Shelley: Selected Poems (Longman Annotated English Poets) [1 ed.] 0415746078, 9780415746076

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Chronological Table of Shelley’s Life and Publications
Abbreviations
The Poems
1 Stanzas. — April, 1814
2 ‘O! there are spirits of the air’
3 To Wordsworth
4 Mutability
5 Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude
6 Verses written on receiving a Celandine in a letter from England
7 Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
8 Mont Blanc. Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni
9 Ozymandias
10 To Constantia (‘Thy voice, slow rising like a Spirit, lingers’)
11 Sonnet (‘Lift not the painted veil which those who live’)
12 The Two Spirits. An Allegory
13 Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October, 1818
14 Stanzas written in dejection — December 1818, near Naples
15 Prometheus Unbound
16 Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation
17 To Night
18 The Mask of Anarchy
19 Ode to Heaven
20 To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]
21 England in 1819
22 Ode to the West Wind
23 On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, In the Florentine Gallery
24 Love’s Philosophy
25 ‘Thou art fair, and few are fairer’
26 To —— (‘I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden’)
27 On a Dead Violet: To ——
28 Goodnight
29 ‘What men gain fairly, that should they possess’
30 An Exhortation
31 Song: To the Men of England
32 To —— (‘Corpses are cold in the tomb’)
33 The Sensitive-Plant
34 To —— [Lines to a Reviewer]
35 ‘Arethusa arose’
36 ‘Arethusa was a maiden’
37 ‘God save the Queen!’ [A New National Anthem]
38 Song (‘Rarely, rarely comest thou’)
39 Song of Apollo
40 Song of Pan
41 The Cloud
42 Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa
43 Letter to Maria Gisborne
44 To a Sky-Lark
45 To —— [the Lord Chancellor]
46 To —— [Lines to a Critic]
47 The Witch of Atlas
48 Sonnet: Political Greatness
49 ‘Ye hasten to the [grave]! What seek ye there’
50 ‘Rose leaves, when the rose is dead’ [To —— (‘Music, when soft voices die’)]
51 Epipsychidion
52 A Lament (‘O World, O Life, O Time’)
53 ‘When passion’s trance is overpast’
54 Adonais
55 The Aziola
56 Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon
57 The Indian Girl’s Song
58 Autumn: a Dirge
59 ‘The flower that smiles today’ [Mutability]
60 ‘A widowed bird sate mourning for her love’
61 ‘Art thou pale for weariness’
62 To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’) [To Edward Williams]
63 To Jane. The invitation
64 To Jane —— The recollection
65 ‘Swifter far than summer’s flight’/Remembrance [A Lament]
66 ‘When the lamp is shattered’ [Lines]
67 ‘One word is too often profaned’
68 With a Guitar. To Jane
69 The magnetic lady to her patient
70 The Triumph of Life
71 To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’)
72 ‘Bright wanderer, fair coquette of heaven’ [Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici]
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines

Citation preview

Shelley: Selected Poems

‘This new Shelley: Selected Poems offers the outstanding editorial expertise and critical acumen of the complete Longman Poems in a single judiciously organized volume. It will be of great interest to everyone who cares about one of the most challenging of Romantic poets.’ Professor William Keach, Emeritus Professor, Brown University, USA Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was one of the major Romantic poets and wrote what is critically recognised as some of the finest lyric poetry in the English Language. In this volume, the editors have selected the most popular, significant and frequently taught poems from the six-volume Longman Annotated edition of Shelley’s poems. Each poem is fully annotated, explained and contextualised, along with a comprehensive list of abbreviations, an inclusive bibliography of material relating to the text and interpretation of Shelley’s poetry, plus an extensive chronology of Shelley’s life and works. Headnotes and footnotes furnish the personal, literary, historical and scientific information necessary for an informed reading of Shelley’s richly varied and densely allusive verse, making this an ideal anthology for students, classroom use, and anyone approaching Shelley’s poetry for the first time; however, the level and extent of commentary and annotation will also be of great value for researchers and critics. Kelvin Everest is Emeritus Bradley Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Liverpool. He has published extensively on English Romantic poetry, including booklength studies of Coleridge and Keats, several edited collections of essays, and numerous articles and chapters. He is the co-editor of the Complete Poems of Shelley in the Longman Annotated English Poets series. His most recent monograph is Keats and Shelley: Winds of Light, published by Oxford University Press in 2021.

LONGMAN ANNOTATED ENGLISH POETS General Editors: Paul Hammond, David Hopkins and Michael Rossington Founding Editors: F. W. Bateson and John Barnard

Recent titles in the series include: THE POEMS OF ALEXANDER POPE: VOLUME ONE Edited by Julian Ferraro and Paul Baines (2019) THE POEMS OF W. B. YEATS: VOLUME ONE: 1882–1889 Edited by Peter McDonald (2020) THE POEMS OF W. B. YEATS: VOLUME TWO: 1890–1898 Edited by Peter McDonald (2020) THE POEMS OF BEN JONSON Edited by Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (2021) THE POEMS OF ROBERT BROWNING: VOLUME 5 The Ring and the Book, Books 1–6 Edited by John Woolford, Daniel Karlin and Joseph Phelan (2022) THE POEMS OF ROBERT BROWNING: VOLUME 6 The Ring and the Book, Books 7–12 Edited by John Woolford, Daniel Karlin and Joseph Phelan (2022) THE POEMS OF SHELLEY: VOLUME 5 Edited by Carlene Adamson, Will Bowers, Jack Donovan, Kelvin Everest, Mathelinda ­Nabugodi and Michael Rossington (2023) THE POEMS OF SHELLEY, VOLUME 6 Edited by Carlene Adamson, Will Bowers, Jack Donovan, Kelvin Everest, Mathelinda ­Nabugodi and Michael Rossington (2023) SHELLEY: SELECTED POEMS Edited by Carlene Adamson, Will Bowers, Jack Donovan, Cian Duffy, Kelvin Everest, ­Geoffrey Matthews, Mathelinda Nabugodi, Ralph Pite, and Michael Rossington.

Selected and Revised by Kelvin Everest (2023)

THE POEMS OF W. B. YEATS: VOLUME THREE: 1899–1910 Edited by Peter McDonald (2023) For more information about the series, please visit: www.routledge.com/LongmanAnnotated-English-Poets/book-series/LAEP

SHELLEY: Selected Poems edited by

CARLENE ADAMSON, WILL BOWERS, JACK DONOVAN, CIAN DUFFY, KELVIN EVEREST, GEOFFREY MATTHEWS, MATHELINDA NABUGODI, RALPH PITE, and MICHAEL ROSSINGTON With the assistance of LAURA BARLOW and ANDREW LACEY Selected and Revised by KELVIN EVEREST Founding Editor: GEOFFREY MATTHEWS

Cover image: Percy Bysshe Shelley by Amelia Curran © National ­Portrait Gallery, London First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Kelvin Everest for the selection and the contributing editors for the editorial material The right of Kelvin Everest to be identified as the author of the editorial material has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792–1822. | Adamson, Carlene A., editor. | Bowers, Will, editor. | Donovan, Jack, editor. | Duffy, Cian, editor. | Everest, Kelvin, editor. | Matthews, Geoffrey, 1920–1984, editor. | Nabugodi, Mathelinda, editor. | Pite, Ralph, editor. | Rossington, Michael, editor. Title: Shelley : Selected Poems / edited by Carlene Adamson, Will ­Bowers, Jack Donovan, Cian Duffy, Kelvin Everest, ­Geoffrey ­Matthews, Mathelinda Nabugodi, Ralph Pite, and Michael ­Rossington ; selected and revised by Kelvin Everest ; founding editor, Geoffrey Matthews. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | “This volume presents a substantial selection from the complete Poems of Shelley published in the Longman Annotated English Poets series in six volumes (1989–2022).” | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022009797 (print) Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry. Classification: LCC PR5403 .A33 2022 (print) | LCC PR5403 (ebook) | DDC 821/.7—dc23/eng/20220422 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022009797 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022009798 ISBN: 978-0-415-74607-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-405-85819-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-17034-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343 Typeset in Minion Pro by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Preface Chronological Table of Shelley’s Life and Publications Abbreviations

ix xiii xix

The Poems 1 Stanzas. — April, 1814

3

2 ‘O! there are spirits of the air’

4

3 To Wordsworth

6

4 Mutability

7

5 Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude

8

6 Verses written on receiving a Celandine in a letter from England

36

7 Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

39

8 Mont Blanc. Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni

47

9 Ozymandias

62

10 To Constantia (‘Thy voice, slow rising like a Spirit, lingers’)

66

11 Sonnet (‘Lift not the painted veil which those who live’)

69

12 The Two Spirits. An Allegory

72

13 Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October, 1818

74

vi

contents

14 Stanzas written in dejection — December 1818, near Naples

89

15 Prometheus Unbound

93

16 Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation

270

17 To Night

307

18 The Mask of Anarchy

310

19 Ode to Heaven

342

20 To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]

347

21 England in 1819

350

22 Ode to the West Wind

353

23 On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, In the Florentine Gallery

364

24 Love’s Philosophy

368

25 ‘Thou art fair, and few are fairer’

372

26 To —— (‘I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden’)

374

27 On a Dead Violet: To ——

376

28 Goodnight

379

29 ‘What men gain fairly, that should they possess’

381

30 An Exhortation

383

31 Song: To the Men of England

385

32 To —— (‘Corpses are cold in the tomb’)

388

33 The Sensitive-Plant

391

34 To —— [Lines to a Reviewer]

418

35 ‘Arethusa arose’

420

contents

vii

36 ‘Arethusa was a maiden’

425

37 ‘God save the Queen!’ [A New National Anthem]

427

38 Song (‘Rarely, rarely comest thou’)

431

39 Song of Apollo

433

40 Song of Pan

435

41 The Cloud

437

42 Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa

446

43 Letter to Maria Gisborne

449

44 To a Sky-Lark

482

45 To —— [the Lord Chancellor]

491

46 To —— [Lines to a Critic]

496

47 The Witch of Atlas

499

48 Sonnet: Political Greatness

559

49 ‘Ye hasten to the [grave]! What seek ye there’

566

50 ‘Rose leaves, when the rose is dead’ [To —— (‘Music, when soft voices die’)]

567

51 Epipsychidion

571

52 A Lament (‘O World, O Life, O Time’)

623

53 ‘When passion’s trance is overpast’

625

54 Adonais

628

55 The Aziola

717

56 Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon

720

viii

contents

57 The Indian Girl’s Song

725

58 Autumn: a Dirge

730

59 ‘The flower that smiles today’ [Mutability]

734

60 ‘A widowed bird sate mourning for her love’

736

61 ‘Art thou pale for weariness’

739

62 To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’) [To Edward Williams] 740 63 To Jane. The invitation

755

64 To Jane —— The Recollection761 65 ‘Swifter far than summer’s flight’/Remembrance [A Lament]

766

66 ‘When the lamp is shattered’ [Lines]

771

67 ‘One word is too often profaned’

777

68 With a Guitar. To Jane

779

69 The magnetic lady to her patient

790

70 The Triumph of Life

798

71 To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’)

881

72 ‘Bright wanderer, fair coquette of heaven’ [Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici]

885

Index of Titles Index of First Lines

897 899

Preface

This volume presents a substantial selection from the complete Poems of Shelley published in the Longman Annotated English Poets series in six volumes (1989–2023). For a detailed explanation of the genesis and editorial principles of the Longman Shelley, including an overview of the history of Shelley editions up to the 1980s, the reader is directed to the Introduction to Longman i, pages xii–xxxii, and to the Prefaces to volumes ii–vi. The distinctive feature of the Longman Shelley is a presentation of the complete poems in chronological order (insofar as that has proved possible, given the sometimes problematic challenges of dating Shelley’s work). Each poem is preceded by a headnote offering detailed commentary on manuscript and print sources, biographical, social and political circumstances of composition, and extended treatment of relevant literary contexts. The poems are then given with comprehensive textual, literary and contextual annotation, presented on the same page with Shelley’s text. There are some 460 poems in the complete Longman edition, of which 72 have been selected for the present volume. It has been necessary to omit some long poems, owing to simple constraints of space, but the Selected Shelley nevertheless offers a comprehensive collection of Shelley’s major lyrics, together with fully annotated texts of most of Shelley’s best-known major long poems, including ‘Alastor’, ‘Prometheus Unbound’, ‘The Sensitive-Plant’, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, ‘The Witch of Atlas’, ‘Epipsychidion’, ‘Adonais’ and ‘The Triumph of Life’. None of Shelley’s extensive and significant verse translations have been included in the Selected Shelley, but a companion volume drawn from the Longman edition provides for the first time a complete edition of the translations, again arranged in chronological order with comprehensive scholarly apparatus and annotation. The poems in this selection have been revised to standardise presentation and layout, to rectify typographical and other minor errors, to carry out some corrections to matters of fact, to update references where necessary, and to facilitate cross reference to Shelley’s works in the headnotes and notes. The poems here selected are numbered from 1 to 72, which means their numbering differs from that of the complete Poems of Shelley. References in the headnotes and annotation of the Selected Shelley to poems by Shelley which are included in the Selected are by title of poem in italic; references to poems by Shelley which are not included in the Selected are by page and poem number in the relevant Longman volume. Poem titles are as in the Longman edition; where a poem has historically been referred to by a different title, that title is given in square brackets beneath the editorial title, and these historic titles are also given for convenience in the Index to Titles of the Selected Shelley.

x

preface I cannot do better than quote the final paragraph of the Preface to Longman ii (p. x): The principles of the edition remain those set forth in the Introduction to Volume One. That Introduction also makes clear that the basic conception of the edition, and most of its decisions in matters of dating and editorial approach, originate with Geoffrey Matthews. Geoffrey died in 1984, and the enormous growth since then in available materials relevant to Shelley’s text, and in the number of scholars and critics interested in working with them, has brought significant changes of theory and practice in the editorial problem. There have also been larger changes and shifts of emphasis in the place of editing as a scholarly activity, in its relation to questions of literary and cultural theory. The work of such commentators as Jerome McGann and D. F. Mackenzie has transformed our understanding of the nature and value of editing. I have nevertheless sought to keep always in mind, as I take it that Geoffrey would wish to have stressed, the editor’s responsibility to shape an image of a body of texts, and to attempt a coherent representation of the literary past which can live for the present.

Work on the Longman Shelley edition was begun by Geoffrey Matthews in 1964. Following his death in 1984, it was taken up by Kelvin Everest at the request of Geoffrey’s widow Daphne. Following the publication of volume one in 1989, as the scale of relevant scholarship saw significant and rapid increase, Kelvin Everest was joined by Michael Rossington, Jack Donovan and Ralph Pite to produce the second volume in 2000. An editorial team of Jack Donovan, Kelvin Everest and Michael Rossington was joined for volume three (2011) by Cian Duffy and assisted by Laura Barlow. Volume four (2014) was completed by Jack Donovan, Kelvin Everest and Michael Rossington (who took over the responsibility of lead editor), assisted by Andrew Lacey. Jack Donovan, Kelvin Everest and Michael Rossington were joined for volumes five and six (2022) by Carlene Adamson, Will Bowers, and Mathelinda Nabugodi. For most of the period during which the Longman Shelley has been in preparation, the editorial project has been a collaborative venture in which all members of the editorial team have contributed extensively. Individual editorial responsibility has, however, customarily been taken in the preparation of specific poems, as follows: Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews have edited numbers 1–8; Kelvin Everest has edited numbers 9–15, 54, 62–69, 71 and 72; Kelvin Everest and Jack Donovan have edited number 19; Jack Donovan has edited numbers 17 and 18, 20 and 21, 23–32, 34, 37 and 38, 45 and 46, 53, 57, 59, and 65; Jack Donovan and Laura Barlow have edited numbers 22, 33, and 41; Kelvin Everest and Michael Rossington have edited number 56; Ralph Pite has edited number 16; Cian Duffy has edited numbers 35, 36, 39, and 40; Michael Rossington has edited numbers 42 and 43, 47–50, 52, 55 and 61; Michael Rossington and Andrew Lacey have edited number 51; Carlene Adamson and Michael Rossington have edited number 60; Will Bowers has edited numbers 58 and 70, for which Kelvin Everest has contributed the textual section of the headnote. All editorial work on numbers 57–72 has benefitted greatly from the contributions of Carlene Adamson and Mathelinda Nabugodi. The editors are grateful to the following institutions for kind permission to cite from manuscript material in their collections: University of Aberdeen (no. 69); The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (nos. 6–12, 14–23, 25–37, 39–48, 50–61, 65–68, 70–72); The British Library (nos. 7, 8, 18, 43, 64, 66); the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (no. 63); Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh (no. 62); the Provost and Fellows of Eton College (nos. 24, 28, 58, 65); Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cologny

preface

xi

(Genève) (nos. 27, 57); University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections (no. 66); Houghton Library, Harvard University (nos. 6–7, 10, 17, 19, 24, 28, 30, 32–33, 38, 44–45, 48–49, 57, 65); The Huntington Library, San Marino, California (nos. 13, 43, 56); University of Manchester (no. 71); Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC (no. 18); The Morgan Library & Museum (nos. 11, 14, 16, 28, 49, 55, 57); Robert H. Taylor Collection of English and American Literature, Rare Book Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library (no. 65); Tinker Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (no. 13).

Kelvin Everest Liverpool, December 2021

Chronological Table of Shelley’s Life and Publications

1792 (4 August) S. born at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, eldest son of Timothy Shelley, landowner and Whig MP (Baronet, 1806). (7 September) Baptised at Warnham, Sussex. 1798 Studies with Warnham clergyman Rev. Evan Edwards. 1802–04 At Syon House Academy, Isleworth, near London. Attends lectures by Adam Walker on natural philosophy. 1804–10 At Eton, where he is bullied. Develops scientific as well as literary interests. 1806 Possible date of composition for earliest poems in Esd. 1808 Begins correspondence with Harriet Grove, his cousin; relationship ended in 1810 by religious prejudices of her family. 1810 (Spring) Publishes Gothic novel, Zastrozzi. (Summer) Submits WJ, his earliest long poem, for publication; it is rejected (eventually published in 1829 as a series of extracts; published as a whole, but abridged, in 1831). (September) Publishes Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire, written with his sister Elizabeth. Withdrawn following the discovery that one of the poems had been plagiarised from M. G. (‘Monk’) Lewis. (from October) At University College, Oxford, where he meets Thomas Jefferson Hogg. (November) Publishes Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson. (December) Publishes second Gothic novel, St. Irvyne (dated 1811). 1811 (January) Meets Harriet Westbrook. (March) Publishes Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things in support of Peter Finnerty, a radical Irish journalist imprisoned for libel in February. (25 March) Expelled in his second term at Oxford for refusing to answer questions about a sceptical pamphlet written with Hogg, The Necessity of Atheism (published February). Hogg also expelled. (July) Visits Cwm Elan in Radnorshire, Wales. (August) Elopes with Harriet Westbrook and marries her in Edinburgh (29 August). (November) Quarrels with Hogg over his attempted seduction of Harriet. (December) Meets Southey in the Lake District. 1812 (January) Begins correspondence with William Godwin. Unsuccessful attempt to meet Wordsworth. (January–August) Writes a number of poems in Esd. (February–March) Campaigns for political reform in Ireland.

xiv

chronological table of shelley’s life and publications

(February) Writes An Address, to the Irish People and Proposals for an Association of . . . Philanthropists. (March) Prints Declaration of Rights. Adopts vegetarianism. (6 April) Returns to Wales then moves to Devon, where he is kept under surveillance by Government agents. (June–July) Writes A Letter to Lord Ellenborough. (July–August) Revises The Devil’s Walk for distribution as a broadsheet. (mid-July) Elizabeth Hitchener joins Harriet and Harriet’s sister Eliza in S.’s domestic circle. (August) His servant, Daniel Healy, is imprisoned for distributing the Declaration and The Devil’s Walk. (September) Goes to Tremadoc, North Wales, where he is involved in further political activity. (from September) Works on Q Mab. (4 October–13 November) Thomas Love Peacock introduced to S. by Thomas Hookham. (October) Meets William Godwin and John Frank Newton in London. (November–December) Copies out Esd. (November) Elizabeth Hitchener leaves household. 1813 (27 February) Flees from Tremadoc after mysterious incident at Tan-yr-allt in which S. is supposedly attacked at night. (March) Visits Dublin and Killarney. (5 April) Returns to London. (May) Q Mab privately published; A Vindication of Natural Diet, one of the notes to Q Mab is published shortly before. (23 June) Ianthe Shelley born. (July) Moves to Bracknell in Berkshire. Joins expatriate pro-revolutionary French and English circle centred on Mrs Boinville and the Newtons. (December) Writes A Refutation of Deism (privately published in early 1814). 1814 (March) Remarries Harriet to ensure her legal status as his wife but spending time apart with the Boinvilles. (May–June) Visiting Godwin in London; growing estrangement from Harriet. (28 July) Elopes with Mary Godwin, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. They travel to Switzerland accompanied by Claire Clairmont (daughter of Godwin’s second wife by a previous relationship). (13 September) Returns to England. (30 November) Charles Shelley born to Harriet. (December) Review of Hogg’s Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff published in the Critical Review. 1815 (6 January) S.’s grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, dies. (late January-early February) Briefly involved with Irish radical George Cannon (‘Erasmus Perkins’) and plans for monthly paper, the Theological Inquirer; or, Polemical Magazine. (22 February) Mary’s first child born (dies 6 March). (July) S. receives annual income of £1000 (of which £200 is made over to Harriet). Gives large sums of money to Godwin.

chronological table of shelley’s life and publications

xv

(May–Sept) The opening scenes of Goethe’s Faust (‘They approach you again, fluctuating Shapes!’) probably translated in this period. (early August) Moves to cottage at Bishopsgate, next to Windsor Park. (late August–early September) River excursion up the Thames with Mary, Peacock and Charles Clairmont. (10 September–14 December) Writes Alastor. 1816 (24 January) William Shelley born to Mary. (February) 1816 published. (3 May) Leaves for Continent with Mary and Claire. (25 May–29 August) Stays with Mary and Claire in Switzerland; meets Lord Byron. (June) Writes Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (published in the Examiner in January 1817). (July) Writes Mont Blanc (published in 1817), begins R&H (late July). (8 September) Returns to England. (9 October) Suicide of Mary’s half-sister Fanny Imlay (Wollstonecraft’s daughter by Gilbert Imlay). (9 November) Suicide of Harriet Shelley by drowning in the Serpentine (discovered 10 December). (December) Meets John Keats and Horace Smith through friendship with Leigh Hunt. (15 December) Receives news of Harriet’s suicide. (30 December) Marries Mary. 1817 (12 January) Allegra, Claire’s daughter by Byron, born at Bath. (late January–early February) Drafts Declaration in Chancery. (February) Further meetings with Keats. Writes A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote (published March). (2 March) Moves to Albion House, Marlow. (4 March) Habeas Corpus suspended (until 1 February 1818). (27 March) Lord Eldon, Lord Chancellor, denies S. custody of his two children by Harriet. (March–September) Writes L&C. (July) Mary transcribes his viva voce translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. (September) Works on R&H. (2 September) Clara Shelley born. (?September–December) Drafts On Christianity. (November) 1817 published anonymously. Writes, and probably prints, An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte (published c. 1843). (December) L&C published (with 1818 on the title-page) and suppressed. Writes Ozymandias. 1818 (January) L&C reissued in a revised version as RofI. (12 March) Leaves England for Italy with Mary, Claire and children. (4 April) Arrives in Milan. (28 April) Sends Allegra to Byron. (9 May) Meets John and Maria Gisborne and Henry Reveley, Maria’s son by her first marriage, at Livorno.

xvi

chronological table of shelley’s life and publications

(June–July) Moves to Bagni di Lucca (11 June). Translates Plato’s Symposium, writes On Love and A Discourse on the manners of the Ancient Greeks relative to the subject of Love (the latter not published in full until 1931). (first half of August) Finishes R&H. (17 August) Travels to Venice with Claire to meet Byron. (late August–5 November) Stays at the Villa I Capuccini in Este, near Venice. Begins J&M and writes Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October 1818. (31 August) Mary travels to Venice with William and Clara. (24 September) Clara Shelley dies, aged one. (October) Writes Act I of PU. (November) Travels to Rome, visiting Ferrara and Bologna en route (in Rome 20–27 November). (December) Goes on to Naples (1 December). Visits surrounding classical sites and volcanic scenery, writes Stanzas written in dejection — December 1818, near Naples. (27 December) Birth of Elena Adelaide Shelley. 1819 (February) Further visits to Pompeii and Paestum and other classical sites. (27 February) Birth of Elena Adelaide Shelley registered at Naples. (March–April) Returns to Rome (arrives 5 March). Writes PU Acts II and III. (Spring) 1819 published. (May) Finishes J&M (first published in 1824). (7 June) William Shelley dies, aged three and a half. (17 June) Moves to Livorno. (8 August) The Cenci completed at Villa Valsovano. Printed at Livorno in September. (August–December) Completes a fourth act of PU. (September) Receives news of the Peterloo Massacre (5 September). Writes MA (not published until 1832) and other political poems. (October–November) Moves to Florence (2 October). Writes Ode to the West Wind, PB3 (first published in 1840) and a letter to the Examiner on the trial of Richard Carlile (published in part in 1880 and in full in 1926). (c. 15 October–23 December) Writes England in 1819. (November–December) Begins PVR (not published until 1920), writes On Life. (10 November) Sophia Stacey first meets the Shelleys. (12 November) Percy Florence born. (December) British Parliament passes repressive ‘Six Acts’. 1820 (26 January) Moves to Pisa. (29 January) George III dies. (March) Constitutional monarchy established in Spain. Writes SP. The Cenci published in London. (May–November) Translates Plato’s Phaedo (MS lost). (May–June) Writes OL. (9 June) Elena Adelaide Shelley dies in Naples, aged one and a half. (15 June) Moves to Livorno. (15 June–early July) Writes LMG (first published in 1824), To a Sky-Lark. (July) Constitutional revolution in Naples. (August) Moves to Casa Prinni at Bagni di San Giuliano, near Pisa.

chronological table of shelley’s life and publications

xvii

Writes WA, Ode to Naples and begins OT. 1820 published. (20 October) Claire goes to live with the Bojti family in Florence. (22 October) Medwin arrives at Bagni di San Giuliano. (29 October) Returns to Pisa. (21 November) Claire stays with S. and Mary in Pisa. (early December) First visits Teresa Viviani (‘Emilia’) at the Convent of St Anna. S., Mary and Claire continue to visit and correspond with her until her marriage on 8 September 1821. (before mid-December) OT published and suppressed. (last two weeks of December) S. suffers a bout of ophthalmia which prevents him from reading and writing. (23 December) Claire returns to the Bojtis in Florence. 1821 (19 January) Edward and Jane Williams first meet the Shelleys. (January–early March) William Clark publishes an unauthorised edition of Q Mab. (late January–early February) Writes Epipsychidion. (late January–20 March) Writes DP (not published until 1840) in response to Peacock’s The Four Ages of Poetry (published in 1820 in the first and only issue of Olliers Literary Miscellany). (23 February) Keats dies in Rome. (27 February) Medwin departs for Rome. (1 April) Receives news of revolution against Ottoman rule in Greece. (11 April) Receives news of Keats’s death in a letter from Horace Smith dated 28 March. Smith’s letter also contains news of the unexpected stoppage of S.’s income. (May–June) Writes Adonais (published at Pisa in July). (May) Epipsychidion published anonymously. (4 May) Invites Byron to Pisa for the summer. (5 May) Death of Napoleon Bonaparte. The news is not reported until early July. (8 May) S. and Mary return to Bagni di San Giuliano. (19–22 June) Claire with S. and Mary in Pisa and Bagni di San Giuliano. (23 June) Claire removes to Livorno for the summer. (July) Writes Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon. (21–27 July) Claire with S. and Mary in Pisa and Bagni di San Giuliano. (3 August) Visits Claire at Livorno. (4 August) Leaves for Ravenna via Florence and Bologna to meet Byron. (6 August) Arrives at Ravenna. In talking all night with Byron, learns of circulation of scandalous rumours about him by Richard Belgrave Hoppner, the British Consul at Venice. Returns to Pisa by 22 August. (26 August) Writes to Hunt mentioning Byron’s plans for The Liberal. (September–early November) Writing Hellas. (5–15 September) Claire with S. and Mary in Bagni di San Giuliano and the Bay of Spezia. (9–31 October) Claire with S. and Mary in Pisa, Bagni di San Giuliano and Pugnano. (25 October) S. and Mary return to Pisa. (1 November) Byron moves to Pisa. Claire returns to the Bojtis in Florence.

xviii

chronological table of shelley’s life and publications

(11 November) Hellas sent to Ollier for publication. (14 November) Medwin returns to the Shelleys at Pisa. 1822 (early January) Begins to draft Charles the First. (14 January) Edward Trelawny arrives in Pisa. (mid-January–February) Translates the Walpurgisnacht scene from Goethe’s Faust. (late January–March) Translates passages from Calderón’s El mágico prodigioso. (late January–June) Writes lyrics to Jane Williams. (February) 1822 published. (March) Translates the Prolog im Himmel scene from Goethe’s Faust. (9 March) On or soon after this date, Medwin departs for Rome. (24 March) S., Byron, Trelawny and Taaffe are involved in an altercation with Stefano Masi (the so-called ‘Dragoon Affair’). (20 April) Death of Allegra Byron at a convent in Bagnacavallo. (30 April) Moves with his family and Edward and Jane Williams to Villa Magni at San Terenzo on the Bay of Spezia, near Lerici. (12 May) Takes delivery of his boat, the Don Juan, at Lerici. (late May–late June) Writing TL. (1 July) Sails to Livorno with Williams to meet Leigh Hunt. (8 July) Drowns with Williams when boat founders on the return voyage. (16 August) Cremated on the beach between La Spezia and Livorno, in the presence of Trelawny, Byron and Hunt. (August) Mary begins to transcribe unpublished MSS for publication. (September) Mary and the Hunts move in together in Albaro, near Genoa. 1823 (March) Ashes interred in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. (July) Mary returns to England. 1824 1824 published. Suppressed at the insistence of Sir Timothy Shelley. 1829 Mary assists in the publication of 1829. 1839 1839 and 1840 published.

Abbreviations

Poems and Prose Works by Shelley

Alastor = Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude Daemon = The Daemon of the World DMAG = A Discourse on the manners of the Ancient Greeks relative to the subject of Love DP = A Defence of Poetry J&M = Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation L&C = Laon and Cythna; Or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of The Nineteenth Century. In the Stanza of Spenser LMG = Letter to Maria Gisborne MA = The Mask of Anarchy: Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester OL = Ode to Liberty OT = Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant. A Tragedy, in Two Acts PB3 = Peter Bell the Third PU = Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts PVR = A Philosophical View of Reform Q Mab = Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem: with Notes R&H = Rosalind and Helen, a Modern Eclogue RofI = The Revolt of Islam; A Poem, In Twelve Cantos SP = The Sensitive-Plant TL = The Triumph of Life WA = The Witch of Atlas WJ = The Wandering Jew; or the Victim of the Eternal Avenger

Manuscript Sources

Box 1 = Bod. MS Shelley adds. c. 4: various dates. Box 2 = Bod. MS Shelley adds. c. 5: various dates.

xx

abbreviations

CHPL = The Carl H. Pforzheimer Library (now known as The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle). Esd = The Esdaile Notebook, CHPL SC 372: 1810–14 (fair copies). G1824 = John Gisborne’s copy of 1824, now in the British Library, shelfmark C. 61 c. 5. Harvard MSS = Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Eng 822: various dates. Harvard Nbk 1 = Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Eng 258.2: between August 1819 and May 1824 (fair copies). Harvard Nbk 2 = Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Eng 258.3: mainly 1817 (fair copies). HM 329 = HM 329, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California (press copy of Hellas in the hand of Edward Williams, with corrections by Shelley): November 1821. L&C (PM) = The copy of L&C with Shelley’s MS alterations made to transform the poem into RofI. This copy, once owned by H. Buxton Forman and described by him in The Shelley Library (1886) 83–86, is now in the Morgan Library & Museum (W25A 37292). Mary Copybk 1 = Bod. MS Shelley adds. d. 7: probably autumn 1822 to autumn 1823. Mary Copybk 2 = Bod. MS Shelley adds. d. 9: autumn 1823 with additions of c. 1839. Mary Copybk 3 = Bod. MS Shelley adds. d. 8: autumn 1823 with additions of c. 1839. Mary Nbk = Bod. MS Shelley d. 2: between summer 1820 and May 1824. Montagu = Bod. MS Montagu d. 18: various dates. Nbk 1 = Bod. MS Shelley adds. e. 16: June 1816 through July 1817. Nbk 2 = Bod. MS Shelley adds. e. 19: early April 1817. Nbk 3 = Bod. MS Shelley adds. e. 10: May through September 1817. Nbk 4 = Bod. MS Shelley adds. e. 14: October 1817. Nbk 4a = Bod. MS Shelley d. 3: October 1817. Nbk 5 = Bod. MS Shelley e. 4: late 1817 through summer 1819. Nbk 6 = Bod. MS Shelley adds. e. 11: May 1818 through April 1819. Nbk 7 = Bod. MS Shelley e. 1: April through December 1819. Nbk 8 = Bod. MS Shelley e. 2: April–May 1819. Nbk 9 = Bod. MS Shelley e. 3: April through December 1819. Nbk 10 = HM 2177, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California: spring 1819 through spring 1820. Nbk 11 = Bod. MS Shelley adds. e. 12: January 1818 through summer 1821. Nbk 12 = HM 2176, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California: spring 1819 through summer 1821. Nbk 13 = Bod. MS Shelley adds. e. 15: late October 1819. Nbk 14 = Bod. MS Shelley adds. e. 6: summer 1818 through early autumn 1820. Nbk 15 = Bod. MS Shelley adds. e. 9: November 1819 through summer 1821. Nbk 16 = Bod. MS Shelley d. 1: August 1819 through March 1821.

abbreviations

xxi



Nbk 17 = Bod. MS Shelley adds. e. 8: January 1820 through May 1821. Nbk 18 = Bod. MS Shelley adds. e. 18: April 1821 through April 1822. Nbk 19 = Bod. MS Shelley adds. e. 17: November/December 1819 through late J­ anuary 1822. Nbk 20 = Bod. MS Shelley adds. e. 20: February through June 1821. Nbk 21 = Bod. MS Shelley adds. e. 7: late summer 1821 through January 1822. Nbk 22 = HM 2111, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California: late December 1821/early January 1822 through June 1822. Relation = ‘Relation of the death of the family of the Cenci’ in Bod. MS Shelley adds. e. 13, pp. 1–72 (in Mary Shelley’s hand, probably with corrections by Shelley): April or May 1819. SDMS = The Scrope Davies Notebook, British Library Loan MS 70/8: 15 May–29 August 1816 (fair copies). The following abbreviations designate MS collections, now dispersed, originally in the possession of H. B. Forman, C. W. Frederickson, the Gisbornes, Elizabeth Hitchener, T. J. Hogg, Leigh Hunt, Charles Madocks, Thomas Medwin, Charles Ollier, Sophia Stacey, E. J. Trelawny: Forman MSS, Frederickson MSS, Gisborne MSS, Hitch. MSS, Hogg MSS, Hunt MSS, Madocks MSS, Medwin MSS, Ollier MSS, Stacey MSS, Trelawny MSS. Printed Sources



1811 = A Gentleman of the University of Oxford, Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, London 1811 (by Shelley). Bod. [pr.] Shelley adds. d.14. 1816 = Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude: and Other Poems, London 1816. 1817 = [Anon.], History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, London 1817 (by Shelley and Mary Shelley). 1819 = Percy Bysshe Shelley, Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems, London 1819. 1820 = Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, with Other Poems, London 1820. 1822 = Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hellas: A Lyrical Drama, London 1822. 1824 = Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, [ed. Mary Shelley], London 1824. 1829 = The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, Paris 1829 (the G ­ alignani edition). 1834 = The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, [ed. John Ascham], 2 vols, London 1834. 1839 = The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Mary Shelley, 4 vols, L ­ ondon 1839. 1840 = The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Mary Shelley, London 1840 (a revised one-volume edition of 1839; published in 1839).

xxii

abbreviations

1840 (ELTF) = Percy Bysshe Shelley, Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, ed. Mary Shelley, 2 vols, London 1840 (published in 1839). 1846 = The Minor Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. A New Edition, London 1846. 1847 = The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Mary Shelley, 3 vols, L ­ ondon 1847. 1907 = The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. A. H. Koszul, 2 vols, ­London 1907 (the ‘Everyman’ edition). 1951 = Shelley, Selected Poetry, Prose and Letters, ed. A. S. B. Glover, London 1951 (the ‘Nonesuch’ edition). 1964 = Shelley, Selected Poems and Prose, ed. G. M. Matthews, Oxford 1964. 1972 = The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Neville Rogers (4 vols projected, only two published), vol. i, 1802–1813, Oxford 1972. 1975 = The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Neville Rogers, vol. ii, 1814–1817, Oxford 1975. Adonais (1821) = Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais. An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion etc., Pisa 1821. Adonais (1829) = Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais. An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc., Cambridge 1829. Adonais (1903) = Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais, ed. William Michael Rossetti, 2nd edn, rev. with the assistance of A. O. Prickard, Oxford 1903. Bajetta = Peter Bell: The 1819 Texts. A Critical Edition with Commentary and Notes, ed. Carlo M. Bajetta (Milan 2003), rev. edn 2005. Baker = Carlos Baker, Shelley’s Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision, Princeton, NJ 1948. Barthélemy = Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece, [trans. William Beaumont] (1788), 2nd edn, 7 vols, London 1794. Bates = E. S. Bates, A Study of Shelley’s Drama The Cenci, New York 1908, rptd 1969. Bieri = James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography, Baltimore, MD 2008. Bieri I = J ames Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Biography: Youth’s Unextinguished Fire, 1792–1816, Cranbury, NJ 2004. Bieri II = James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Biography: Exile of Unfulfilled ­Renown, 1816–1822, Cranbury, NJ 2005. BSM = The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, gen. ed. Donald H. Reiman, 23 vols, New York 1986–2002: vol. i, Peter Bell the Third and The Triumph of Life: [parts of] Bod. MS Shelley adds. c. 5 and adds. c. 4, ed. Donald H. Reiman, 1986 (Box 2 and Box 1); vol. ii, Bodleian MS Shelley adds. d. 7, ed. Irving Massey, 1987 (Mary Copybk 1) vol. iii, Bodleian MS Shelley e. 4, ed. P. M. S. Dawson, 1987 (Nbk 5); vol. iv, Bodleian MS Shelley d. 1, ed. E. B. Murray, 2 Parts, 1988 (Nbk 16); vol. v, The Witch of Atlas Notebook: Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 6, ed. Carlene A. Adamson, 1997 (Nbk 14);

abbreviations

xxiii

vol. vi, Shelley’s Pisan Winter Notebook (1820–1821): Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 8, ed. Carlene A. Adamson, 1992 (Nbk 17); vol. vii, ‘Shelley’s Last Notebook’: Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 20, adds. e. 15 and [part of] adds. c. 4, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Hélène Dworzan Reiman, 1990 (Nbk 20, Nbk 13, and Box 1); vol. viii, Bodleian MS Shelley d. 3, ed. Tatsuo Tokoo, 1988 (Nbk 4a); vol. ix, The Prometheus Unbound Notebooks: Bodleian MSS Shelley e. 1, e. 2, and e. 3, ed. Neil Fraistat, 1991 (Nbk 7, Nbk 8 and Nbk 9); vol. x, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Mythological Dramas: Proserpine and Midas: Bodleian MS Shelley d. 2, ed. Charles E. Robinson (Mary Nbk) and Relation of the Death of the Family of the Cenci: Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 13, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 1992; vol. xi, The Geneva Notebook of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 16 and [part of] MS Shelley adds c. 4, ed. Michael Erkelenz, 1992 (Nbk 1 and Box 1); vol. xii, The ‘Charles the First’ Draft Notebook: Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 17, ed. Nora Crook, 1991 (Nbk 19); vol. xiii, Drafts for Laon and Cythna: Bodleian MSS Shelley adds. e. 14 and adds. e. 19, ed. Tatsuo Tokoo, 1992 (Nbk 4 and Nbk 2); vol. xiv, Shelley’s ‘Devils’ Notebook: Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 9, ed. P. M. S. Dawson and Timothy Webb, 1993 (Nbk 15); vol. xv, The Julian and Maddalo Draft Notebook: Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 11, ed. Steven E. Jones, 1990 (Nbk 6); vol. xvi, The Hellas Notebook: Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 7, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Michael J. Neth, 1994 (Nbk 21); vol. xvii, Drafts for Laon and Cythna, Cantos V–XII: Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 10, ed. Steven E. Jones, 1994 (Nbk 3); vol. xviii, The Homeric Hymns and Prometheus Drafts Notebook: Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 12, ed. Nancy Moore Goslee, 1996 (Nbk 11); vol. xix, The Faust Draft Notebook: Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 18, ed. Nora Crook and Timothy Webb, 1997 (Nbk 18); vol. xx, The Defence of Poetry Fair Copies: Bodleian MSS Shelley adds. e. 6 and adds. d. 8, ed. Michael O’Neill, 1994 (Nbk 14 and Mary Copybk 3); vol. xxi, Miscellaneous Poetry, Prose and Translations from Bodleian MS Shelley adds. c. 4, etc., ed. E. B. Murray, 1995 (mainly Box 1); vol. xxii, [Additional MSS mainly in the hand of Mary Shelley], Part One: Bodleian MS Shelley adds. d. 6, Part Two: Bodleian MS Shelley adds. c. 5 (Box 2), ed. Alan M. Weinberg, 2 Parts, 1997; vol. xxiii, A Catalogue and Index of the Shelley Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library and a General Index to the Facsimile Edition of the Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, Volumes I–XXII by Tatsuo Tokoo; with Shelleyan Writing Materials in the Bodleian Library: A Catalogue of Formats, Papers, and Watermarks by B. C. Barker-Benfield, 2002.

xxiv

abbreviations



Butter (1954) = Peter Butter, Shelley’s Idols of the Cave, Edinburgh 1954.



Butter (1970) = Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alastor and Other Poems, Prometheus Unbound with Other Poems, Adonais, ed. P. H. Butter, London 1970.



Byron L&J = Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols, London 1973–94.



Byron Prose = Lord Byron, The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson, Oxford 1991.



Byron PW = Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. ­McGann with Barry Weller, 7 vols, Oxford 1980–93.



Cameron (1951) = Kenneth Neill Cameron, The Young Shelley: Genesis of a ­Radical (New York 1950), 1951.



Cameron (1974) = Kenneth Neill Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years, ­Cambridge, MA 1974.



Cenci (1819) = Percy B. Shelley, The Cenci: A Tragedy, in Five Acts, ­London 1819 (published in 1820).



Cenci (1821) = Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cenci: A Tragedy, in Five Acts, 2nd edn, London 1821.



Chernaik = Judith Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley, Cleveland, OH 1972.



Claire Jnl = The Journals of Claire Clairmont, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking with David Mackenzie Stocking, Cambridge, MA 1968.

Clairmont Correspondence = The Clairmont Correspondence: Letters of Claire Clairmont, Charles Clairmont, and Fanny Imlay Godwin, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking, 2 vols, Baltimore, MD 1995.

Concordance = A Lexical Concordance to the Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, compiled by F. S. Ellis, London 1892 (based on ­Forman 1882).



Cox = Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle, Cambridge 1998.



CPPBS = The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (vols i–ii, Baltimore, MD 2000, 2004), ed. Neil Fraistat and Nora Crook (vol. iii, Baltimore, MD 2012), ed. Nora Crook (vol. vii, Baltimore, MD 2021). Further vols in progress.



Cronin = Richard Cronin, Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts, London 1981.



Curran (1970) = Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire, Princeton, NJ 1970.



Curran (1975) = Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision, San Marino, CA 1975.



Darwin = Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, London 1791 (comprising Part I The Economy of Vegetation, Part II The Loves of the Plants (1789)).

abbreviations









xxv

Dawson = P. M. S. Dawson, The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics, Oxford 1980. Donovan = Percy Shelley: Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy, London 2016. Dowden 1890 = The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Edward ­Dowden, London 1890. Dowden 1891 = The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Edward ­Dowden, London 1891. Dowden Life = Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols, London 1886. Enquirer = William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature, in a Series of Essays, London 1797. Epipsychidion (1821) = [Anon.], Epipsychidion: Verses Addressed to the Noble and Unfortunate Lady Emilia V — Now Imprisoned in the ­Convent of ——, London 1821 (by Shelley). Esd Nbk = Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Esdaile Notebook: A Volume of Early Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron (New York 1964), slightly revised, 1964. Esd Poems = Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Esdaile Poems, ed. Neville Rogers, Oxford 1966. Essays and Studies (1992) = Percy Bysshe Shelley: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Kelvin ­Everest, Cambridge 1992. Eustace = Rev. John Chetwode Eustace, A Classical Tour Through Italy, 4th edn, 4 vols, London 1817. F&B = Dante’s Lyric Poetry, ed. K. Foster and P. Boyde, 2 vols, O ­ xford 1967. Faust = Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. Historisch-kritische Edition, ed. Anne Bohnenkamp et al., with the assistance of Gerrit Brüning et al. (2018) http://faustedition.net/ Forman 1876–7 = The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. H. Buxton Forman, 4 vols, London 1876–77. Forman 1880 = The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in Verse and Prose, ed. H. Buxton Forman, 8 vols, London 1880. Forman 1882 = The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. H. Buxton Forman, 2 vols, London 1882. Forman 1892 = The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. H. Buxton Forman, 5 vols, London 1892 (the ‘Aldine’ edition). Gisborne Jnl = Maria Gisborne & Edward E. Williams, Shelley’s Friends: Their Journals and Letters, ed. Frederick L. Jones, Norman, OK 1951. GM = Geoffrey Matthews. GM = Gentleman’s Magazine. Godwin Novels = Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols, London 1992.

xxvi















abbreviations

Godwin Writings = Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols, London 1993. Grabo (1930) = Carl Grabo, A Newton Among Poets: Shelley’s Use of ­Science in Prometheus Unbound, Chapel Hill, NC 1930. Grabo (1935) = Carl Grabo, Prometheus Unbound: An Interpretation, ­Chapel Hill, NC 1935. Harvard Nbk (Woodberry) = The Shelley Notebook in the Harvard College Library. ed. George Edward Woodberry, Cambridge, MA 1929 (Harvard Nbk 1). Hayward = Faust: A Dramatic Poem by Goethe. Trans. [Anon.] ­London 1833 (by Abraham Hayward). Hazlitt Works = William Hazlitt, The Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols, London 1930–34. Hogg = Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols (two further vols announced on title-page but never published), London 1858. Holmes = Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, London 1974. Hughes 1820 = Shelley, Poems Published in 1820, ed. A. M. D. Hughes, 2nd edn, Oxford 1957. Hughes = A. M. D. Hughes, The Nascent Mind of Shelley, Oxford 1947. Hunt 1820 = Shelley’s presentation copy of 1820 to Leigh Hunt, inscribed by Hunt, Call no. 22460, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Hunt Autobiography = The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt; with Reminiscences of Friends and Contemporaries, 3 vols, London 1850. Hunt Correspondence = The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, ed. [Thornton Hunt], 2 vols, London 1862. Hunt Works = The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt, gen. eds Robert ­Morrison and Michael Eberle-Sinatra, 6 vols, London 2003. Huntington Nbks = Note Books of Percy Bysshe Shelley, From the Originals in the Library of W. K. Bixby, ed. H. Buxton Forman, 3 vols, Boston, MA 1911 (Nbk 10, Nbk 12, and Nbk 22). Hutchinson = The Complete Poetical Works of Shelley, ed. Thomas ­Hutchinson, Oxford 1904. Julian = The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols, London 1926–30 (the ‘Julian’ edition). Keats Circle = The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers, and More Letters and Poems of the Keats Circle, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2nd edn, 2 vols, Cambridge, MA 1965. Keats L = The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols, Cambridge 1958.

abbreviations



xxvii

Kent = [Anon.], Flora Domestica; or, The Portable Flower-­Garden, with Directions for the Treatment of Plants in Pots; and Illustrations from the Works of the Poets, London 1823 (by Elizabeth Kent). King-Hele (1971) = Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work, 2nd edn, London 1971. Knerr = Shelley’s Adonais: A Critical Edition, ed. Anthony D. Knerr, New York 1984. K-SJ = Keats-Shelley Journal. K-SMB = Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin. K-SR = Keats-Shelley Review.



L = The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols, Oxford 1964.



L about S = Edward Dowden, Richard Garnett, and William Michael Rossetti, Letters about Shelley Interchanged by Three Friends, ed. R. S. Garnett, London 1917.



Locock Ex = C. D. Locock, An Examination of the Shelley Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford 1903.



Locock 1911 = The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. C. D. Locock, 2 vols, London 1911.



Longman = The Poems of Shelley, ed. Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin ­Everest (vol i, London 1989), ed. Jack Donovan, ­Kelvin ­Everest, Geoffrey Matthews, Ralph Pite, and Michael ­Rossington (vol ii, London 2000), ed. Jack Donovan, Cian Duffy, Kelvin Everest, and Michael Rossington, with the assistance of Laura Barlow (vol iii, London 2011), ed. Jack Donovan, Kelvin Everest, and Michael Rossington, with the assistance of Andrew Lacey and Laura Barlow (vol iv, London 2014), ed. Carlene Adamson, Will Bowers, Jack Donovan, Kelvin Everest, Mathelinda Nabugodi and Michael ­Rossington (vols v–vi, London 2022).



MA (1832) = Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy, ed. Leigh Hunt, London 1832.



Mac-Carthy = Denis Florence Mac-Carthy, Shelley’s Early Life, London 1872.



Mac-Carthy (1873) = Denis Florence Mac-Carthy, Calderon’s Dramas, London 1873.





Major Works = Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’ Neill (Oxford 2003), reissued, 2009. Mary Jnl = The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols, Oxford 1987. Mary Jnl (Jones) = Mary Shelley’s Journal, ed. Frederick L. Jones, Norman, OK 1947.

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abbreviations Mary L = The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. ­Bennett, 3 vols, Baltimore, MD 1980–88. Massey = Irving Massey, Posthumous Poems of Shelley: Mary Shelley’s Fair Copy Book, Montreal 1969 (Mary Copybk 2). Medwin (1824) = Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron: Noted During a Residence with his Lordship at Pisa, in the Years 1821 and 1822. A New Edition, London 1824. Medwin (1833) = The Shelley Papers: Memoir of Percy Bysshe Shelley, by T. Medwin, Esq., and Original Poems and Papers, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Now First Collected, London 1833. Medwin = Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols, London 1847. Medwin (1913) = Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. H. Buxton Forman, London 1913. Morton = Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World, Cambridge 1994. MSCTS = Mary Shelley, Collected Tales and Stories, ed. Charles E. Robinson, Baltimore, MD 1976. MSLL = Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, 4 vols, gen. ed. Nora Crook, London 2002. MSW = The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, gen. ed. Nora Crook with Pamela Clemit, 8 vols, London 1996: vol. i, Frankenstein, ed. Nora Crook, introd. Betty T. Bennett; vol. ii, Matilda, Dramas, etc., ed. Pamela Clemit; vol. iii, Valperga, ed. Nora Crook; vol. iv, The Last Man, ed. Jane Blumberg with Nora Crook; vol. v, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, ed. Doucet Devin Fischer; vol. vi, Lodore, ed. Fiona Stafford; vol. vii, Falkner, ed. Pamela Clemit; vol. viii, Travel Writing, Index, ed. Jeanne Moskal. MWW = The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and ­Marilyn Butler, 7 vols, London 1989. MYRS = The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics: Shelley, gen. ed. Donald H. Reiman, 9 vols, New York 1985–97: vol. i, The Esdaile Notebook, ed. Donald H. Reiman, 1985 (Esd); vol. ii, The Mask of Anarchy, ed. Donald H. Reiman, 1985; vol. iii, Hellas: A Lyrical Drama, ed. Donald H. Reiman, 1985;

abbreviations

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vol. iv, The Mask of Anarchy Draft Notebook: Huntington MS HM 2177, ed. Mary A. Quinn, 1990 (Nbk 10); vol. v, The Harvard Shelley Poetic Manuscripts, ed. Donald H. Reiman, 1991 (Harvard Nbk 1, Harvard Nbk 2, and Harvard MSS); vol. vi, Shelley’s 1819–1821 Huntington Notebook: ­ untington MS HM 2176, ed. Mary A. Quinn, 1994 (Nbk H 12); vol. vii, Shelley’s 1821–1822 Huntington Notebook: ­Huntington MS HM 2111, ed. Mary A. Quinn, 1996 (Nbk 22); vol. viii, Fair-Copy Manuscripts of Shelley’s Poems in ­European and American Libraries, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Michael O’Neill, 1997 (includes SDMS); vol. ix, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: The Frankenstein Notebooks, ed. Charles E. Robinson, 2 Parts, 1996.





New SL = New Shelley Letters, ed. W. S. Scott, London 1948. Notopoulos = James A. Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley: A Study of Platonism and the Poetic Mind, Durham, NC 1949. OSA = Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, 2nd edn, rev. G. M. Matthews, Oxford 1970 (‘Oxford Standard Authors’). OT (1820) = [Anon.], Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant. A Tragedy. In Two Acts. London 1820 (by Shelley). Paine Writings = The Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Moncure Daniel ­Conway, 4 vols, New York 1894–96. Peacock L = The Letters of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. Nicholas A. ­Joukovsky, 2 vols, Oxford 2001.



Peacock Works = The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. H. F. B. BrettSmith and C. E. Jones, 10 vols, London 1924–34.



Peck = Walter Edwin Peck, Shelley: His Life and Work, 2 vols, ­Boston, MA 1927.



PFMN = [Anon.], Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, ­Oxford 1810 (by Shelley).



Political Justice = William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), 3rd edn, 1798, ed. F. E. L. Priestley, 3 vols, ­Toronto 1946.



Prose = Shelley’s Prose; or, The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque, NM 1954), corr. edn, Albuquerque, NM 1966.



Prose Works = The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. i, ed. E. B. Murray, Oxford 1993.

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abbreviations Recollections = E. J. Trelawny, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, London 1858. Records = Edward John Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, 2 vols, London 1878. Reflections = Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, gen. ed. Paul Langford, 9 vols, Oxford 1981–2000, vol. viii, The French Revolution, 1790–1794, ed. L. G. Mitchell. Reiman (1969) = Donald H. Reiman, Percy Bysshe Shelley, New York 1969. Reiman (1977) = Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and ­Sharon B. Powers, New York 1977. Reiman (2002) = Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 2nd edn, ed. Donald H. ­Reiman and Neil Fraistat, New York 2002. Relics = Relics of Shelley, ed. Richard Garnett, London 1862. Ricci = Corrado Ricci, Beatrice Cenci, 2 vols, Milan 1923. Ricci (1926) = Corrado Ricci, Beatrice Cenci, trans. Morris Bishop and ­Henry Longan Stuart, 2 vols, London 1926. Robinson = Charles E. Robinson, Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight, Baltimore, MD 1976. Rogers = Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work: A Critical Inquiry, Oxford 1956. Rogers (1967) = Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work: A Critical Inquiry, 2nd edn, Oxford 1967. Rognoni = Shelley, Opere, ed. Francesco Rognoni, Turin 1995. Rognoni (2018a) = Percy Bysshe Shelley, Opere poetiche, ed. Francesco ­Rognoni and Valentina Varinelli, Milan 2018. Rognoni (2018b) = Percy Bysshe Shelley, Teatro, prose e lettere, ed. Francesco ­Rognoni and Valentina Varinelli, Milan 2018. Rossetti 1870 = The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. William Michael Rossetti, 2 vols, London 1870. Rossetti 1878 = The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. William ­Michael Rossetti, 3 vols, London 1878. Ruins = Constantin-François Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney, The ­Ruins: or, A Survey of the Revolutions of Empires (1791), 3rd edn, London 1796. S in Eng = Roger Ingpen, Shelley in England: New Facts and Letters from the Shelley-Whitton Papers, London 1917. S Memorials = Shelley Memorials, from Authentic Sources, ed. Lady Shelley, London 1859. SC = Shelley and his Circle: 1773–1822 (an edition of the manuscripts of Shelley and others in CHPL), ed. ­Kenneth Neill Cameron (vols i–iv, Cambridge, MA 1961–70), ed. Donald

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H. Reiman (vols v–viii, ­Cambridge, MA 1973–86), ed. Donald H. Reiman and Doucet Devin Fischer (vols ix–x, Cambridge, MA 2002). Further vols in progress. SC followed by a number = CHPL’s classification of an item in its collection. Shelley and Mary = Shelley and Mary, [ed. Lady Shelley], 3 vols (sometimes 4 vols), London 1882. Shelley Revalued = Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference, ed. Kelvin Everest, Leicester 1983. Shelley’s Guitar = B. C. Barker-Benfield, Shelley’s Guitar: An ­Exhibition of Manuscripts, First Editions and Relics, to Mark the ­Bicentenary of the Birth of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792/1992, Oxford 1992. Shepherd 1871–5 = The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. R. H. Shepherd, 4 vols, London 1871–75. Southey Life = The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey, 6 vols, London 1849–50. St Irvyne = [Anon.], St. Irvyne; or, the Rosicrucian: A Romance, London 1811 (by Shelley; published in 1810). Système de la Nature = [Baron D’Holbach], Systême de la nature, ou des loix du monde physique & du monde moral (Amsterdam 1770; attributed to Mirabaud). Taylor = Charles H. Taylor, Jr., The Early Collected Editions of ­Shelley’s Poems: A Study in the History and Transmission of the Printed Text, New Haven, CT 1958. Thompson = Selections from the Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. A. Hamilton Thompson, Cambridge 1915. TL (Reiman) = Donald H. Reiman, Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’: A Critical Study based on a Text Newly Edited from the Bodleian MS, Urbana, IL 1965. TL (GM) = ‘ “The Triumph of Life”: a New Text’, ed. G. M. M ­ atthews, Studia Neophilologica, xxxii (1960). Turner = Paul Turner, ‘Shelley and Lucretius’, Review of English Studies, n. s. x (1959). Unextinguished Hearth = The Unextinguished Hearth: Shelley and His Contemporary Critics, ed. Newman Ivey White, Durham, NC 1938. V&C = [Anon.], Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire, ­Worthing 1810 (by Shelley and his sister Elizabeth; edition w ­ ithdrawn). V&C (1898) = Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (Worthing 1810), ed. Richard Garnett, London 1898. V&P = Verse and Prose from the Manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Sir John C. E. Shelley-Rolls and Roger Ingpen, London 1934.

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abbreviations Viviani della Robbia = Enrica Viviani della Robbia, Vita di una donna (L’Emily di Shelley), Florence 1936. Walker = Adam Walker, A System of Familiar Philosophy, London 1799. Wasserman = Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading, Baltimore, MD 1971. Webb = Timothy Webb, The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation, Oxford 1976. Webb (1977) = Timothy Webb, Shelley: A Voice Not Understood, M ­ anchester 1977. Webb (1995) = Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poems and Prose, ed. Timothy Webb, London 1995. White = Newman Ivey White, Shelley, 2 vols, New York 1940. Woodberry 1892 = The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. George Edward Woodberry, 4 vols, Boston, MA 1892. Woodberry 1893 = The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. George Edward Woodberry, 4 vols, London 1893. Woodberry (1901) = The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. George Edward Woodberry, Boston, MA 1901 (the ‘­ Cambridge’ edition). Woodberry (1909) = Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cenci, ed. George Edward ­Woodberry, Boston, MA 1909. Wordsworth Prose = The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols, Oxford 1974. Worthen = John Worthen, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, Chichester 2019. Zillman Text = Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: The Text and the Drafts, ed. Lawrence John Zillman, New Haven, CT 1968. Zillman Variorum = Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: A Variorum Edition, ed. Lawrence John Zillman, Seattle, WA 1959.

Further editorial abbreviations that are unique to the commentary on a poem are identified in the headnote or notes to that poem. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Greek and Latin texts, and their translations, are from the Loeb Classical Library editions. In the case of Theocritus, Moschus and Bion, A. S. F. Gow, ed., Bvcolici Graeci (1952) is used for the Greek text, and the same scholar’s The Greek Bucolic Poets (1953) for the translation. The sources of translations from Dante’s Divina commedia (Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso), Goethe’s Faust, Calderón’s El mágico prodigioso and Petrarch’s lyric poems are respectively and unless otherwise stated: The Vision of Dante [1814], trans. Henry Cary, ed. Ralph Pite (1994); Hayward; Mac-Carthy (1873); and Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, ed. Robert M. Durling (1976).

The Poems

1  Stanzas. — April, 1814 According to Claire Clairmont in later life, ‘Shelley at Bracknell fell in love with Mrs Turner. Madame de Boinville and Mrs Turner were indignant, and broke off his acquaintance; but Harriet Shelley continued to visit them, and remained at Bracknell, while Shelley took refuge in London. The stanzas dated April, 1814, are addressed to Madame de Boinville and Cornelia Turner’ (Dowden Life ii 549). Harriet S. in fact went to London with her sister Eliza on 14 April, and S. avoided his own ‘desolated hearth’ by staying with the Boinvilles. A crisis in their relationship must have alienated Mrs Boinville (the ‘friend’ of line 6) while Cornelia (the ‘lover’ of line 7 — though ‘lover’ bears no unequivocally physical implication) would not commit herself to intercede for him. Lines 1–2 suggest a moon in its first quarter, so the poem may well have been composed about 25 April. Mrs Boinville apparently relented so far as to come to nurse S. in London when he took poison early in July (Dowden Life ii 544–5). This self-admonishing poem is in a very unusual (and slightly irregular) metre, which however has affinities with that of Moore’s ‘The Irish Peasant to his Mistress’ (Irish Melodies Series iii, 1810). Text from 1816 56–8. Published in 1816.

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Away! the moor is dark beneath the moon, Rapid clouds have drank the last pale beam of even: Away! the gathering winds will call the darkness soon, And profoundest midnight shroud the serene lights of heaven. Pause not! The time is past! Every voice cries, Away! Tempt not with one last tear thy friend’s ungentle mood: Thy lover’s eye, so glazed and cold, dares not entreat thy stay: Duty and dereliction guide thee back to solitude. Away, away! to thy sad and silent home; Pour bitter tears on its desolated hearth; Watch the dim shades as like ghosts they go and come, And complicate strange webs of melancholy mirth. The leaves of wasted autumn woods shall float around thine head: The blooms of dewy spring shall gleam beneath thy feet: But thy soul or this world must fade in the frost that binds the dead, Ere midnight’s frown and morning’s smile, ere thou and peace may meet. The cloud shadows of midnight possess their own repose, For the weary winds are silent, or the moon is in the deep: Some respite to its turbulence unresting ocean knows;

¶ 1. 1. the moor is dark] Hogg, who had very recently visited Bracknell, described Ascot Heath at night as ‘a land of darkness, of thick, black darkness, of solitude, stillness, and silence’ (Hogg ii 523–4). 2. drank] A common form of the past participle at this date. 8. Duty and dereliction] I.e. his duty to his wife, and Cornelia’s abandonment of him.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-1

4 20

shelley: selected poems Whatever moves, or toils, or grieves, hath its appointed sleep. Thou in the grave shalt rest — yet till the phantoms flee Which that house and heath and garden made dear to thee erewhile, Thy remembrance, and repentance, and deep musings are not free From the music of two voices and the light of one sweet smile.

2  ‘O! there are spirits of the air’ ΔAΚΡΥΕΙ ΔΙΟΕΩ MOTMON AMOTMON Date of composition unknown; possibly early in 1815. S. ordered ‘Coleridge’s Poems’ (i.e. the 3rd edn of Poems, 1803) on 24 December 1812 (L i 345), and the book is listed among those read in 1815 (Mary Jnl i 90). S. mentions an edition of Euripides on 13 February 1815 (Mary Jnl i 64). But he ordered a translation of the Hippolytus on 27 September (L i 433), so the poem (or just its Greek heading) may belong to the autumn (see note on line 1). In 1816 the poem appeared under the Greek heading only; for 1839 (iii 6), Mary S. substituted the title ‘To ****.’, explaining in her ‘Note on the Early Poems’: ‘The poem beginning “Oh, there are spirits in the air [sic],” was addressed in idea to Coleridge, whom he never knew; and at whose character he could only guess imperfectly, through his writings, and accounts he heard of him from some who knew him well. He regarded his change of opinion as rather an act of will than conviction, and believed that in his inner heart he would be haunted by what Shelley considered the better and holier aspirations of his youth.’ (iii 15–16). There is no good reason to doubt Mary’s long and informed account, though many have preferred to think the poem addressed to S. himself. If so, lines 13–16 describe his loss of Harriet Grove, while stanzas 5–6 reflect S.’s realization of the failure of his marriage to Harriet Westbrook, and the poem must date from spring 1814. But in writing of one ‘whom he never knew’, it is likely, as Peter Butter suggested, that S. ‘felt, or imagined, an affinity with Coleridge, and used his own experience in interpreting the other’s’ (Butter (1970) 246). The poem’s picture of its subject is very similar to that of Coleridge in PB3 383–7: . . . a man who might have turned Hell into Heaven — and so in gladness A Heaven unto himself have earned; But he in shadows undiscerned Trusted, — and damned himself to madness. S. may have drawn on other supposed experiences too (see note to lines 13–16 below). As Butter also notes, the theme is related to that of Alastor. The Greek title-epigraph is from Euripides, Hippolytus 1142–3, slightly truncated: ‘[For your sad fate] I  shall endure with tears an unfortunate fortune’. The Chorus is commiserating with Hippolytus, exiled by his father after his mother’s false accusation of rape. Text from 1816 53–5. Published in 1816. 20–1. Whatever moves .  .  . shalt rest] A  recurrent lament of S.’s, deriving ultimately from Matthew viii 20: ‘The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head’. Cp. MA 197–208; To — (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’) 41–8.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-2

2  ‘o! there are spirits of the air’

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5

O! there are spirits of the air, And genii of the evening breeze, And gentle ghosts, with eyes as fair As star-beams among twilight trees: — Such lovely ministers to meet Oft hast thou turned from men thy lonely feet. With mountain winds, and babbling springs, And moonlight seas, that are the voice Of these inexplicable things Thou didst hold commune, and rejoice When they did answer thee; but they Cast, like a worthless boon, thy love away. And thou hast sought in starry eyes Beams that were never meant for thine, Another’s wealth: — tame sacrifice To a fond faith! still dost thou pine? Still dost thou hope that greeting hands, Voice, looks, or lips, may answer thy demands?

¶ 2. 1. spirits of the air] Perhaps referring to Alvar’s invocation to the spirits surrounding the earth in Coleridge’s Remorse (III i 44–5, 53–5). Harriet S. had ordered two copies of Remorse on publication in 1813 (L i 351n.). Or to ‘Lines on an Autumnal Evening’ (1796) 37, 43–4: ‘Spirits of Love!/. . . O heed the spell, and hither wing your way,/Like far-off music, voyaging the breeze’. 2. genii of the evening breeze] A probable reference to Coleridge’s ‘The Eolian Harp’ (1796). Cp. Q Mab i 52–3: ‘. . . that strange lyre whose strings/The genii of the breezes sweep’. 3. gentle ghosts] One was Chatterton’s, from Coleridge’s ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’ (1794) 118–21: Here, far from men, amid this pathless grove, In solemn thought the Minstrel wont to rove, Like star-beam on the slow sequester’d tide Lone glittering, through the high tree branching wide. 13–16. And thou hast sought . . . To a fond faith!] I.e. ‘the eyes you loved were destined to bestow their favour on another, in acquiescence to Christian doctrine’ (‘a fond faith’). Coleridge had been married for five years when in 1799 he met and loved Sara Hutchinson. S. may also remember his own experience with Harriet Grove, and what he had been told by Southey of the poet James Montgomery who ‘loved an apparently amiable female. He was about to marry her. — Having some affairs in the West Indies he went to settle them before his marriage. On his return to Sheffield he actually met the marriage procession of this woman who had in the meantime chosen another love. He became melancholy, mad; the horrible events of his life preyed on his mind . . . the contest between his reason and his faith was destroying. He is now a methodist . . .’ (L i 216). 14. thine,] thine 1816.

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shelley: selected poems Ah! wherefore didst thou build thine hope On the false earth’s inconstancy? Did thine own mind afford no scope Of love, or moving thoughts to thee? That natural scenes or human smiles Could steal the power to wind thee in their wiles? Yes, all the faithless smiles are fled Whose falsehood left thee broken-hearted; The glory of the moon is dead; Night’s ghosts and dreams have now departed; Thine own soul still is true to thee, But changed to a foul fiend through misery. This fiend, whose ghastly presence ever Beside thee like thy shadow hangs, Dream not to chase; — the mad endeavour Would scourge thee to severer pangs. Be as thou art. Thy settled fate, Dark as it is, all change would aggravate.

3  To Wordsworth On 14 September 1814, Mary S. noted: ‘Shelley . . . brings home Wordsworth’s “Excursion”, of which we read a part, much disappointed. He is a slave’ (Mary Jnl i 25). The poem may reflect that initial disillusion with such passages as the ‘Poet’s Address to the State and Church of England’ opening Bk VI. But paradoxically, S.’s interest in Wordsworth’s poetry only developed seriously during the following year; in 1815, he re-read The Excursion (Mary Jnl i 91) and procured the Poems immediately after their publication (21 April 1815; Mary Jnl i 76). But he never ceased to deplore Wordsworth’s change of views, and this sonnet may well date as late as September–October 1815. Text from 1816 67–8. Published in 1816. Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know That things depart which never may return: Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow, Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.

¶ 3. 1–4. Wordsworth’s ‘Ode, Intimations of Immortality’, ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle’, ‘A Complaint’ (all 1807), and ‘Surprised by Joy’ (1815) are among the poems S. probably had in mind.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-3

4 mutability 5

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These common woes I feel. One loss is mine Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore. Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar: Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood Above the blind and battling multitude: In honoured poverty thy voice did weave Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, — Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve, Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.

4 Mutability Date of composition unknown; here assigned to winter 1815–16 mainly on grounds of stylistic maturity. Lines 1–4 suggest a late autumn or winter night, but this could have been equally well a night in 1814. Coleridge’s ‘Eolian Harp’, which may have influenced lines 5–8, was read in 1815 (Mary Jnl i 90); and as a meditation on the transience and vulnerability of human life, the poem is likely to be associated with S.’s supposed serious illness in spring 1815 (see headnote to Alastor). In a letter dated by Jones 4 November 1814 (L i 418– 19), S. told Mary: ‘I am an harp responsive to every wind. The scented gale of summer can wake it to sweet melody, but rough cold blasts draw forth discordances & jarring sounds’; but S.’s letters to Hogg in September 1815 contain reflections on mortality likewise in the mood of the poem. For the theme of ‘mutability’, the sources are numerous, and include Ovid’s exposition of the Pythagorean flux, ‘cuncta fluunt . . .’ (Metamorphoses xv 178–355), and Spenser’s ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ (FQ VII vii 13–56). Text from 1816 59–60. Published in 1816. We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon; How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver, Streaking the darkness radiantly! — yet soon Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

7. Thou wert as a lone star] Echoing Wordsworth’s own sonnet on Milton, ‘London, 1802’ 9: ‘Thy soul was like a Star and dwelt apart’. 10. blind and battling multitude] ‘thoughtless followers of the doctrine of self-interest’ rather than the common people as such. 11. honoured poverty] In 1811, at Keswick, S. had heard and believed that ‘Wordsworth . . . yet retains the integrity of his independance, but his poverty is such that he is frequently obliged to beg for a shirt to his back’ (L i 208–9). 12. Wordsworth had headed one section of his Poems in Two Volumes (1807) ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-4

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shelley: selected poems Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings Give various response to each varying blast, To whose frail frame no second motion brings One mood or modulation like the last. We rest. — A dream has power to poison sleep; We rise. — One wandering thought pollutes the day; We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep; Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away: It is the same! — For, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free: Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.

5  Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude Composed at Bishopsgate between 10 September and 14 December 1815 (the date of the Preface). Mary S. wrote (1839 i 141) that ‘ “Alastor” was composed on his return’ from the voyage up the Thames to Lechlade (begun at the end of August), for which S.’s letter of 10 September (L i 430) provides a terminal date, and in a letter postmarked 22 September S. told Hogg: ‘I have been engaged lately in the commencement of several literary plans, which if my present temper of mind endures I shall probably complete in the winter’ (L i 432). In sending the poem to Southey in March, S. called it ‘the product of a few serene hours of the last beautiful autumn’ (L i 461). But S. had foreshadowed the theme of the poem even before his Thames expedition in a letter to Hogg postmarked 26 August (L i 429–30): ‘Yet who is there that will not pursue phantoms, spend his choicest hours in hunting after dreams, and wake only to perceive his error and regret that death is so near?’ By 6 January 1816, the Alastor volume was in print except for the last sheet, and in this state was offered for publication to Murray (L i 438), who declined it. It was eventually announced as ready for publication ‘in a few days’ on 6 February by Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, jointly with Carpenter & Son (L i 449), and S.’s father had received a copy by 27 February (S in Eng 463). The distinction made in the Preface between ‘luminaries of the world’ and ‘meaner spirits’ could have been suggested, or reinforced, by Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria, in her Posthumous Works (1798), which S. had read with Mary S. in 1814 (Mary Jnl i 86): ¶ 4. 5. forgotten lyres] An Aeolian harp could be left in a window or tree for the wind to make music. dissonant] variously-sounding. Cp. Coleridge’s ‘Eolian Harp’ (1796) 40–3: ‘. . . many idle flitting phantasies,/Traverse my indolent and passive brain,/As wild and various as the random gales/That swell and flutter on this subject Lute!’ 15. Man’s yesterday .  .  . his morrow] Cp. Ovid, Met. xv 215–16: ‘nec quod fuimusve sumusve,/cras erimus’. 16. Nought . . . Mutability] Cp. Spenser, FQ VII vii 47, lines 8–9: ‘Wherefore, this lower world who can deny/But to be subject still to Mutabilitie?’

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-5

5  alastor; or, the spirit of solitude

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The youths who are satisfied with the ordinary pleasures of life, and do not sigh after ideal phantoms of love and friendship, will never arrive at great maturity of understanding; but if these reveries are cherished . . . when experience ought to have taught them in what human happiness consists, they become as useless as they are wretched. (MWW i 104) The Preface’s description of those ‘pure and tender-hearted individuals’, like the poet-protagonist of the poem, who ‘attempt to exist without human sympathy’ and so ‘perish through the intensity and passion of their search after its communities’, may also be indebted to Godwin’s Fleetwood (1805). This novel, with which S. was familiar from at least 1812 (L i 260), characterises a ‘self-centred seclusion’ like that of the poet in Alastor: Fleetwood, you are too much alone. I hear people talk of the raptures of solitude; and with what tenderness of affection they can love a tree, a rivulet, or a mountain . . . still it will not do. There is a principle in the heart of man which demands the society of his like. He that has no such society, is in a state but one degree removed from insanity. He pines for an ear into which he might pour the story of his thoughts, for an eye that shall flash upon him with responsive intelligence, for a face the lines of which shall talk to him in dumb but eloquent discourse, for a heart that shall beat in unison with his own. (II ch. xv: Godwin Novels v 164) Compare also Fleetwood’s account of his own wanderings: I wanted something, I knew not what. I sought it in solitude and in crowds, in travel and at home, in ambition and in independence . . . I wandered among mountains and rivers, through verdant plains, and over immense precipices; but nature had no beauties. (II ch. xi: Godwin Novels v 151) The issues were probably brought to a sharper intellectual focus for S. by his reading of Sir William Drummond’s Academical Questions (1805), ordered by S. on 27 September 1815 (L i 433), which places the ‘interesting situation of the human mind’ of S.’s Preface in a context of philosophical scepticism: We are not satisfied with speaking of the objects of our perception — of what we feel and understand. We seek to attach ideas to mere abstractions, and to give being to pure denominations . . . Is there not one, who perceives his own ideas, and calls them external objects: who thinks he distinguishes the truth, and who sees it not; who grasps at shadows, and who follows phantoms; who passes from the cradle to the tomb, the dupe and often the victim of the illusions, which he himself has created? (Bk II ch. i 166–7) A further marked influence on both the Preface and the poem itself is from Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree’, first published in Lyrical Ballads (1798) but probably read by S. in April 1815 in the two-volume Poems published in that year (Mary Jnl i 76). This influence extends beyond striking thematic parallels to a general similarity in the handling of blank verse, and to a more particular similarity in some points of detail (e.g. Wordsworth’s ‘Vacancy’, ‘Lines

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. . .’ 7, cp. Alastor 126, 191, 195, 201, 562, 662; ‘Lines . . .’ 10–12, cp. Alastor 431–3). Commentaries have frequently compared the ideas of the Preface and poem with those of S.’s prose fragments ‘On Love’ and, less decidedly, ‘On Life’ (Prose 169–75); but while these fragments provide valuable glosses on Alastor, it is almost certain that they are significantly later in date (see SC vi 638–9, 971). Much critical discussion has addressed an apparent contradiction between the Preface’s judgement of the protagonist in the poem and the generally more sympathetic attitude of the poem itself: ‘the poem tends to romanticize what it was supposed to condemn’ (GM). For a convincing account of the relationship between Preface and poem, see Evan K. Gibson, ‘Alastor. A Reinterpretation’, PMLA lxii (1947) 1022–42, which argues that ‘what Shelley felt he had presented in the poem when he wrote the Preface’ was ‘a tragedy of misdirected genius brought to inevitable defeat by the innocent neglect of one of the most necessary elements in the human soul’ (1026). The poem’s title is explained in a passage of Peacock’s Memoirs of S.: He was at a loss for a title, and I proposed that which he adopted: Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude. The Greek word Ἀλάστωρ is an evil genius, κακοδαίμων, though the sense of the two words is somewhat different . . . The poem treated the spirit of solitude as a spirit of evil. I mention the true meaning of the word because many have supposed Alastor to be the name of the hero of the poem. (Peacock Works viii 100) This account has, however, led to confusion in its suggestion that the poem’s ‘Spirit of Solitude’ is to be understood as an external supernatural agency, where the poem makes clear (149ff.) that the visionary figure is initially created by the poet-protagonist, and remains imaginary. The Greek ἀλάστωρ can, in fact, mean either an avenging spirit or, more rarely, the victim of such a spirit, so that S. may, after all, have intended his title to refer to the poem’s protagonist; but the thematic importance of the poet’s anonymity (cp. 50–60) makes this unlikely. Mary S. notes that during the composition of Alastor S. ‘spent his days under the oak shades of Windsor Great Park; and the magnificent woodland was a fitting study to inspire the various descriptions of forest scenery we find in the poem’. She also points out that S. had ‘visited some of the more magnificent scenes of Switzerland, and returned to England from Lucerne, by the Reuss and the Rhine. This river navigation enchanted him. In his favourite poem of “Thalaba”, his imagination had been excited by a description of such a voyage’ (1839 i 140–1). The account of these journeys in 1817 suggests interesting similarities to elements of the boat journey in the poem: The Reuss is exceedingly rapid, and we descended several falls, one of more than eight feet . . . There is something very delicious in the sensation, when at one moment you are at the top of a fall of water, and before the second has expired you are at the bottom, still rushing on with the impulse which the descent has given . . . . . . we engaged a small canoe to convey us to Mumph. I give these boats this Indian appellation, as they were of the rudest construction — long, narrow, and flat-bottomed: they consist merely of straight pieces of deal board, unpainted, and nailed together with so little care, that the water constantly poured in at the crevices, and the boat perpetually required emptying. The river was rapid, and sped swiftly, breaking as it passed on innumerable rocks just covered by the water: it was a sight of some dread to see our frail boat winding among the eddies of the rocks, which it was death to touch, and when the slightest inclination on one side would instantly have overset it. (1817 57–8)

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S’s poem appears in some respects Southeyan in conception. Editors may, however, have been mistaken in following Mary S.’s supposition that the idea of an ‘underground voyage’ derives from Southey’s Thalaba. Thalaba’s boat descends a stream that becomes a river, then crosses the sea (xi 30–xii 8), but the entry into the cavern and all the underground part of his mission is accomplished on foot or in a winged car (xii 8–end). There is an account of a voyage within a magnetic rock in Robert Paltock’s Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man (1751), which S. had read as a boy (Medwin (1913) 24). Cp. for example, Alastor 369–97 with Peter Wilkins ch. x: I heard a great noise, as of a fall of water . . . the stream insensibly drawing me on, I soon found myself in an eddy; and the boat drawing forward beyond all my power to resist it, I was quickly sucked under a low arch . . . I could perceive the boat to fall with incredible violence, as I thought, down a precipice, and suddenly whirled round and round with me, the water roaring on all sides, and dashing against the rock with a most amazing noise. As Beljame suggested (Alastor ou Le Génie de la Solitude (Paris 1895) 95), S. is indebted for details of the poet’s overland route described in 140–353 to Alexander the Great’s expedition into India of 327 B.C., although S.’s source was not Arrian, whom he apparently did not read before summer 1817, but Quintus Curtius, who provides S.’s place names and other particulars (see notes below). S. ordered a specific edition of Quintus Curtius in December 1815 (L i 437–8) and states his preference for Quintus Curtius to Arrian in a letter to Hogg of 6 July 1817 (L i 545). The poet’s route in the poem is ‘through Arabie/And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste’ (i.e. through modern Iran and Afghanistan along the north coast of the Arabian sea) then north over the Indian Caucasus (the Hindu Kush) to the Vale of Cashmire; then (after the vision of 149 ff.) east again, roughly along the Oxus/Amu Darya, through Balk (Balkh in Afghanistan) into Media (south of the Caspian Sea, in Iran). The poet then quits Alexander’s route, which was south and back to Babylon, and journeys to the ‘lone Chorasmian shore’, the eastern coast of the Caspian, finally crossing from there by boat to reach what is now the Soviet Caucasus. For further suggestions about possible literary influences on Alastor, see White i 700–1. Alastor represents a dramatic advance in S.’s poetic technique and intellectual range comparable with that made by Q Mab. The poem’s autobiographical element has been often noticed, and the preoccupation with death and failure doubtless owes something to S.’s ill health in spring 1815; as Mary S. remarks, at this period ‘physical suffering had .  .  . considerable influence in causing him to turn his eyes inward; inclining him rather to brood over the thoughts and emotions of his own soul than to glance abroad .  .  . In the Spring of 1815 an eminent physician pronounced that he was dying rapidly of a consumption; abscesses were formed on his lungs, and he suffered acute spasms’ (1839 i 140; see White i 405–6. The ‘eminent surgeon’ was Sir William Lawrence; L i 429). But there is a newly controlled detachment in S.’s subordination of personal ­material to more general thematic concerns, in which hints at the experience of other living poets combine with representations of his own life to enrich a symbolic narrative which is not confined to any one particular biography. For arguments in favour of Wordsworth and Coleridge as possible models for the poet, see Paul Mueschke and Earl L. Griggs, ‘Wordsworth as the Prototype of the Poet in Shelley’s Alastor’, PMLA xlix (1934) 229– 45, and Joseph Raben, ‘Coleridge as the Prototype of the Poet in Shelley’s Alastor’, RES xvii (1966) 78–92. Short poems critical of Wordsworth and of Coleridge were included in the Alastor volume, and S. ‘always took care that the minor poems in his collections matched the principal one’ (GM). The blank verse of Alastor also displays a marked new maturity which, while bearing the influence of S.’s reading in English blank verse, particularly Wordsworth’s, is more distinctive of S.’s own manner than obviously derivative. Also

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distinctive is S.’s use in the poem of landscapes which are ‘inseparable from the psychic and emotional states of the Poet passing through them’ (GM). The Alastor volume received very scant critical attention on its appearance, most of it hostile and bewildered (see Unextinguished Hearth 105–8). A  favourable review finally appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in November  1819; the review, by John Wilson, was used as the occasion to attack the Quarterly Review’s savage attack on S. in its review of L&C in April 1819 (see headnotes to PU and Adonais). Text from 1816. Published in 1816.

Preface.

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The poem entitled ‘ALASTOR’ may be considered as allegorical of one of the most interesting situations of the human mind. It represents a youth of uncorrupted feelings and adventurous genius led forth by an imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent and majestic, to the contemplation of the universe. He drinks deep of the fountains of knowledge, and is still insatiate. The magnificence and beauty of the external world sinks profoundly into the frame of his conceptions, and affords to their modifications a variety not to be exhausted. So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous, and tranquil, and self-possessed. But the period arrives when these objects cease to suffice. His mind is at length suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself. He images to himself the Being whom he loves. Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures, the vision in which he embodies his own imaginations unites all of wonderful, or wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher, or the lover could depicture. The intellectual faculties, the imagination, the functions of sense, have their respective requisitions on the sympathy of corresponding powers in other human beings. The Poet is represented as uniting these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image. He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave. The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet’s self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that Power which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influences, dooms to a slow and poisonous decay those meaner spirits that dare to abjure its dominion. Their destiny is more abject and inglorious as their delinquency is more contemptible and pernicious. They who, deluded by no generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth, and cherishing no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies with their kind, rejoicing neither in human joy nor mourning with human grief; these, and such as they, have their apportioned curse. They languish, because none feel with them their common nature. They are morally dead. They are neither friends, nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor benefactors of their country. Among those who attempt to exist without human sympathy, the pure and tender-hearted perish through the intensity and passion of their search after its communities, when the

¶ 5. 2. Preface. It represents a youth] The protagonist of the poem is not named, a mark of his failure as a poet. Cp. lines 50–66, 669–71. 15. requisitions] I.e. claims. 16. prototype] ideal embodiment.

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vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. All else, selfish, blind, and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes who constitute, together with their own, the lasting misery and loneliness of the world. Those who love not their fellow-beings, live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave. ‘The good die first, And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust, Burn to the socket!’

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December 14, 1815. Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quaerebam quid amarem, amans amare. Confess. St. August.

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Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood! If our great Mother has imbued my soul With aught of natural piety to feel Your love, and recompense the boon with mine; If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even, With sunset and its gorgeous ministers, And solemn midnight’s tingling silentness; If autumn’s hollow sighs in the sere wood, And winter robing with pure snow and crowns Of starry ice the grey grass and bare boughs; If spring’s voluptuous pantings when she breathes Her first sweet kisses, have been dear to me; If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast I consciously have injured, but still loved

31. All else] ‘utterly different’ (Butter (1970)). 34–36. ‘The good . . . socket!’] Wordsworth, Excursion (1814 i 500–2); S.’s quotation reads ‘those’ for ‘they’ and introduces a comma after ‘dust’. Epigraph. amans amare] amans mare 1816 (a misprint). ‘I was not yet in love, and I loved to be in love, I sought what I might love, loving to be in love’ (St Augustine’s Confessions III i). S. used this quotation in his ‘Advertisement’ to the ‘Mary’ poems in Esd (see headnote to To Mary —— 1, Longman i 128–30, no. 38), and he also copied it into Claire Clairmont’s 1814 journal (BL MS Ashley 394) next to his verse Fragments written in Claire Clairmont’s Journal (Longman I 439–40, no. 100; see headnote, and Claire Jnl 61–2). 1. Earth, ocean, air] ‘The three legendary divisions of the world’ (‘ex fabulis tria regnia divisa’), Cicero, De Natura Deorum II xxvi 66. The invocation to the material world was Hymen’s at the marriage of Cupid and Psyche in Erasmus Darwin’s Temple of Nature (ii 243–4): ‘Behold, he cries, Earth! Ocean! Air above,/And hail the DEITIES OF SEXUAL LOVE!’ Harold Bloom has been followed in his view (The Visionary Company (1962) 280) that ‘Speaking as the element of fire, the poet addresses earth, ocean, and air as his brothers’, but S. is not addressing his own brothers; he is saluting Nature as a brotherhood of elements. 2. our great Mother] Cybele, a goddess of the powers of Nature, the ‘magna Mater’ of the ancients (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura ii 589–99; cp. Gray, ‘Progress of Poesy’ III i 4). 3. natural piety] From Wordsworth: ‘My heart leaps up’ 8–9: ‘And I could wish my days to be/Bound each to each by natural piety’, and Excursion iii 267. 14. consciously] I.e. in full moral awareness of the act. According to Medwin, S. spent September 1810 in shooting and once killed three snipes with successive shots (Medwin (1913) 68). He was a vegetarian from the age of 19 (White i 224; see line 101) and expressed his horror of hunting in Q Mab (note to viii 211–12), ‘that beings capable of the gentlest and most admirable sympathies should take delight in the death-pangs and last convulsions of dying animals’. The hero of Beattie’s Minstrel is similarly described: ‘His heart, from cruel sport estranged, would bleed/To work the woe of any living thing’ (XVIII 3–4).

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shelley: selected poems And cherished these my kindred; then forgive This boast, beloved brethren, and withdraw No portion of your wonted favour now! Mother of this unfathomable world! Favour my solemn song, for I have loved Thee ever, and thee only; I have watched Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps, And my heart ever gazes on the depth Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins, where black death Keeps record of the trophies won from thee, Hoping to still these obstinate questionings Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost Thy messenger, to render up the tale Of what we are. In lone and silent hours, When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, Like an inspired and desperate alchemist Staking his very life on some dark hope, Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks With my most innocent love, until strange tears Uniting with those breathless kisses, made Such magic as compels the charmed night To render up thy charge: . . . and, though ne’er yet Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary, Enough from incommunicable dream,

15. my kindred] S. startled Horace Smith in 1817 by referring to ‘his animal brethren’ (Arthur H. Beavan, James and Horace Smith (1899) 171–2). Cp. Q Mab viii 225–7: ‘Man has lost/His terrible prerogative, and stands/An equal amidst equals’. 18. The phrase may be recalled from Holbach (Système de la Nature i 59n.): ‘Platon dit que la matière & la nécessité sont la même chose, & que cette nécessité est la mère du monde’ (see note to Q Mab vi 198). H.’s assertion is presumably based on the Timaeus 47e–51c. 21. shadow] image: ‘Nature’ herself is unseen, apprehended only by her physical effects. 23–29. I have made my bed . . . what we are] Cp. Excursion iii 686–95. As a boy, S. ‘was passionately attached to the study of what used to be called the occult sciences . . . Sometimes he watched the livelong nights for ghosts . . . he even planned how he might get admission to the vault, or charnel-house, at Warnham Church, and might sit there all night, harrowed by fear, yet trembling with expectation, to see one of the spiritualised owners of the bones piled around him’ (Hogg i 33–4). S. told Hogg on 6 January 1811, ‘I have been most of the night pacing a church yard’ (L i 39). Cp. Hymn to Intellectual Beauty 49–54. The ‘visionary boy’ of Beattie’s Minstrel would also ‘dream of graves, and corses pale;/And ghosts that to the charnel-dungeon throng’ (I xxxii 5–6). 26. obstinate questionings] From Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ 142–3: ‘.  .  . those obstinate questionings/Of sense and outward things’. 29–37. In lone and silent hours . . . To render up thy charge] S. noted of himself and Claire C. on 7 October 1814: ‘At one of clock Shelley observes that it is the witching time of night . . . He inquires soon after whether it is not horrible to feel the silence of night tingling in our ears . . . We continued to sit by the fire at intervals engaging in awful conversation relative to the nature of these mysteries’ (Mary Jnl i 32–3). S. is unlikely, however, to have discussed such things only with Claire. 38. sanctuary,] sanctuary; 1816.

5  alastor; or, the spirit of solitude 40

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And twilight phantasms, and deep noonday thought, Has shone within me, that serenely now And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre Suspended in the solitary dome Of some mysterious and deserted fane, I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain May modulate with murmurs of the air, And motions of the forests and the sea, And voice of living beings, and woven hymns Of night and day, and the deep heart of man. There was a Poet whose untimely tomb No human hands with pious reverence reared, But the charmed eddies of autumnal winds Built o’er his mouldering bones a pyramid Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness: — A lovely youth, — no mourning maiden decked With weeping flowers, or votive cypress wreath, The lone couch of his everlasting sleep: — Gentle, and brave, and generous, — no lorn bard Breathed o’er his dark fate one melodious sigh: He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude. Strangers have wept to hear his passionate notes, And virgins, as unknown he passed, have pined And wasted for fond love of his wild eyes. The fire of those soft orbs has ceased to burn, And Silence, too enamoured of that voice, Locks its mute music in her rugged cell. By solemn vision, and bright silver dream, His infancy was nurtured. Every sight And sound from the vast earth and ambient air, Sent to his heart its choicest impulses.

41–9. serenely now . . . deep heart of man] Eds cite the invocation in Wordsworth’s extract from The Recluse as prefaced to The Excursion, 83–107, and ‘Tintern Abbey’ 94–100; but the symbols are those of Coleridge’s ‘Eolian Harp’ (‘Effusion XXXV’), esp. lines 32–6 of the 1803 edn: And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely fram’d, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? 44. fane] temple. 67–8. By solemn vision . . . was nurtured] ‘In dreams, in study, and in ardent thought,/Thus was he reared’ (Excursion i 301–2). Much of the Wanderer’s early experience of Nature in Wordsworth’s poem (e.g. i 134–62) is paralleled by that of S.’s Poet.

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The fountains of divine philosophy Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great, Or good, or lovely, which the sacred past In truth or fable consecrates, he felt 75 And knew. When early youth had passed, he left His cold fireside and alienated home To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands. Many a wide waste and tangled wilderness Has lured his fearless steps; and he has bought 80 With his sweet voice and eyes, from savage men, His rest and food. Nature’s most secret steps He like her shadow has pursued, where’er The red volcano overcanopies Its fields of snow and pinnacles of ice 85 With burning smoke, or where bitumen lakes On black bare pointed islets ever beat With sluggish surge, or where the secret caves Rugged and dark, winding among the springs Of fire and poison, inaccessible 90 To avarice or pride, their starry domes Of diamond and of gold expand above Numberless and immeasurable halls, Frequent with crystal column, and clear shrines Of pearl, and thrones radiant with chrysolite. 95 Nor had that scene of ampler majesty Than gems or gold, the varying roof of heaven And the green earth lost in his heart its claims To love and wonder; he would linger long In lonesome vales, making the wild his home, 100 Until the doves and squirrels would partake From his innocuous hand his bloodless food, Lured by the gentle meaning of his looks, And the wild antelope, that starts whene’er The dry leaf rustles m the brake, suspend

81–9. Nature’s most secret steps . . . fire and poison] The images; volcanoes, bitumen-lakes, caves, springs, are those in Southey’s Thalaba V xxi–xxiv and VI ii 5–9, e.g.: . . . From where its gushing springs Boil their black billows up . . . There from a cave, with torrent force, And everlasting roar, The black bitumen roll’d. (V xxii 4–5, 10–12) Cp. Paradise Lost xii 41–2. 93. Frequent with] abundant with (a Latinism; cp. Paradise Lost i 797). 104. suspend] I.e. would suspend (from line 100).

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105 Her timid steps to gaze upon a form More graceful than her own.

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      His wandering step Obedient to high thoughts, has visited The awful ruins of the days of old: Athens, and Tyre, and Balbec, and the waste Where stood Jerusalem, the fallen towers Of Babylon, the eternal pyramids, Memphis and Thebes, and whatsoe’er of strange Sculptured on alabaster obelisk, Or jasper tomb, or mutilated sphinx, Dark Ethiopia in her desert hills Conceals. Among the ruined temples there, Stupendous columns, and wild images Of more than man, where marble daemons watch The Zodiac’s brazen mystery, and dead men Hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around, He lingered, poring on memorials Of the world’s youth, through the long burning day Gazed on those speechless shapes, nor, when the moon Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades Suspended he that task, but ever gazed And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw The thrilling secrets of the birth of time. Meanwhile an Arab maiden brought his food,

106–16. His wandering step . . . Conceals.] The Poet’s first wanderings take him back through the world’s youth (122) towards the birth of time (128). According to Diodorus Siculus (III i–vii), Ethiopia was the most ancient civilisation, from which Memphis and Thebes (Luxor) in Egypt had been colonised; while Volney (Ruins 19) explains that Jerusalem and Tyre (both at their greatest in Solomon’s day) were destroyed by the kings of Nineveh and Babylon. Greek civilisation was the latest ruin of time. Geographically the journey is round the eastern Mediterranean and up the Nile: Tyre and Balbec (Baalbek) were in Lebanon; Babylon was in Iraq, south of Baghdad. 109–10. the waste/Where stood Jerusalem] Jerusalem had been finally destroyed by Emperor Titus in A.D. 70, and still, in 1867, had a population of only 16,000. 119. The Zodiac’s brazen mystery] In the famous temple of Isis at Dendera in Egypt, Vivant Denon ‘had perceived zodiacs, planetary systems, and celestial planispheres’ (quoted from A General Collection of Voyages and Travels . . . (1813) xxii 222), but these were painted on the ceiling; ‘brazen mystery’ may have been suggested by Homer’s ‘ὀυράνος χάλκεος’ (‘brazen firmament’). 119–20. dead men . . . mute walls around] Denon later explored an ancient Egyptian monastery where ‘Nothing indicated the remains of the habitation of man but some short sentences written on the walls . . . a vain attempt, which time, that destroys every thing, has entirely frustrated. I presented them to my imagination as dying, and still striving, with fluttering speech, to utter a few words’ (loc. cit. 240). 126–7. till meaning . . . strong inspiration] Echoing Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ (1807) 18–22: ‘For oft, when on my couch I lie/In vacant or in pensive mood,/They flash upon that inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude’.

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130 Her daily portion, from her father’s tent, And spread her matting for his couch, and stole From duties and repose to tend his steps: — Enamoured, yet not daring for deep awe To speak her love: — and watched his nightly sleep, 135 Sleepless herself, to gaze upon his lips Parted in slumber, whence the regular breath Of innocent dreams arose: then, when red morn Made paler the pale moon, to her cold home Wildered, and wan, and panting, she returned. 140

The Poet wandering on, through Arabie And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste, And o’er the aërial mountains which pour down Indus and Oxus from their icy caves, In joy and exultation held his way; 145 Till in the vale of Kashmir, far within Its loneliest dell, where odorous plants entwine Beneath the hollow rocks a natural bower, Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched His languid limbs. A vision on his sleep 150 There came, a dream of hopes that never yet Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veilèd maid Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones. Her voice was like the voice of his own soul Heard in the calm of thought; its music long, 155 Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held

140–1. The Poet . . . wild Carmanian waste] The Poet passed the Red Sea and crossed Saudi Arabia into the Kerman Desert of Persia (Iran); and over the Hindu Kush mountains (the ‘Indian Caucasus’ of PU), from which the Indus and Oxus (Amu-Darya) flow opposite ways, into the Arabian and into the Aral Sea respectively. 145–9. Till in the vale . . . His languid limbs.] S.’s uses of the Vale of Kashmir in northern India derive mostly from descriptions in an early favourite novel, Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary: an Indian Tale (1811): ‘He [the Missionary] rapidly descended the rock, now embossed with odoriferous plants, and shaded by lofty shrubs . . . countless streams of liquid silver meeting, in natural basons, under the shade of the seringata . . . offered to his weary frame the most necessary luxury that he could now enjoy’ (i 130–1). 151. a veilèd maid] The Poet’s vision parallels Hilarion’s meeting in the vale of Kashmir with Luxima, the veiled heroine of The Missionary, of whom S. told Hogg in June 1811: ‘Luxima the Indian is an Angel. What pity that we cannot incorporate these creations of Fancy; the very thought of them thrills the soul’ (L i 107). 153–4. Her voice . . . calm of thought] ‘His mind . . . thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself. He images to himself the Being whom he loves’ (S.’s Preface). Cp. ‘On Love’ (Prose 169–71) and L&C II xxxi 4–6: ‘Hers too were all my thoughts, ere yet, endowed/With music and with light, their fountains flowed/In poesy’. The impulse is equalitarian, not narcissistic: cp. Erasmus: ‘It is an especyall swetnes to have one with whom ye may communycate the secrete affectyons of your mynde, with whom ye may speake even as it were with your owne selfe’ (In Laude and Prayse of Matrymony Sigs. Cvi–Cviv). 154. long] ‘for a long time’ (adv.).

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160

165

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His inmost sense suspended in its web Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues. Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme, And lofty hopes of divine liberty, Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy, Herself a poet. Soon the solemn mood Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame A permeating fire: wild numbers then She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs Subdued by its own pathos: her fair hands Were bare alone, sweeping from some strange harp Strange symphony, and in their branching veins The eloquent blood told an ineffable tale. The beating of her heart was heard to fill The pauses of her music, and her breath Tumultuously accorded with those fits Of intermitted song. Sudden she rose, As if her heart impatiently endured Its bursting burthen: at the sound he turned, And saw by the warm light of their own life Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil Of woven wind, her outspread arms now bare, Her dark locks floating in the breath of night, Her beamy bending eyes, her parted lips Outstretched, and pale, and quivering eagerly. His strong heart sunk and sickened with excess Of love. He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet Her panting bosom: . . . she drew back a while, Then, yielding to the irresistible joy, With frantic gesture and short breathless cry Folded his frame in her dissolving arms. Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night Involved and swallowed up the vision; sleep, Like a dark flood suspended in its course, Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain.

158–9. Knowledge and truth . . . divine liberty] Her ‘theme’ resembles Cythna’s: ‘For with strong speech I tore the veil which hid/Nature, and Truth, and Liberty, and Love, — ’ (L&C IX vii 1–2). 163. numbers] verse; here a song, with lute accompaniment. 175–7. saw by the warm light . . . Of woven wind] A much-used contemporary image, encouraged by prevailing fashion in women’s clothes which approached that reported in antiquity of the women of Cos or Chios (modern Zia) in the Cyclades. S. noted the drapery of a Venus Genetrix in Florence, ‘the original of which must have been the “woven wind” of Chios’ (Prose 346). Cp. the address to Asia in PU II v: ‘Child of Light! thy limbs are burning/Through the vest which seems to hide them’. The literary source was Petronius, Satyricon 55–6: ‘Aequum est induere nuptam ventum textilem,/palam prostare nudam in nebula linea’ (‘Your bride might as well clothe herself in woven wind, as stand forth publicly naked under her mist of muslin’).

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shelley: selected poems Roused by the shock he started from his trance — The cold white light of morning, the blue moon Low in the west, the clear and garish hills, The distinct valley and the vacant woods, Spread round him where he stood. Whither have fled The hues of heaven that canopied his bower Of yesternight? The sounds that soothed his sleep, The mystery and the majesty of Earth, The joy, the exultation? His wan eyes Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly As ocean’s moon looks on the moon in heaven. The spirit of sweet human love has sent A vision to the sleep of him who spurned Her choicest gifts. He eagerly pursues Beyond the realms of dream that fleeting shade; He overleaps the bounds. Alas! alas! Were limbs, and breath, and being intertwined Thus treacherously? Lost, lost, for ever lost In the wide pathless desert of dim sleep, That beautiful shape! Does the dark gate of death Conduct to thy mysterious paradise, O Sleep? Does the bright arch of rainbow clouds, And pendent mountains seen in the calm lake, Lead only to a black and watery depth, While death’s blue vault, with loathliest vapours hung, Where every shade which the foul grave exhales Hides its dead eye from the detested day, Conduct, O Sleep, to thy delightful realms? This doubt with sudden tide flowed on his heart, The insatiate hope which it awakened, stung His brain even like despair.

193. blue moon] The moon sheds ‘blue blasted light’ in Landor’s Gebir (1798) v 17–18, a favourite poem of S.’s at Oxford (Hogg i 201–2). The colour blue often implies sickness or the unearthly (see note to PU I 170). 196–8. Whither have fled . . . Of yesternight?] A possible echo of Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’ 56–7; but this type of rhetorical question has numberless antecedents. 207. the bounds] I.e. between illusion and reality, in trying to follow the dream-image into the actual world. 209–11. Lost . . . That beautiful shape!] An echo of Aeschylus, Agamemnon 420–6: ‘In dreams come bitter apparitions bringing empty joy; for vainly, whenever in imagination a man sees delights, the vision slips through his hands and is gone, winging its flight along the paths of sleep’. 219. Conduct,] 1816, 1824; Conducts, Rossetti 1870. The verb is treated simply as the third item in a series of similar questions: ‘Does the dark gate . . . Conduct? Does the bright arch . . . lead? While [does] death’s blue vault . . . Conduct?’ The Poet asks: Is physical reality merely a beautiful surface concealing nothingness, while death’s hideous surface conceals the true beauty we perceive in dreams? 221–2. The insatiate hope . . . like despair.] If his speculations in lines 211–19 were justified, the Poet’s desire could be satisfied only through death.

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225

230

235

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While daylight held The sky, the Poet kept mute conference With his still soul. At night the passion came, Like the fierce fiend of a distempered dream, And shook him from his rest, and led him forth Into the darkness. — As an eagle grasped In folds of the green serpent, feels her breast Burn with the poison, and precipitates Through night and day, tempest, and calm, and cloud, Frantic with dizzying anguish, her blind flight O’er the wide aery wilderness: thus driven By the bright shadow of that lovely dream, Beneath the cold glare of the desolate night, Through tangled swamps and deep precipitous dells, Startling with careless step the moonlight snake, He fled. Red morning dawned upon his flight, Shedding the mockery of its vital hues Upon his cheek of death. He wandered on Till vast Aornos seen from Petra’s steep Hung o’er the low horizon like a cloud; Through Balk, and where the desolated tombs Of Parthian kings scatter to every wind Their wasting dust, wildly he wandered on, Day after day, a weary waste of hours, Bearing within his life the brooding care That ever fed on its decaying flame. And now his limbs were lean; his scattered hair Sered by the autumn of strange suffering Sung dirges in the wind; his listless hand

228. green serpent] Raben (RES n.s. xvii (August 1966) 291) compares the ‘bright green snake’ coiled around the dove in Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ 548–54. 233. shadow] mental image, memory. 240. vast Aornos seen from Petra’s steep] No place named ‘Petra’ existed in the area, but Quintius Curtius described the conquest of one steep summit beyond the river Oxus which he called simply ‘the rock’ (‘Una erat petra . . .’, Hist. Alex. VII xi 1–29). This was the Rock of Soghdiana (at Bukhara in Uzbekistan). Later, Alexander stormed the crag of Aornos (‘birdless’, possibly Pir-Sar) on the Indus (VIII xi 2–19). 242. Balk] Now Balkh, in Afghanistan. 242–4. where the desolated tombs . . . wasting dust] In a.d. 216 ‘Antonius [Caracallus] . . . ravaged a large section of the country round Media . . . dug open the royal tombs of the Parthians, and scattered the bones about’ (Dion Cassius, Hist. Rom. LXXIX i 2). Media and Parthia extended west and east respectively of modern Tehran in Iran. 248–50. his scattered hair . . . sung dirges in the wind] The sound of wind in hair was an Ossianic conceit, e.g. ‘The winds whistling in my grey hair, shall not waken me’ (‘Berrathon’, in Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem (1762) 269).

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shelley: selected poems Hung like dead bone within its withered skin; Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone As in a furnace burning secretly From his dark eyes alone. The cottagers, Who ministered with human charity His human wants, beheld with wondering awe Their fleeting visitant. The mountaineer, Encountering on some dizzy precipice That spectral form, deemed that the Spirit of wind With lightning eyes, and eager breath, and feet Disturbing not the drifted snow, had paused In its career: the infant would conceal His troubled visage in his mother’s robe In terror at the glare of those wild eyes, To remember their strange light in many a dream Of after-times; but youthful maidens, taught By nature, would interpret half the woe That wasted him, would call him with false names Brother, and friend, would press his pallid hand At parting, and watch, dim through tears, the path Of his departure from their father’s door.

At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore He paused, a wide and melancholy waste Of putrid marshes. A strong impulse urged 275 His steps to the sea-shore. A swan was there, Beside a sluggish stream among the reeds. It rose as he approached, and with strong wings Scaling the upward sky, bent its bright course High over the immeasurable main. 280 His eyes pursued its flight. — ‘Thou hast a home, Beautiful bird; thou voyagest to thine home,

262. its] his 1824, 1839. An emendation based on supposed personification. 268–9. would call him . . ./Brother, and friend] The Arab maiden Oneiza in Southey’s Thalaba makes the same pretence to her beloved: ‘She call’ d him Brother, was it sister-love . . . ?’ (III xxv 1). 272. the lone Chorasmian shore] The eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. The Poet has now left the return route, followed by Alexander, and turned north instead of south. 275–90. The swan was sacred to Apollo, god of poetry, and sang before death; hence it may symbolise a dying poet. S. had been ‘vehemently excited’ by Plato’s Phaedo at Oxford (Hogg i 103) and here recalls the parallel Socrates made just before drinking the hemlock: I believe that the swans, belonging as they do to Apollo, have prophetic powers and sing because they know the good things that await them in the unseen world; and they are happier on that day than they have ever been before. Now I consider that I am in the same service as the swans, and dedicated to the same god; and that I am no worse endowed with prophetic powers by my master than they are, and no more disconsolate at leaving this life (84E–85B; Penguin translation).

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Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy neck With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes Bright in the lustre of their own fond joy. 285 And what am I that I should linger here, With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes, Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven 290 That echoes not my thoughts?’ A gloomy smile Of desperate hope wrinkled his quivering lips. For sleep, he knew, kept most relentlessly Its precious charge, and silent death exposed, Faithless perhaps as sleep, a shadowy lure, 295 With doubtful smile mocking its own strange charms. Startled by his own thoughts he looked around. There was no fair fiend near him, not a sight Or sound of awe but in his own deep mind. A little shallop floating near the shore 300 Caught the impatient wandering of his gaze. It had been long abandoned, for its sides Gaped wide with many a rift, and its frail joints Swayed with the undulations of the tide. A restless impulse urged him to embark 305 And meet lone Death on the drear ocean’s waste; For well he knew that mighty Shadow loves The slimy caverns of the populous deep. The day was fair and sunny, sea and sky Drank its inspiring radiance, and the wind 310 Swept strongly from the shore, blackening the waves. Following his eager soul, the wanderer Leaped in the boat, he spread his cloak aloft On the bare mast, and took his lonely seat, And felt the boat speed o’er the tranquil sea 315 Like a torn cloud before the hurricane.

297. fair fiend] Ostensibly Death, the seductive enigma of lines 294–5; but the ambivalence reflects the Poet’s reactions. When Southey’s Damsel led Thalaba into extreme danger, he questioned her status in similar words: ‘And was that lovely Mariner/A fiend as false as fair?’ (Thalaba XII xvii 12–13). 299. shallop] small dinghy; a new word in Spenser (FQ III vii 27) from whom S. probably adopted it. Evan K. Gibson noted that its frailty ‘is suggestive of the bodily condition of the poet’ (PMLA lxii (1947) 1037). 309. the wind] Gibson (loc. cit. 1037–8) interprets this as the wind of Necessity, here ‘the necessity of death — the irresistible laws of disintegration in the universe’. 311–13. the wanderer . . . took his lonely seat] Cp. Thalaba XI xxxi 2–4: ‘A little boat there lay,/Without an oar, without a sail,/One only seat it had, one seat’.

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shelley: selected poems As one that in a silver vision floats Obedient to the sweep of odorous winds Upon resplendent clouds, so rapidly Along the dark and ruffled waters fled The straining boat. — A whirlwind swept it on, With fierce gusts and precipitating force, Through the white ridges of the chafèd sea. The waves arose. Higher and higher still Their fierce necks writhed beneath the tempest’s scourge Like serpents struggling in a vulture’s grasp. Calm and rejoicing in the fearful war Of wave ruining on wave, and blast on blast Descending, and black flood on whirlpool driven With dark obliterating course, he sate: As if their genii were the ministers Appointed to conduct him to the light Of those beloved eyes, the Poet sate Holding the steady helm. Evening came on, The beams of sunset hung their rainbow hues High mid the shifting domes of sheeted spray That canopied his path o’er the waste deep; Twilight, ascending slowly from the east, Entwined in duskier wreaths her braided locks O’er the fair front and radiant eyes of day; Night followed, clad with stars. On every side More horribly the multitudinous streams Of ocean’s mountainous waste to mutual war Rushed in dark tumult thundering, as to mock The calm and spangled sky. The little boat Still fled before the storm; still fled, like foam Down the steep cataract of a wintry river; Now pausing on the edge of the riven wave; Now leaving far behind the bursting mass That fell, convulsing ocean. Safely fled — As if that frail and wasted human form Had been an elemental god. At midnight The moon arose: and lo! the etherial cliffs Of Caucasus, whose icy summits shone

327. ruining] 1816, 1824; running 1839, 1840. An obvious misprint: the word is from Lat. ruere, ‘to fall in disorder’, and is so used by Milton: ‘Heav’n ruining from Heav’n’ (PL vi 867–8), and by Wordsworth of a waterfall: ‘Ruining from the cliffs the deafening load/Tumbles’ (Descriptive Sketches (1793) 204–5). 334. hung their rainbow hues] I.e. made sun-bows in the water-vapour. 352. etherial] ‘reaching into the upper air’. 353. Caucasus] The boat had crossed the Caspian Sea to the mountains of the Caucasus, now in Soviet Georgia, on the western shore.

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Among the stars like sunlight, and around 355 Whose caverned base the whirlpools and the waves Bursting and eddying irresistibly Rage and resound forever. — Who shall save? — The boat fled on, — the boiling torrent drove, — The crags closed round with black and jaggèd arms, 360 The shattered mountain overhung the sea, And faster still, beyond all human speed, Suspended on the sweep of the smooth wave, The little boat was driven. A cavern there Yawned, and amid its slant and winding depths 365 Engulfed the rushing sea. The boat fled on With unrelaxing speed. — ‘Vision and Love!’ The Poet cried aloud, ‘I have beheld The path of thy departure. Sleep and death Shall not divide us long!’ The boat pursued 370 The windings of the cavern. Daylight shone At length upon that gloomy river’s flow; Now, where the fiercest war among the waves Is calm, on the unfathomable stream The boat moved slowly. Where the mountain, riven, 375 Exposed those black depths to the azure sky, Ere yet the flood’s enormous volume fell Even to the base of Caucasus, with sound That shook the everlasting rocks, the mass Filled with one whirlpool all that ample chasm; 380 Stair above stair the eddying waters rose, Circling immeasurably fast, and laved With alternating dash the gnarlèd roots Of mighty trees, that stretched their giant arms In darkness over it. I’ the midst was left, 385 Reflecting, yet distorting every cloud, A pool of treacherous and tremendous calm. Seized by the sway of the ascending stream, With dizzy swiftness, round, and round, and round, Ridge after ridge the straining boat arose,

358–401. What seems on the literal level to happen here is that wind-driven seas pour inland through a cavern, emerging eventually into a whirlpool which spins so fast that at the extreme edge, its centrifugal force lifts the boat clear of the rock funnel onto a high plateau; from here a tributary, ‘a placid stream’, flows downhill in the orthodox way. Gibson (loc. cit. 1038) identifies the cavern (363) as ‘the jaws of death’. 376–9. Ere yet . . . all that ample chasm] A memory of the escape route from the garden of bliss in Thalaba (VII vi 12–17): ‘There adown/The perforated rock/Plunge the whole waters; so precipitous,/So fathomless a fall,/That their earth-shaking roar came deaden’d up/Like subterranean thunders’ (see also line 402).

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shelley: selected poems

390 Till on the verge of the extremest curve, Where, through an opening of the rocky bank, The waters overflow, and a smooth spot Of glassy quiet mid those battling tides Is left, the boat paused shuddering. — Shall it sink 395 Down the abyss? Shall the reverting stress Of that resistless gulf embosom it? Now shall it fall? — A wandering stream of wind, Breathed from the west, has caught the expanded sail, And, lo! with gentle motion, between banks 400 Of mossy slope, and on a placid stream, Beneath a woven grove it sails, and, hark! The ghastly torrent mingles its far roar With the breeze murmuring in the musical woods. Where the embowering trees recede, and leave 405 A little space of green expanse, the cove Is closed by meeting banks, whose yellow flowers For ever gaze on their own drooping eyes, Reflected in the crystal calm. The wave Of the boat’s motion marred their pensive task, 410 Which nought but vagrant bird, or wanton wind, Or falling spear-grass, or their own decay Had e’er disturbed before. The Poet longed To deck with their bright hues his withered hair, But on his heart its solitude returned, 415 And he forbore. Not the strong impulse hid In those flushed cheeks, bent eyes, and shadowy frame Had yet performed its ministry: it hung Upon his life, as lightning in a cloud Gleams, hovering ere it vanish, ere the floods Of night close over it. 420

The noonday sun Now shone upon the forest, one vast mass Of mingling shade, whose brown magnificence A narrow vale embosoms. There, huge caves, Scooped in the dark base of their aëry rocks

406. yellow flowers] The narcissus was transformed from a youth whose failure to respond to the love of others was punished by a passion for his own reflection (Ovid, Met. iii 344–511). 409. pensive] S.’s sole use of this adjective. 412–13. The Poet . . . his withered hair] A habit of S.’s own: Polly Rose, who knew him at Marlow, said that sometimes when he returned from the Thames ‘on his head would be a wreath of what in Marlow we call “old man’s beard” [wild clematis] and wild flowers intermixed’ (Dowden Life i 120). 422. brown] dark (a common equivalent of Italian bruna). 424. aëry] lofty.

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425 Mocking its moans, respond and roar for ever. The meeting boughs and implicated leaves Wove twilight o’er the Poet’s path, as led By love, or dream, or god, or mightier Death, He sought in Nature’s dearest haunt, some bank, 430 Her cradle, and his sepulchre. More dark And dark the shades accumulate. The oak, Expanding its immense and knotty arms, Embraces the light beech. The pyramids Of the tall cedar overarching, frame 435 Most solemn domes within, and far below, Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky, The ash and the acacia floating hang Tremulous and pale. Like restless serpents, clothed In rainbow and in fire, the parasites, 440 Starred with ten thousand blossoms, flow around The grey trunks, and, as gamesome infants’ eyes, With gentle meanings, and most innocent wiles, Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love, These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs 445 Uniting their close union; the woven leaves Make net-work of the dark blue light of day, And the night’s noontide clearness, mutable As shapes in the weird clouds. Soft mossy lawns Beneath these canopies extend their swells, 425. Mocking its moans] echoing the forest’s response to the wind. Locock refers its to the torrent of line 402. 430. Her cradle] Butter (Butter (1970) 243) notes: ‘He is travelling in imagination back to the source of life’, and compares PU II ii. The Vale of Kashmir in Owenson’s The Missionary contained a spot ‘where an eternal spring seemed to reign, and which looked like the cradle of infant Nature, where she first awoke, in all her primeval bloom of beauty’ (i 141). But Granville Penn in ‘Remarks on the Eastern Origination of Mankind’ summed up evidence and opinion as locating ‘the cradle of the present race of mankind . . . near to the borders of those luxuriant regions, which a line drawn from the south-east corner of the Euxine [Black Sea] directly eastward into the Caspian Sea, must necessarily traverse’ (Oriental Collections II No. i (1797) 73). This line passes through the Russian Caucasus; the adjoining ‘luxuriant regions’ would be Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. Luther L. Scales Jr. in ‘The Poet as Miltonic Adam in Alastor’ (KSJ xxi–xxii (1972–73) 139– 40) relates the physical details of the underground stream bringing the Alastor Poet into ‘Nature’s dearest haunt’ (line 429) with those of the underground river that fertilises Paradise in PL iv 223–30. 433–41. The pyramids . . . The grey trunks] The terms of the description owe much to those used of the garden of bliss in Thalaba (VI xx 12–17): ‘fluted cypresses rear’d up/Their living obelisks;/And broad-leav’d plane-trees in long colonnades/O’er-arch’d delightful walks,/Where round their trunks the thousand tendrill’d vine/Wound up and hung the boughs with greener wreaths’. 439. parasites] The original Greek compound παρα-σιτος means only ‘feeding together’, and any climbing plant could be called a parasite-plant without disapprobation. Indeed at this period, the word as used of vegetation generally carries the sense of fruitful intimacy rather than of exploitation. See note to Q Mab i 43. 444. wedded boughs] Butter (Butter (1970) 243) notes how the imagery ‘has appropriately sexual associations’. The archetype was Milton’s Eden (PL v 215–17): ‘they led the Vine/To wed her Elm; she spous’d about him twines/Her mariageable arms’. 448. lawns] grassy clearings (still the usual sense in 1815).

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450 Fragrant with perfumed herbs, and eyed with blooms Minute yet beautiful. One darkest glen Sends from its woods of musk-rose, twined with jasmine, A soul-dissolving odour, to invite To some more lovely mystery. Through the dell, 455 Silence and Twilight here, twin-sisters, keep Their noonday watch, and sail among the shades, Like vaporous shapes half seen; beyond, a well, Dark, gleaming, and of most translucent wave, Images all the woven boughs above, 460 And each depending leaf, and every speck Of azure sky, darting between their chasms; Nor aught else in the liquid mirror laves Its portraiture, but some inconstant star Between one foliaged lattice twinkling fair, 465 Or painted bird, sleeping beneath the moon, Or gorgeous insect floating motionless, Unconscious of the day, ere yet his wings Have spread their glories to the gaze of noon. Hither the Poet came. His eyes beheld 470 Their own wan light through the reflected lines Of his thin hair, distinct in the dark depth Of that still fountain; as the human heart, Gazing in dreams over the gloomy grave, Sees its own treacherous likeness there. He heard 475 The motion of the leaves, the grass that sprung Startled and glanced and trembled even to feel An unaccustomed presence, and the sound Of the sweet brook that from the secret springs Of that dark fountain rose. A Spirit seemed

453. soul-dissolving] A compound adopted from Thomson’s Castle of Indolence (1748) I xxxix 6, where ‘soul-dissolving airs’ are breathed from the Aeolian harp. 455. Silence and Twilight here, twin-sisters, keep] Silence and Twilight, here twin-sisters, keep Locock 1911. Locock moved the comma because ‘without it “here” is tautological with “Through the dell” ’, but the text implies that it is from here, in ‘one darkest glen’, that Silence and Twilight supervise the whole cell. See A Summer-Evening Churchyard (Longman i 451–3, no. 109) 5–6 and note. 465. Or painted] 1839; Or, painted 1816, 1824. 466–8. Or gorgeous insect . . . gaze of noon] I.e. ‘or a reflected butterfly, still unaware that outside the forest it is noonday’. Thus the well reflects only leaves and sky by day, only star or bird by night, and perhaps a butterfly that mistakes day for night. 474. Sees its own treacherous likeness there] ‘imagines its own dubious survival after death’. 479. A Spirit] Presumably an embodiment of Nature, not visually personified but communicating directly via the landscape. This diverges explicitly from the experiences of the young Wordsworth, for whom the appearances of Nature were ‘a feeling and a love/That had no need of a remoter charm,/By thought supplied, nor any interest/Unborrowed from the eye’ (‘Lines Composed . . . above Tintern Abbey’ 80–3). Wasserman sees this Spirit as another realisation of the veilèd maid, ‘diffused mysteriously throughout nature’ (Wasserman 32).

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480 To stand beside him — clothed in no bright robes Of shadowy silver or enshrining light, Borrowed from aught the visible world affords Of grace, or majesty, or mystery; — But, undulating woods, and silent well, 485 And leaping rivulet, and evening gloom Now deepening the dark shades, for speech assuming Held commune with him, as if he and it Were all that was, — only . . . when his regard Was raised by intense pensiveness, . . . two eyes, 490 Two starry eyes, hung in the gloom of thought, And seemed with their serene and azure smiles To beckon him.

495

500

505

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Obedient to the light That shone within his soul, he went, pursuing The windings of the dell. — The rivulet Wanton and wild, through many a green ravine Beneath the forest flowed. Sometimes it fell Among the moss with hollow harmony Dark and profound. Now on the polished stones It danced; like childhood laughing as it went: Then, through the plain in tranquil wanderings crept, Reflecting every herb and drooping bud That overhung its quietness. — ‘O stream! Whose source is inaccessibly profound, Whither do thy mysterious waters tend? Thou imagest my life. Thy darksome stillness, Thy dazzling waves, thy loud and hollow gulfs, Thy searchless fountain, and invisible course Have each their type in me: and the wide sky, And measureless ocean may declare as soon What oozy cavern or what wandering cloud Contains thy waters, as the universe Tell where these living thoughts reside, when stretched Upon thy flowers my bloodless limbs shall waste I’ the passing wind!’

484–7. But, undulating woods . . . commune with him] ‘. . . the Spirit, assuming for speech the undulating woods, silent well [etc.], communed with the Poet’ (Forman). Cp. Mont Blanc (Text B) 74–83. 490. Two starry eyes] The ‘beamy bending eyes’ of line 179. Butter comments (Butter (1970) 243): ‘He is beckoned to seek communion beyond that which nature affords, but there is no assurance that the hope of such ideal communion is not an illusion’. 502–14. Eds compare Wordsworth, Excursion iii 967–end; but the stream or sea of life is a u ­ niversallyused metaphor.

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Beside the grassy shore 515 Of the small stream he went; he did impress On the green moss his tremulous step, that caught Strong shuddering from his burning limbs. As one Roused by some joyous madness from the couch Of fever, he did move; yet, not like him, 520 Forgetful of the grave, where, when the flame Of his frail exultation shall be spent, He must descend. With rapid steps he went Beneath the shade of trees, beside the flow Of the wild babbling rivulet; and now 525 The forest’s solemn canopies were changed For the uniform and lightsome evening sky. Grey rocks did peep from the spare moss, and stemmed The struggling brook: tall spires of windlestrae Threw their thin shadows down the rugged slope, 530 And nought but gnarlèd roots of ancient pines Branchless and blasted, clenched with grasping roots The unwilling soil. A gradual change was here, Yet ghastly. For, as fast years flow away, The smooth brow gathers, and the hair grows thin 535 And white, and where irradiate dewy eyes Had shone, gleam stony orbs: — so from his steps Bright flowers departed, and the beautiful shade Of the green groves, with all their odorous winds And musical motions. Calm, he still pursued 540 The stream, that with a larger volume now Rolled through the labyrinthine dell; and there Fretted a path through its descending curves With its wintry speed. On every side now rose Rocks, which, in unimaginable forms, 545 Lifted their black and barren pinnacles In the light of evening, and its precipice Obscuring the ravine, disclosed above, Mid toppling stones, black gulfs and yawning caves,

5 19–20. yet, not like him,/Forgeful] I.e. ‘yet not resembling the fever-patient in being forgetful .  .  .’ Some editors change the punctuation in various ways to remove the ambiguity, which also changes the intended emphasis. 524. rivulet;] rivulet, 1816. 528. windlestrae] A windlestraw is a dry grass stalk. The Scottish spelling may derive from John Leyden’s ‘The Elfin-King’ 49, in Tales of Wonder. 530. roots] Perhaps a misprint for knots, which would look very similar in S.’s autograph. 546–8. its precipice . . . yawning caves] ‘the ravine’s steep side, obscuring the ravine itself below, revealed at a higher level, amid falling stones, black gulfs’ etc. The passage has produced much editorial ingenuity, but the characteristic syntax needs no emendation: the subject of disclosed is its precipice, which refers proleptically to the ravine. The gulfs and caves are not necessarily at the top of the precipice, or they would not echo the noise of the stream, only above the ravine bottom.

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Whose windings gave ten thousand various tongues 550 To the loud stream. Lo! where the pass expands Its stony jaws, the abrupt mountain breaks, And seems, with its accumulated crags, To overhang the world: for wide expand Beneath the wan stars and descending moon 555 Islanded seas, blue mountains, mighty streams, Dim tracts and vast, robed in the lustrous gloom Of leaden-coloured even, and fiery hills Mingling their flames with twilight, on the verge Of the remote horizon. The near scene, 560 In naked and severe simplicity, Made contrast with the universe. A pine, Rock-rooted, stretched athwart the vacancy Its swinging boughs, to each inconstant blast Yielding one only response, at each pause 565 In most familiar cadence, with the howl The thunder and the hiss of homeless streams Mingling its solemn song, whilst the broad river, Foaming and hurrying o’er its rugged path, Fell into that immeasurable void 570 Scattering its waters to the passing winds. Yet the grey precipice and solemn pine And torrent, were not all; — one silent nook Was there. Even on the edge of that vast mountain, Upheld by knotty roots and fallen rocks, 575 It overlooked in its serenity The dark earth, and the bending vault of stars. It was a tranquil spot, that seemed to smile Even in the lap of horror. Ivy clasped The fissured stones with its entwining arms, 580 And did embower with leaves for ever green, And berries dark, the smooth and even space Of its inviolated floor; and here

557. fiery hills] Mount Elbruz, the highest peak of the Caucasus, has a double volcanic cone but has not erupted in historical times. 564. response] Normally accented on the first syllable at this date. 572. one silent nook] Perhaps suggested in some features by the ‘hidden nook’ in the mountains described in Wordsworth’s Excursion iii 50–147. 577–8. to smile/Even in the lap of horror] A phrase coined, according to William Gilpin (Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, made in the Year 1772 (1786 edn) i 183), by one Mr Avison to describe Derwentwater: ‘Here is beauty indeed — Beauty lying in the lap of Horrour!’ The phrase gained currency as an early Romantic reaction to wild scenery, and S. could have met it in several sources, including Mrs Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) i ch. v, where an Alpine landscape presents ‘a perfect picture of the lovely and the sublime — of “beauty sleeping in the lap of horror” ’.

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shelley: selected poems The children of the autumnal whirlwind bore, In wanton sport, those bright leaves, whose decay, Red, yellow, or etherially pale, Rivals the pride of summer.’Tis the haunt Of every gentle wind, whose breath can teach The wilds to love tranquillity. One step, One human step alone, has ever broken The stillness of its solitude: — one voice Alone inspired its echoes; — even that voice Which hither came, floating among the winds, And led the loveliest among human forms To make their wild haunts the depository Of all the grace and beauty that endued Its motions, render up its majesty, Scatter its music on the unfeeling storm, And to the damp leaves and blue cavern mould, Nurses of rainbow flowers and branching moss, Commit the colours of that varying cheek, That snowy breast, those dark and drooping eyes.

The dim and hornèd moon hung low, and poured A sea of lustre on the horizon’s verge That overflowed its mountains. Yellow mist 605 Filled the unbounded atmosphere, and drank Wan moonlight even to fullness: not a star Shone, not a sound was heard; the very winds, Danger’s grim playmates, on that precipice Slept, clasped in his embrace. — O, storm of death! 610 Whose sightless speed divides this sullen night: And thou, colossal Skeleton, that, still Guiding its irresistible career In thy devastating omnipotence, Art king of this frail world, from the red field 615 Of slaughter, from the reeking hospital,

583. children] I.e. playful gusts of wind. 588–92. One step . . . among the winds] The ‘one human step alone’ is the Poet’s, the ‘one voice’ that of his vision (‘like the voice of his own soul’ — line 153), or possibly of the stream he has been following (lines 494–515). 598. blue cavern mould] Norman Thurston notes (SiR xiv (Spring 1975) 126) how the stones are covered with ivy ‘for ever green’ (580), and how the mould nurses ‘rainbow flowers’: ‘Here death is ambiguous’. Beljame (see headnote) identified the mould as Aspergillus glaucus. 602. The dim and hornèd moon] The description of the crescent moon may recall a memorable scene near the Swiss frontier on 18 August 1814: ‘The evening was most beautiful — the horned moon hung in the light of sunset, that threw a glow of unusual depth of redness above the piny mountains and the dark deep valleys which they included . . . The moon becomes yellow, hangs low — close to the woody horizon’ (Mary Jnl i 16). 613. devastating] Normally accented on the second syllable at this date.

5  alastor; or, the spirit of solitude

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The patriot’s sacred couch, the snowy bed Of innocence, the scaffold and the throne, A mighty voice invokes thee. Ruin calls His brother Death. A rare and regal prey 620 He hath prepared, prowling around the world; Glutted with which thou mayst repose, and men Go to their graves like flowers or creeping worms, Nor ever more offer at thy dark shrine The unheeded tribute of a broken heart. 625

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When on the threshold of the green recess The wanderer’s footsteps fell, he knew that death Was on him. Yet a little, ere it fled, Did he resign his high and holy soul To images of the majestic past, That paused within his passive being now, Like winds that bear sweet music, when they breathe Through some dim latticed chamber. He did place His pale lean hand upon the rugged trunk Of the old pine. Upon an ivied stone Reclined his languid head, his limbs did rest, Diffused and motionless, on the smooth brink Of that obscurest chasm; — and thus he lay, Surrendering to their final impulses The hovering powers of life. Hope and despair, The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear Marred his repose, the influxes of sense, And his own being unalloyed by pain, Yet feebler and more feeble, calmly fed The stream of thought, till he lay breathing there At peace, and faintly smiling: — his last sight Was the great moon, which o’er the western line Of the wide world her mighty horn suspended, With whose dun beams inwoven darkness seemed To mingle. Now upon the jagged hills It rests, and still as the divided frame Of the vast meteor sunk, the Poet’s blood,

618. Ruin calls] Ruin will one day divert Death’s undiscriminating attention from the victims of the world’s rulers (lines 614–17) to the rulers themselves. Then men will die natural deaths in accordance with their true worth (‘like flowers or creeping worms’). The interpolation parallels the epigram in the Preface and lines 690–5; the Poet’s death is ‘a violation of the natural order of things’ (Albert S. Gérard, English Romantic Poetry (Berkeley 1968) 158). 629. images of the majestic past] As Gibson observes (loc. cit. 1040), S. circumvents any impression that the Poet is united with his vision after death because ‘The danger of neglecting love and sympathy with one’s fellow-man in this life was to be the theme of the poem’, and because ‘expecting to find one’s ideals beyond this life is without any certain foundation’. 651. meteor] Any atmospheric phenomenon could be called a ‘meteor’ at this date, including the moon.

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shelley: selected poems That ever beat in mystic sympathy With nature’s ebb and flow, grew feebler still: And when two lessening points of light alone Gleamed through the darkness, the alternate gasp Of his faint respiration scarce did stir The stagnate night: — till the minutest ray Was quenched, the pulse yet lingered in his heart. It paused — it fluttered. But when heaven remained Utterly black, the murky shades involved An image, silent, cold, and motionless, As their own voiceless earth and vacant air. Even as a vapour fed with golden beams That ministered on sunlight, ere the west Eclipses it, was now that wondrous frame — No sense, no motion, no divinity — A fragile lute, on whose harmonious strings The breath of heaven did wander — a bright stream Once fed with many-voicèd waves — a dream Of youth, which night and time have quenched for ever, Still, dark, and dry, and unremembered now.

O, for Medea’s wondrous alchemy, Which wheresoe’er it fell made the earth gleam With bright flowers, and the wintry boughs exhale 675 From vernal blooms fresh fragrance! O, that God, Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice Which but one living man has drained, who now,

654. two lessening points of light] The tips of the setting moon’s crescent, of which the middle is already in darkness (‘the divided frame’). The two points of light replace the eyes of the dream-maid (lines 179, 489–92) that have hitherto obsessed him. 657. stagnate] An earlier form of stagnant. 663–5. Even as a vapour . . . Eclipses it] ‘like a sunlit cloud in attendance on the sun until it sets’. 671. ‘It is quite in Shelley’s manner . . . to go back to and bring together his illustrations. Here the poet’s frame is a lute, a bright stream, a dream of youth. The lute is still, the stream is dark and dry, the dream is unremembered’ (Stopford Brooke, Poems of Shelley (1880) 324). The illustrations themselves recall lines 41–9 (poet as wind-harp), 149–51 (dream of youth), and 494–514 (stream of life). 672. Medea was the famous sorceress who restored the old father of her lover Jason to youth by replacing his blood using a transfusion of drugs (Ovid, Met. vii 279–81): ‘at quacumque cavo spumas ejecit aeno/ignis at in terram guttae cecidere calentes,/vernat humus, floresque et mollia pabula surgunt’ (‘And wherever the fire spattered froth from the hollow pot, and hot drops fell to the earth, the soil blossomed and flowers and soft grass sprang up’). 676. Profuse of poisons] ‘generous with his venomous acts’. 677. one living man] Ahasuerus (see note on Q Mab vii 67). The Narrator’s wish is that God would confer on mankind as a gift the immortality he inflicted on Ahasuerus as a punishment. Because A. was singled out revengefully in this way, he can feel no ‘proud exemption’ from death, only solitude and misery.

5  alastor; or, the spirit of solitude

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Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels No proud exemption in the blighting curse He bears, over the world wanders for ever, Lone as incarnate death! O, that the dream Of dark magician in his visioned cave, Raking the cinders of a crucible For life and power, even when his feeble hand Shakes in its last decay, were the true law Of this so lovely world! But thou art fled Like some frail exhalation; which the dawn Robes in its golden beams, — ah! thou hast fled! The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful, The child of grace and genius. Heartless things Are done and said i’ the world, and many worms And beasts and men live on, and mighty Earth From sea and mountain, city and wilderness, In vesper low or joyous orison, Lifts still its solemn voice: — but thou art fled — Thou canst no longer know or love the shapes Of this phantasmal scene, who have to thee Been purest ministers, who are, alas! Now thou art not. Upon those pallid lips So sweet even in their silence, on those eyes That image sleep in death, upon that form Yet safe from the worm’s outrage, let no tear Be shed — not even in thought. Nor, when those hues Are gone, and those divinest lineaments, Worn by the senseless wind, shall live alone In the frail pauses of this simple strain, Let not high verse, mourning the memory Of that which is no more, or painting’s woe Or sculpture, speak in feeble imagery Their own cold powers. Art and eloquence, And all the shows o’ the world are frail and vain To weep a loss that turns their lights to shade. It is a woe too ‘deep for tears,’ when all

678. Vessel of deathless wrath] From Romans ix 22: ‘vessels of wrath fitted to destruction’, i.e. created beings deserving to be destroyed in anger. 681–2. the dream/Of dark magician] The alchemist’s dream of discovering an elixir vitae that would overturn the ‘true law’ of irreversible decay. 691–2. many worms . . . live on] Raben (loc. cit.) notices an echo from The Ancient Mariner 236–9; both poets, however, are indebted to King Lear V iii 306–7. 696–7. the shapes/Of this phantasmal scene] The ‘objects’ in this world of appearances. The personal pronoun would for S. apply to the shapes of Nature as well as to human figures. 705. senseless] insensate. 713. Quoting from the last line of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’.

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Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit, 715 Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves Those who remain behind, not sobs or groans, The passionate tumult of a clinging hope; But pale despair and cold tranquillity, Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things, 720 Birth and the grave, that are not as they were.

6  Verses written on receiving a Celandine in a letter from England Dated ‘Switzerland July-1816’ in Mary S.’s hand under her transcript in Harvard Nbk 2 — an impossible date for Peacock to have sent Ranunculus ficaria, a flower of early spring, but Mary S.’s memory was probably confused by the later reference in S.’s letter to Peacock initially dated 25 July concerning the Alpine plants he proposed to naturalize, ‘companions which the celandine, the classic celandine, need not despise; — They are as wild & more daring than he, & will tell him tales of things even as touching & as sublime as the gaze of a vernal poet’ (L i 501). The flower must have been sent immediately after S.’s arrival at Geneva, probably in response to S.’s first homesick letter to Peacock of 15 May: ‘So long as man is such as he now is . . . like Wordsworth he will never know what love subsisted between himself & [the country of his birth], until absence shall have made its beauty heartfelt’ (L i 475). Wordsworth had published three poems on the Lesser Celandine in Poems in Two Volumes (1807), one of which S. quoted to Peacock three years later (L ii 100): ‘To the Small Celandine’ (‘Pansies, Lilies, Kingcups, Daisies’, i 22), ‘To the Same Flower’ (‘Pleasures newly found are sweet’, i 27), and ‘The Small Celandine’ (‘There is a Flower, the Lesser Celandine’, ii 47), and S. adopts this evidently favourite flower as a symbol of the Poet himself (‘There’s a flower that shall be mine,/’Tis the little Celandine’; ‘To the Small Celandine’ 7–8). S. rediscovered Wordsworth’s poetry on his Swiss visit, and as Byron said, ‘used to dose me with Wordsworth physic even to nausea’ (Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron (1824) 237), but he regarded his later politics with contempt. ‘That such a man should be such a poet!’ (letter to Peacock, 25 July 1818, L ii 26). The transcript, in a notebook that had belonged to Claire Clairmont at Marlow, is the only text and is almost unpunctuated. The draft is in Nbk 1 with the poem ‘The billows on the beach’ superimposed. Text from Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Eng. 258.3 (Mary’s transcript). Published by W. E. Peck in The Boston Herald, 21 December 1925, 12; Julian iii 124–6.

720. that are not as they were] Echoing the ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ 5: ‘It is not now as it hath been of yore’.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-6

6  verses written on receiving a celandine in a letter from england 37

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I thought of thee, fair Celandine, As of a flower aery blue, Yet small — thy leaves methought were wet With the light of morning dew; In the same glen thy star did shine As the primrose and the violet, And the wild briar bent over thee And the woodland brook danced under thee. Lovely thou wert in thine own glen Ere thou didst dwell in song or story, Ere the moonlight of a Poet’s mind Had arrayed thee with the glory Whose fountains are the hearts of men — Many a thing of vital kind Had fed and sheltered under thee, Had nourished their thoughts near to thee. Yes, gentle flower, in thy recess None might a sweeter aspect wear: Thy young bud drooped so gracefully, Thou wert so very fair — Among the fairest ere the stress Of exile, death and injury Thus withering and deforming thee Had made a mournful type of thee; A type of that whence I and thou Are thus familiar, Celandine — A deathless Poet whose young prime Was as serene as thine, But he is changed and withered now,

¶ 6. 1–2. The apparent sense, ‘until now I thought the celandine was blue’, must be misleading; it is not credible that S., who, according to Mary S., ‘knew every plant by its name’ (1824 Preface), did not know that the celandine is yellow. The intended sense is possibly that S. associated the celandine with Wordsworth, just as he associated a blue flower with another writer. Perhaps Rousseau was in S.’s mind; the periwinkle was ‘The flower which Rousseau brought into such fashion among the Parisians, by exclaiming one day, “Ah, voilà de la pervenche!” ’ (Moore’s note to The Fudge Family in Paris (1818) Letter xii line 72). The incident itself is in R.’s Confessions (1781) Bk VI. A less likely possibility is that S.’s reference is to the gentian, and that its association for him was with Coleridge; cp. C.’s note to his ‘Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni’ 56: ‘The beautiful Gentiana major, or greater gentian, with blossoms of the brightest blue, grows in large companies a few steps from the never-melted ice of the glaciers. I thought it an affecting emblem of the boldness of human hope, venturing near, and, as it were, leaning over the brink of the grave’ (Poetical Register for 1802 (1803) ii 308). 29. changed and withered] One of Wordsworth’s Celandines grows grey from age: ‘It cannot help itself in its decay;/Stiff in its members, wither’d, changed of hue’ (‘The Small Celandine’ 18–19); Wordsworth’s own decay is seen as inward, corrupting the achievement of his prime.

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shelley: selected poems Fallen on a cold and evil time; His heart is gone — his fame is dim, And Infamy sits mocking him. Celandine! Thou art pale and dead, Changed from thy fresh and woodland state. Oh! that thy bard were cold, but he Has lived too long and late. Would he were in an honoured grave; But that, men say, now must not be Since he for impious gold could sell The love of those who loved him well. That he, with all hope else of good, Should be thus transitory I marvel not — but that his lays Have spared not their own glory, That blood, even the foul god of blood With most inexpiable praise, Freedom and truth left desolate, He has been bought to celebrate! They were his hopes which he doth scorn, They were his foes the fight that won; That sanction and that condemnation Are now forever gone. They need them not! Truth may not mourn That with a liar’s inspiration Her majesty he did disown Ere he could overlive his own. They need them not, for Liberty, Justice and philosophic truth From his divine and simple song Shall draw immortal youth

30. Cp. Milton’s description of his own situation after the Restoration: ‘On evil days though fall’n, and evil tongues’ (PL vii 26). S. later applied the same phrase to Godwin (LMG 198). 39. Since meanly he for gold c.d sell draft. 45. god of blood] S. had evidently seen Wordsworth’s Thanksgiving Ode, January 18 1816, with other short pieces, which contained the notorious ‘Ode 1815’ 106–9: ‘But Thy most dreaded instrument,/In working out a pure intent,/Is Man — arrayed for mutual slaughter,/Yes, Carnage is thy daughter!’. Other poems in the collection expressed similar sentiments. 48. bought] Wordsworth had accepted a minor post under Government in 1813. 49–56. ‘The hopes he despises were once his own, the reactionary victors of Europe were once his enemies, his principles are forgotten; but no matter: it is fitting that he denied the authority of Truth before betraying his own poetic powers’.

7  hymn to intellectual beauty

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When he and thou shall cease to be, Or be some other thing, so long As men may breathe or flowers may blossom O’er the wide Earth’s maternal bosom. 65

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The stem whence thou wert disunited Since thy poor self was banished hither, Now by that priest of Nature’s care Who sent thee forth to wither His window with its blooms has lighted, And I shall see thy brethren there, And each like thee will aye betoken Love sold, hope dead, and honour broken.

7  Hymn to Intellectual Beauty ‘ “The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” was conceived during his voyage round the lake [Léman] with Lord Byron’ (Mary’s ‘Note on the Poems of 1816’, 1839 iii 35). As Gavin de Beer has established (SC iv 690–701), that expedition took place 22–30 June 1816, so the MS date on Harvard Nbk 2 (see below), ‘Switzerland June — 1816’, may only be that of the original conception. When S. left Geneva on 29 August, a notebook containing this poem in Mary S.’s hand and Mont Blanc in S.’s hand remained with Byron, who entrusted its return to his friend Scrope Davies; the latter, however, never delivered it, and the existence of the notebook (SDMS) was revealed only in December 1976 after its discovery in a deposit-box at the Pall Mall branch of Barclay’s Bank in London. The poem must therefore have been written between 22 June and 29 August, very possibly on 27–9 June when the lake party was weather-bound at Ouchy, near Lausanne, and Byron used the time to compose The Prisoner of Chilton (Byron L&J v 82). The absence of a first draft could imply indoor composition, while Mary S. seems uncertain when the actual writing took place. Even so, the poem may not have been completed before August (the last stanza anticipates the end of summer), and could in theory postdate the completion of Mont Blanc. Under the pseudonym ‘The Elfin Knight’, S. submitted the poem to The Examiner, where Hunt acknowledged its receipt on 6 October, but confessed in the issue of 1 December that the MS had been mislaid. S. may already have replaced the loss when he wrote to Hunt on 8 December: ‘Next, will I own the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty? I do not care. As you like. And yet the poem was composed under the influence of feelings which agitated me even to tears, so that I think it deserves a better fate than the being linked with so stigmatised & unpopular a name (so far as it is known) as mine’ (L i 517). Hunt finally published it on 19 January over S.’s own name. The probable sequence is, then, that S.’s fair copy, which Mary S. used for her transcription in SDMS, was the text sent to Hunt and lost, and as SDMS itself also seemed to be lost, the text Hunt eventually printed derives from a return, in England, to the hasty but clean copy of the poem (missing stanza 4) in S.’s draft notebook, Bod. MS Shelley adds.e.16, ff. 57–61 (Nbk 1). The relationship of these versions is discussed in RES xxix (1978) 36–49 by 62–3. so long/As men may breathe] Echoing Shakespeare’s sonnet 18 13–14: ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’. 67. by] ‘by the agency of ’ (a grammatical shorthand).

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-7

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Chernaik and Burnett, who reach the same conclusions. The Examiner text is certainly closer than SDMS to the text in Nbk 1. Thus there are two distinct texts of the Hymn, both reproduced below: ‘A’, the first-completed version from SDMS, and ‘B’, the reworked version printed in The Examiner. S. was in Italy when the poem was reprinted in 1819, and either his publisher Ollier or Peacock was responsible for the changed pointing and other revisions, which have no authority. Mary S.’s pointing in SDMS has been respected in Text A except where its absence causes obscurity: commas are added in lines 19, 20, 26, 43, 59, 70, 83, and full stops in lines 36, 48; a colon is added in line 53. Notes that are relevant to both texts will be found under Text B. The ‘Hymn’ of the poem’s title has the pagan meaning ‘song in honour of a god’, and its lineage is that of the eighteenth-century odes to abstract qualities, including the ‘Hymns’ of Revolutionary France. ‘Intellectual Beauty’, though Platonic in concept, is an expression not used by Plato but widely current in contemporary writing, especially that of Radical intellectuals associated with Godwin, where it means non-sensuous beauty, ‘the beauty of the mind and its creations’ (Cameron (1974) 238). S. probably met it first in Mrs Opie’s novel Adeline Mowbray (1804; 1805 edn, i 121), which he read in July 1811 (L i 122); thereafter in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) ch. iii; in Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication (1798) ch. xvi (in the 2nd edn, he changed ‘an intuitive perception of intellectual beauty’ to ‘an intuitive sense of the pleasures of the imagination’); in Lord Monboddo’s Of the Origin and Progress of Language i (Edinburgh 1773) 98 (ordered 24 December 1812); in Robert Forsyth’s Principles of Moral Science (Edinburgh 1805) ch. 16 and i 513–14; and in C. M. Wieland’s novel Agathon (1766), read early in 1814 in a French translation by F. D. Pernay (Hogg ii 531–2) and again the same year with Mary Godwin, perhaps in English. One of the three occurrences of the phrase in Wieland reveals its usual meaning very clearly in referring to ‘a living instance of this Platonic maxim, that external beauty is the reflection of the intellectual beauty of the soul’ (History of Agathon, trans. J. Richardson (1773) iv 48–9). S.’s title, however, seems closer in meaning to the ‘universal beauty’ which he intended by the phrase two years later when translating a passage of Plato’s Symposium; here, he expanded the original in order to clarify still further Diotima’s distinction between particular beauties and the Beauty that subsumes all beautiful instances: contemplating thus the universal beauty, no longer like some servant in love with his fellow would he [the lover] unworthily and meanly enslave himself to the attractions of one form, nor one subject of discipline or science, but would turn towards the wide ocean of intellectual beauty . . . (Notopoulos 449) Plato has simply ‘the wide ocean of beauty’ (Symp. 210d). S.’s Intellectual Beauty in the Hymn is not exclusively mental; it is contained or reflected in forms as well as in thoughts (lines 7, 15, 82), is apprehended during nights dedicated to ‘love’s delight’ as well as during nights of ‘studious zeal’ (66), is a potential agent of social revolution (68–70), and is evoked throughout the poem in images of conspicuously sensuous appeal. These images of mist, wind, music, moonlight — all fleeting, insubstantial things — illustrate ‘very precisely . . . the hiatus between the lovely, transient effect, as it can be perceived by the senses, and its stable cause in nature’, so providing analogies for the unseen Power whose reality can be inferred only from its influences (Chernaik 38); but the beauty of the analogies offered must itself be interpreted as evidence in Nature of the Power’s visitation. Allusions to this Power, one of S.’s most persistent intuitions, occur in all later periods of his writing, notably in Alastor (37–49), in the unadopted early stanzas of L&C and in The Zucca (Longman v, no. 421) 20–40; and Jesus Christ’s supposed concept of God, in the prose ‘Essay on Christianity’ (1817), is close to S.’s own concept of Intellectual Beauty:

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There is a Power by which we are surrounded, like the atmosphere in which some motionless lyre is suspended, which visits with its breath our silent chords at will. Our most imperial and stupendous qualities — those on which the majesty and the power of humanity is erected — are, relatively to the inferior portion of its mechanism, indeed active and imperial; but they are the passive slaves of some higher and more omnipotent Power. This Power is God . . . But there will come a time when the human mind shall be visited exclusively by the influences of the benignant power . . . This is Heaven, when pain and evil cease, and when the benignant principle untrammelled and uncontrolled visits in the fulness of its power the universal frame of things. (Prose 202, 205) Of Diotima’s other main precepts in the Symposium, one, that the lover should ‘consider the beauty which is in souls more excellent than that which is in form’ (Notopoulos 448; Symp. 210b), is disregarded in the Hymn, while the other, that the lover should ‘ascend through these transitory objects which are beautiful, towards that which is beauty itself, proceeding as on steps’ (Notopoulos 449; Symp. 211c), never appealed to S. Indeed the poem’s immediate stimulus was probably not Plato but Rousseau, whose novel Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), set in the locality of Lake Léman, S. was reading obsessively throughout his tour with Byron. The experiences of Julie’s hero lead him towards the acceptance of a kind of universal love transcending the conventional proprietary sexual love that at first consumes him. For S., the book and the scenery idealised by the book themselves constituted shadows of Intellectual Beauty: he said he found Rousseau’s imagination ‘so powerfully bright as to cast a shade of falsehood on the records that are called reality’, and that Rousseau’s ‘imperishable creations had left no vacancy in my heart for mortal things’ (L i 485, 488). The organisation of the Hymn was clearly influenced by that of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, but there are wide differences in content: Wordsworth seeks adult consolation for the loss of the child’s instinctive harmony with God’s creation; while S. reaffirms his early vision that the humanist virtues of ‘Love, Hope, and Self-esteem’ will eventually redeem a godless and disharmonious world. Text A. From SDMS 3–6 (Mary’s hand). Text B. From Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Eng 258.3, ff. 22–3, a clipping from The Examiner No. 473 corrected in S.’s hand. Examiner printing identified as Ex, with S.’s corrections as Harvard Ex. Published: A. By Judith Chernaik and Timothy Burnett, RES xxix (1978) 43–5. B. The Examiner No. 473 (19 January 1817) 41; 1819.

A.  [Hymn to Intellectual Beauty]

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1. The lovely shadow of some awful Power Walks though unseen amongst us, visiting This peopled world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower, Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower It visits with a wavering glance Each human heart and countenance; — Like hues and harmonies of evening — Like clouds in starlight widely spread Like memory of music fled

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2. Shadow of Beauty! — that doth consecrate With thine own hues all thou dost fall upon Of human thought or form, where art thou gone? Why dost thou pass away and leave our state A dark deep vale of tears, vacant and desolate? Ask why the sunlight not forever Weaves rainbows o’er yon mountain river, Ask why aught fades away that once is shown, Ask wherefore dream and death and birth Cast on the daylight of this earth Such gloom, — why man has such a scope For love and joy, despondency and hope. 3. No voice from some sublimer world hath ever To wisest poets these responses given, Therefore the name of God and Ghosts and Heaven Remain yet records of their vain Endeavour — Frail spells, whose uttered charm might not avail to sever From what we feel and what we see Doubt, Chance and mutability. Thy shade alone like mists o’er mountains driven Or music by the night-wind sent Through strings of some mute instrument Or moonlight on a forest stream Gives truth and grace to life’s tumultuous dream. 4. Love, hope and self-esteem like clouds depart — And come, for some uncertain moments lent. — Man were immortal and omnipotent Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art Keep with this glorious train firm state within his heart. Thou messenger of sympathies That wax and wane in lovers’ eyes, Thou that to the poet’s thought art nourishment As darkness to a dying flame, Depart not as thy shadow came!

¶ 7. (Text A). 13. Shadow] Image, (imperfect) copy. Cp. ‘Shadow of beauty unbeheld’ (PU III iii 7). 21. Why, care & pain & death & birth Nbk 1. 24. love and joy] love [joy canc.] & hate Nbk 1. Clearly a mistranscription; as Chernaik & Burnett point out (RES xxix (1978) 42), ‘ The line calls . . . for two opposed terms’. 43. lovers’] lover’s SDMS. 44. poet’s] poets SDMS.

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Depart not! — lest the grave should be Like life and fear a dark reality.

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5. While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped Through many a lonely chamber, vault and ruin And starlight wood, with fearful step pursuing Hopes of strange converse with the storied dead. I called on that false name with which our youth is fed: He heard me not — I saw them not. — When musing deeply on the lot Of Life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing All vocal things that live to bring News of buds and blossoming — Sudden thy shadow fell on me, I shrieked and clasped my hands in ecstasy. 6. I vowed that I would dedicate my powers To thee and thine — have I not kept the vow? With streaming eyes and panting heart even now 1 call the spectres of a thousand hours Each from his voiceless grave, who have in visioned bowers Of studious zeal or love’s delight Outwatched with me the waning night To tell that never joy illumed my brow Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free This world from its dark slavery, That thou, O, awful Loveliness! Would give whate’er these words cannot express. 7. The day becomes more solemn and serene When noon is past — there is a harmony In Autumn and a lustre in the sky Which through the summer is not heard or seen As if it could not be — as if it had not been — Thus let thy shade — which like the truth Of Nature on my passive youth Descended, to my onward life supply Its hues, to one that worships thee And every form containing thee Whom, fleeting power! thy spells did bind To fear himself and love all human Kind.

52. the storied dead] Those whose records are inscribed on their tombs, as on Gray’s ‘storied urn’ (Elegy in a Country Church-yard 41). 53. that false name] ‘God’.

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shelley: selected poems B.  Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

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1. The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats though unseen amongst us, — visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower. — Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance; Like hues and harmonies of evening, — Like clouds in starlight widely spread, — Like memory of music fled, — Like aught that for its grace may be Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery. 2. Spirit of BEAUTY, that doth consecrate With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon Of human thought or form, — where art thou gone? Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate? Ask why the sunlight not forever Weaves rainbows o’er yon mountain river, Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, Why fear and dream and death and birth Cast on the daylight of this earth Such gloom, — why man has such a scope For love and hate, despondency and hope? 3. No voice from some sublimer world hath ever To sage or poet these responses given — Therefore the name of God, and ghosts, and Heaven,

¶ 7. (Text B). 1. shadow] image, replica. 6. inconstant glance] See note to lines 18–9, ‘inconstant sun’. 7. heart] mind Nbk 1. 9. widely] wildly Nbk 1. 13. doth] dost 1819. 18–19. Perhaps a memory of the waterfall seen at Chède on 21 July 1816: ‘in the midst of which hung a multitude of sunbows, which faded or became unspeakably vivid, as the inconstant sun shone through the clouds’ (1817 148). Cp. Mont Blanc 25–6. 20. shown] displayed in flower (OED 8a). 21. death and birth] I.e. the condition of mortality. The opposition of ‘fear and dream’ corresponds to that of ‘despondency and hope’ (line 24). 27. name of God, and ghosts, and Heaven] names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven Ex; names of Ghosts & God & Heaven Nbk 1. Corrected by S. in Harvard Ex; the Ex text was probably a modification made at Hunt’s request (see Chernaik 186n.).

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Remain the records of their vain endeavour, Frail spells — whose uttered charm might not avail to sever, From all we hear and all we see, Doubt, chance, and mutability. Thy light alone — like mist o’er mountains driven, Or music by the night wind sent Through strings of some still instrument, Or moonlight on a midnight stream, Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream. 4. Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart And come, for some uncertain moments lent. Man were immortal, and omnipotent, Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart. Thou messenger of sympathies That wax and wane in lovers’ eyes — Thou — that to human thought art nourishment, Like darkness to a dying flame! Depart not as thy shadow came, Depart not — lest the grave should be, Like life and fear, a dark reality. 5. While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin, And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

33. sent] sent, Ex. 34. some still instrument] An Aeolian harp. still] unconscious Nbk 1. 35. This image may have had some private association with Mary Godwin; cp. S.’s letter to Mary of 28 October 1814 (L i 414): ‘My mind without yours is dead & cold as the dark midnight river when the moon is down’. Stanza 4 Omitted in Nbk 1. 42. sympathies] SDMS, 1819; sympathies, Ex. 43. lovers’] lover’s Ex, 1819. 44–5. nourishment,/Like darkness to a dying flame!] Strong light was believed to stifle a flame, which was therefore literally ‘nourished’ by darkness (Walker, A System of Familiar Philosophy (1799) 412). Stanzas 5 and 6 Transposed in Nbk 1. 49–52. Hogg describes S.’s early experiments in the supernatural: ‘Sometimes he watched the livelong nights for ghosts . . . he even planned how he might get admission to the vault, or charnel-house, at Warnham Church, and might sit there all night . . . to see one of the spiritualised owners of the bones piled around him’, and at Eton, he tried to raise a midnight ghost by means of incantation over a skull (Hogg i 33–4). Cp. Alastor 23–9; and Wordsworth, Excursion iii 686–95. 51. starlight] The normal contemporary form of ‘starlit’. 52. ‘There studious let me sit,/And hold high converse with the mighty dead’ (Thomson, Seasons, ‘Winter’ 431–2).

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shelley: selected poems I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed, I was not heard — I saw them not — When musing deeply on the lot Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing All vital things that wake to bring News of buds and blossoming, — Sudden, thy shadow fell on me; I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy! 6. I vowed that I would dedicate my powers To thee and thine — have I not kept the vow? With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now I call the phantoms of a thousand hours Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers Of studious zeal or love’s delight Outwatched with me the envious night — They know that never joy illumed my brow Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free This world from its dark slavery, That thou — O awful LOVELINESS, Wouldst give whate’er these words cannot express. 7. The day becomes more solemn and serene When noon is past — there is a harmony In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,

53. poisonous names] the false name Nbk 1. Another possible modification by Hunt. 54. I was not heard —] One of S.’s early correspondents had ‘recommended him to try the effect of prayer, and he actually prayed for two months, till finding that tho he observd the prescription as regularly as if it had been to take three table spoonfuls of julep, no effect followed, he gave up the course’ (Southey to Danvers, 13 January 1812, New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. K. Curry (1965) ii 20). 57–8. Echoing Wordsworth’s ‘To the Same Flower [Small Celandine]’ 17–18: ‘Soon as gentle breezes bring/News of winter’s vanishing’. 58. buds] birds Ex (corrected by S. in Harvard Ex), 1819. 59–72. Webb (Shelley: A  Voice Not Understood (1977) 34–5) stresses the distinction between autobiographical particularity and the conventional language of religious dedication. But that S. did experience a crisis of self-commitment seems evident from many allusions, such as the Dedication to L&C 21–42 and the letter to Hunt of 8 December 1816, which refers both to this Hymn and to ‘the task which I had undertaken in early life, of opposing myself, in these evil times & among these evil tongues, to what I esteem misery & vice’ (L i 517). Medwin (for interesting reasons) located this event at Syon House Academy (Athenaeum 21 July 1832, 472), which S. left aged eleven; but Eton is more probable, as Henry Salt argued (Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Monograph (1888) 237–40). 66. love’s] loves Ex, 1819, Nbk 1. 73–81. These lines are influenced by Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ 88–102 and ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ 176–99, but S. does not distinguish his recognition of ‘the truth of nature’ from his maturing receptivity to Intellectual Beauty as W. separated his early physical response to Nature from his later compensating awareness of ‘a presence’ pervading Nature.

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Which through the summer is not heard or seen, As if it could not be, as if it had not been! Thus let thy power, which like the truth Of nature on my passive youth Descended, to my onward life supply Its calm — to one who worships thee, And every form containing thee, Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind To fear himself, and love all human kind.

8  Mont Blanc. Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni Mary S. states (‘Note on Poems of 1816’, 1839 iii 35) that ‘Mont Blanc was inspired by a view of that mountain and its surrounding peaks and valleys, as [S.] lingered on the Bridge of Arve on his way through the Valley of Chamouni’. The poem was almost certainly begun on 22 July 1816, although it is dated ‘June 23, 1816’ in 1817, 1824, and 1839. S., Mary and Claire made their visit to Chamonix, Mont Blanc and environs from Sunday 21 July to Saturday 27 July 1816 (Mary Jnl i 112–21; L i 494–502). S.’s journal-letter to Peacock of 22 July–2 August 1816 includes for 22 July the following description which (as John Buxton, Byron and Shelley (1968) 33, notes) anticipates the poem in a number of ideas and phrases: From Servox, three leagues remain to Chamounix. Mont Blanc was before us. The Alps with their innumerable glacie[r]s on high, all round; closing in the complicated windings of the single vale: — forests inexpressibly beautiful — but majestic in their beauty — interwoven beech & pine & oak overshadowed our road or receded whilst lawn of such verdure as I had never seen before, occupied these opening[s], & extending gradually becoming darker into their recesses. — Mont Blanc was before us but was covered with cloud, & its base furrowed with dreadful gaps was seen alone. Pinnacles of snow, intolerably bright, part of the chain connected with Mont Blanc shone thro the clouds at intervals on high. I never knew I never imagined what mountains were before. The immensity of these aerial summits excited, when they suddenly burst upon the sight, a sentiment of extatic wonder, not unallied to madness — And remember this was all one scene. It all pressed home to our regard & to our imagination. — Though it embraced a great number of miles the snowy pyramids which shot into the bright blue sky seemed to overhang our path — the ravine, clothed with gigantic pines and black with its depth below. — so deep that the very roaring of the untameable Arve, which rolled through it could not be heard above — was close to our very footsteps. All was as much our own as if we had been the creators of such impressions in the minds of others, as now occupied our own. — Nature was the poet whose harmony held our spirits more breathless than that of the divinest. (L i 496–7) 83. SPIRIT fair] awful Power Nbk 1. 84. Concordance glosses ‘fear’ as ‘doubt, mistrust’, but it is the only example of this meaning listed, and Elizabeth Nitchie (PMLA lxiii (1948) 753) suggests as more likely the meaning ‘honour, revere’ (OED ii 3). Wasserman 195n. cites Pythagoras: ‘of thy self stand most in fear’. The poem’s conclusion would then be a defiant revision of Ecclesiastes xii 13: ‘Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man’.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-8

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S.’s draft, in Nbk 1 ff. 3–13, is headed (after some cancellation; see notes) ‘The scene of Pellisier, at the extremity of the vale of Servoz’. It begins as much-cancelled pencil over-written in ink, and suggests that S. may actually have begun Mont Blanc in situ at Pont Pellisier on the second day of his journey (the original pencil draft peters out at line 48). S.’s letter to Byron from his hotel in Chamonix, dated 22 July, indicates that he was already himself thinking of a poetic response: ‘I shall not attempt to describe to you the scenes through which we have passed. I hope soon to see in poetry the feelings with which they will inspire you’ (L i 494). Mary’s journal records the arrival of the party at Pont Pellisier en route from St Martin to Chamonix on 22 July: From Cervaux [for Servoz] we continued on a mountainous & rocky path & passed apine [Mary Jnl (Jones) 52 reads ‘an Alpine’] bridge over the Arve — this is one of the loveliest scenes in the world — the white  & foamy river broke proudly through the rocks that opposed its progress — Immense pines covered the bases of the Mountains that closed around it & a rock covered with woods & seemingly detached from the rest stood at the End & closed the ravine — (i 114–15) S. names this bridge in his account of the return journey to Geneva on Friday 25 July: ‘We repassed Pont Pellisier a wooden bridge over the Arve & the ravine of the Arve.’ (L i 501). Pont Pellisier is not actually in the Vale of Chamonix, which extends some twelve miles south-east to north-west from Col-de-Balme to les Houches, but about two miles northnorth-west of les Houches, towards Servoz; it seems likely that S.’s topographically exact title in Nbk 1 was replaced in 1817 by the subtitle ‘Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni’ in order to point up the poem’s implicit address to Coleridge’s ‘Hymn: Before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouny’ (see below). S. probably worked on Mont Blanc during the wet afternoon and evening of Wednesday 24 July, having spent Tuesday in sight-seeing (Mary Jnl i 118), but the poem includes descriptive writing evidently indebted to S.’s experiences of glaciers, including the Mer de Glace, which were not visited until Thursday 25 July (see Mary Jnl i 119), and there is evidence to suggest that S. was still working on the poem after his return to Geneva on Sunday 28 July. Box 1 f. 72 is a leaf torn from Nbk 1 with part of Lines to Leigh Hunt on the recto (see headnote to that poem in Longman i 516–7, no. 118), and on the verso three separate items. At the top, there are almost indecipherable lines probably addressed to Mary by S. for the second anniversary of their elopement on 28 July 1814 (these lines are quoted in the headnote to Lines to Leigh Hunt). At the bottom is a description of a thunderstorm dated ‘July 28’ (really 29 July; see Mary Jnl i 121). Between these items, and presumably datable to the same weekend, is a draft of five unused lines for ‘Mont Blanc’, which reads: There is a voice not understood by all Sent from these [icy canc.] desart caves [this solitude canc.] [Of ? pines that to the lightest call canc.] [Of ? ? ? canc.] It is the roar Of the rent ice cliff which the sunbeams call Plunges into the vale — it is the [blast canc. wind canc.] Descending on the pines — [the torrents pour canc. it is a rock canc.] By 29 August, S. had transcribed a fair copy of Mont Blanc into the notebook which, for whatever reason, he left with Byron in Geneva when he returned to England (SDMS; see no. 7 headnote); this version of the poem remained unknown until the discovery of the

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notebook in 1976. It was first published (together with nos. 120, 121, and 123 A in Longman i 518–520, 525–8) in RES xxix (1978) 36–49. The first published version of Mont Blanc appeared in 1817. The poem was transcribed again (S.’s original transcript having apparently been lost) from the draft in Nbk 1, presumably by S. himself, at around the same time that Mary was preparing letters and journal entries for incorporation into 1817 in early October 1817. It is however conceivable that Mary was responsible for copying the poem from a draft for 1817; this would account for the striking number of different readings between 1817 and Nbk 1, some of which could be transcription errors (see notes), and others the result of editorial substitution and inversion of the kind which characterise Mary’s work on other drafts of comparable difficulty such as To Constantia and The Two Spirits. Mary seems to have borne sole responsibility for the printing of 1817 (with the exception of the Preface, attributed in Mary’s ‘Note on Poems of 1816’ to S.). Mary remained in Marlow while S. was away in London for most of the time in October 1817; her letters to S. on 28 September, 14 and 16 October mention transcribing the Geneva letters printed in the volume and sending the completed MS in a parcel to Hookham, the printer, on 15 October (Mary L i 47, 54, 56). On Sunday 12 October, she noted in her journal: S. comes down on friday evening — Read & finish miseries of human life [i.e. James Beresford, The Miseries of Human Life: . . . (1806)] — write out letters from Geneva — S. transcribes his poem on Saturday walk out with him & Willy. P.[eacock] drinks tea here. S. goes away sunday evening — transcribe. (Mary Jnl i 181) ‘S. transcribes his poem’ would at this point in the journal most probably refer to L&C, which although finished on 23 September was still being transcribed for the printer in October (see headnote to L&C). Nevertheless, in the absence of more conclusive evidence, the likeliest assumption is that S. did himself produce a second version of Mont Blanc in the autumn of 1817, sometimes forgetting choices and substitutions he had made when copying from the draft in the previous summer, and perhaps at times unable to read his own tangled draft. Two distinct forms of the poem therefore exist, and are both presented here; the B text (1817) is collated with Nbk 1 as this makes clear the extent to which it diverges from the draft relative to the A text (SDMS), which is much closer to Nbk 1. Chernaik 288–93 offers a transcription of the draft. Two primary thematic preoccupations are combined in ‘Mont Blanc’, with what has been considered uneven success, although many have argued for the poem’s intellectual coherence. S.’s defiantly atheistical response to the supreme experience of Alpine scenery (see B text 97n.) merges with his epistemological uncertainties concerning the characteristics and mode of existence of a causal power which, not itself knowable, yet determines matter and intelligence. The atheism of Mont Blanc appears to some extent aimed in a specific way at Coleridge, and in particular at his ‘Hymn: Before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouny’ (1802), which S. probably read in The Friend No. 11, 26 October 1809 (the ‘Hymn’ is in fact closely based on Friederika Brun’s ‘Chamouny beym Sonneraufgange: Gedichte’ (1805); see A. P. Rossiter in the TLS, 28 September 1951, 613). For S. and Byron’s knowledge of and interest in Coleridge and The Friend in 1816, see Robinson 32–9, and also Charles E. Robinson, ‘The Shelley Circle and Coleridge’s The Friend’, ELN viii (1971) 269–74. The tone of Coleridge’s poem is well given in the note which accompanied its first publication in the Morning Post, 11 September 1802: . . . the whole vale, its every light, its every sound, must needs impress every mind not utterly callous with the thought — Who would be, who could be an Atheist in this valley of Wonders!

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The poem itself emphatically and — from S.’s point of view — provokingly celebrates the maker of all the components of the scene presented by the valley of the Arve: GOD! let the Torrents, like a shout of Nations, Answer! And let the Ice plains echo, GOD! God! sing, ye meadow streams! with gladsome voice! Ye Pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like Sounds! And they too have a Voice, yon Piles of Snow, And in their perilous Fall shall thunder GOD!

(lines 55–60, Friend text)

Coleridge appears to have been on S.’s mind throughout the Swiss journey, perhaps because of Byron’s influence; on 17 July, S. wrote to Peacock, ‘Tell me of the political state of England — its literature, of which when I speak Coleridge is in my thoughts’ (L i 490). Mont Blanc echoes a number of Coleridge’s poems in addition to the ‘Hymn’, including ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Eolian Harp’ (see notes). The atheism of Mont Blanc has a further related context — although no mention of it is made by S. or Mary in their journal and letters at the time — in the notorious entries by S. in various visitors’ books during his visit to the Vale of Chamonix, mocking the conventional pieties of English tourists’ responses to Alpine scenery. At the Hôtel des Londres, for example, S. wrote of himself ‘δεμοκρατικós øιλανθρωπότατοs καì αθεοs’ (‘democrat, lover of mankind, and atheist’), and of his destination as ‘L’enfer’. Byron rightly guessed that these entries would lead to trouble, as they did when news of them was carried back to England (notably by Southey) and fed the public image of S.’s notoriety in a damaging way (for details of the episode, see two articles by Gavin de Beer, ‘The Atheist, an incident at Chamonix’, in On Shelley, ed. Edmund Blunden (1938), and ‘An Atheist in the Alps’, KSMB ix (1958)). Some thirty months later, the memory of these events was revived for S. when, having read the attack on his atheism and private life in the Quarterly’s review of Leigh Hunt’s Foliage in May 1818 (see Unextinguished Hearth 125), he composed a passage for PU II iii which merges his alpine experiences, and their representation in Mont Blanc, with the impact of the volcanic scenery of Vesuvius and of the Solfatara region west of Naples (see PU headnote and II iii 11–42nn) The descriptive writing and mountain scenery of Mont Blanc also show the influence of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III, which Byron was working on during S.’s stay in Geneva (see Robinson 31–9) and of other Byron poems written at Diodati in July 1816, for example ‘The Dream’ and ‘A Fragment’. There are, too, marked affinities between Mont Blanc and the accounts of mountain scenery in Frankenstein ch. ix, which Mary was writing on the visit to Chamonix (Mary Jnl i 118). The poem also implies S.’s knowledge of geology and vulcanology in the terms of the speculations prompted by the mountain and its scenery. S.’s letter to Peacock of 22 July displays this knowledge in a characteristic conjunction with political and social reflections that is present in the poem itself: Within this last year these glaciers have advanced three hundred feet into the valley. Saussure the naturalist says that they have their periods of increase & decay — the people of the country hold an opinion entirely different, but, as I judge, more probable. It is agreed by all that the snows on the summit of Mt. Blanc & the neighboring mountains perpetually augment, & that ice in the form of glacier subsists without melting in the valley of Chamounix during its transient and variable summer. If the snow which produces the glaciers must augment & the heat of the valley is no obstacle to the perpetual subsistence of such masses of ice as have already descended into it, the consequence is

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obvious. — The glaciers must augment, & will subsist at least until they have overflowed this vale. — I will not pursue Buffons sublime but gloomy theory, that this earth which we inhabit will at some future period be changed into a mass of frost. Do you who assert the supremacy of Ahriman imagine him throned among these desolating snows, among these palaces of death & frost, sculptured in this their terrible magnificence by the unsparing hand of necessity, & that he casts around him as the first essays of his final usurpation avalanches, torrents, rocks & thunders — and above all, these deadly glaciers at once the proofs & the symbols of his reign. — Add to this the degradation of the human species, who in these regions are half deformed or idiotic & all of whom are deprived of anything that can excite interest & admiration. This is a part of the subject more mournful  & less sublime; — but such as neither the poet nor the philosopher should disdain. (L i 499) As Buxton (Byron and Shelley 33) remarks, S. ‘was aware of Buffon’s theory that the world would end in a new and universal ice age’. He was also aware of the Comte de Buffon’s proposition in his ‘Des Epoques de la Nature!’, Suppléments de l’Histoire Naturelle (vol. v, Paris 1778) that the earth had at first been at fluid heat and had cooled slowly and evolved over a great period of time in seven phases or ‘Epoques’ corresponding to scriptural days (see below, lines 73–4). The argument and style of Mont Blanc are difficult, and are made more so by the consequences of its complex textual transmission. S. seeks to engage important questions of the relation between mind and the objects of thought, and between the apparent permanence of nature and an impersonal Power, embodied in the mountain, which compels change over periods of time too great for the imagination to comprehend. S.’s efforts in Mont Blanc to represent this Power anticipates in some respects his conception of Demogorgon in PU (see PU headnote). The poem represents an important transitional point in S.’s intellectual development, from an early confidence in radical materialism towards the distinctive sceptical idealism of his maturity. Chernaik (49) remarks illuminatingly of the poem’s form in relation to its argument that, in Mont Blanc, S. ‘seems to make the physical scene contingent upon the generalisation it has prompted but which precedes it in the poem’. In its representation of nature as metaphorical of consciousness, S.’s poem is comparable with other Romantic poems which dramatise the mind’s consciousness of itself, such as Wordsworth’s ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ (1798) and Keats’s ‘Ode to Psyche’ (1819). The style of ‘Mont Blanc’, broadly Wordsworthian but bleaker and more disturbed, registers a certain intellectual irresolution as well as excitement. S. appears conscious of this in his note on the poem in the Preface to 1817: The poem entitled ‘Mont Blanc’ . . . was composed under the immediate impressions of the deep and powerful feelings excited by the objects which it attempts to describe; and as an undisciplined overflowing of the soul, rests its claim to approbation on an attempt to imitate the untameable wildness and inaccessible solemnity from which those feelings sprang. (1817 vi) For a valuable account of the ‘wildly irregular rhyming of [‘Mont Blanc’] whereby nearly every line eventually finds its companion, but without any predictable order’ (Wasserman 234), see William Keach, Shelley’s Style (1984) 194–200, who follows earlier commentators

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in noting Lycidas as a model for the rhyme scheme. Text: A. From SDMS 7–13. Accents have been added in lines 13 and 22, stops in lines 11 and 49 and a diaeresis in line 26. B. From 1817 175–83. Published: A. By Judith Chernaik and Timothy Burnett, RES xxix (1978) 45–9. B. 1817. Notes relevant to both texts are given for text B.

A. Scene — Pont Pellisier in the vale of Servox

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In day the eternal universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves Now dark, now glittering; now reflecting gloom Now lending splendour, where, from secret caves The source of human thought its tribute brings Of waters, with a sound not all its own: Such as a feeble brook will oft assume In the wild woods among the mountains lone Where waterfalls around it leap forever Where winds and woods contend, and a vast river Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves. Thus thou Ravine of Arve, dark deep ravine, Thou many coloured, many voicèd vale! Over whose rocks and pines and caverns sail Fast cloud shadows and sunbeams — awful scene, Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down From the ice gulfs that gird his secret throne Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame Of lightning through the tempest — thou dost lie Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging Children of elder time, in whose devotion The charmèd winds still come, and ever came To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging To hear, an old and solemn harmony; Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep Of the aërial waterfall, whose veil Robes some unsculptured image; even the sleep The sudden pause that does inhabit thee Which when the voices of the desert fail And its hues wane, doth blend them all and steep

¶ 8. (Text A). 1. In day] I.e. during waking consciousness, in contrast to experience in sleep (50–1). 11–12. There is no break between these lines in RES. 27. the sleep] The interval of suspense when the sound is interrupted and the view obscured by an obstacle. S. described the ravine as in places ‘so deep that the very roaring of the untameable Arve, which rolled through it, could not be heard above’ (1817 152; cp. Edward Thomas, ‘The Mountain Chapel’ 4–5: ‘The loss of the brook’s voice/Falls like a shadow’).

8  mont blanc. lines written in the vale of chamouni

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Their periods in its own eternity; Thy caverns echoing to the Arve’s commotion A loud lone sound no other sound can tame: Thou art pervaded with such ceaseless motion Thou art the path of that unresting sound Ravine of Arve! and when I gaze on thee I seem as in a vision deep and strange To muse on my own various fantasy My own, my human mind . . . which passively Now renders and receives fast influencings Holding an unforeseeing interchange With the clear universe of things around: A legion of swift thoughts, whose wandering wings Now float above thy darkness, and now rest Near the still cave of the witch Poesy Seeking among the shadows that pass by, Ghosts of the things that are, some form like thee, Some spectre, some faint image; till the breast From which they fled recalls them — thou art there. Some say that gleams of a remoter world Visit the soul in sleep — that death is slumber And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber Of those who wake and live. I look on high: Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled The veil of life and death? or do I lie In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep Spread far around, and inaccessibly Its circles? — for the very spirit fails Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep That vanishes among the viewless gales. — Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky Mont Blanc appears, still, snowy and serene, Its subject mountains their unearthly forms Pile round it — ice and rock — broad chasms between Of frozen waves, unfathomable deeps Blue as the overhanging Heaven, that spread And wind among the accumulated steeps, Vast deserts, peopled by the storms alone Save when the eagle brings some hunter’s bone And the wolf watches her — how hideously

31. Their periods] An ambivalence: ‘their times of existence’ or ‘their times of cessation’. 53. high:] high SDMS, RES.

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shelley: selected poems Its rocks are heaped around, rude, bare and high Ghastly and scarred and riven! — is this the scene Where the old Earthquake demon taught her young Ruin? were these their toys? or did a sea Of fire envelop once this silent snow? None can reply — all seems eternal now. This wilderness has a mysterious tongue Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild So simple, so serene that man may be In such a faith with Nature reconciled. Ye have a doctrine, Mountains, to repeal Large codes of fraud and woe — not understood By all, but which the wise and great and good Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

85

The fields, the lakes, the forests and the streams Ocean, and all the living things that dwell Within the daedal Earth, lightning and rain, Earthquake, and lava flood and hurricane — The torpor of the year, when feeble dreams 90 Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep Holds every future leaf and flower — the bound With which from that detested trance they leap; The works and ways of man, their death and birth And that of him, and all that his may be, 95 All things that move and breathe with toil and sound Are born and die, revolve, subside and swell — Power dwells apart in deep tranquillity, Remote, sublime, and inaccessible. And this, the naked countenance of Earth 100 On which I gaze — even these primeval mountains Teach the adverting mind. — The Glaciers creep Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains Slow rolling on: — there, many a precipice Frost and the Sun in scorn of human power 105 Have piled: dome, pyramid and pinnacle A city of death, distinct with many a tower And wall impregnable of shining ice . . . A city’s phantom . . . but a flood of ruin Is there that from the boundaries of the sky

71. rude,] rude SDMS, RES. 81. doctrine, Mountains,] doctrine Mountains SDMS, RES. 96. revolve,] revolve SDMS, RES. 98. inaccessible.] inaccessible, RES. 101. mind. — The] mind. — the SDMS, RES. 109. there] there, RES (comma canc. in SDMS).

8  mont blanc. lines written in the vale of chamouni 110 Rolls its eternal stream . . . vast pines are strewing Its destined path, or in the mangled soil Branchless and shattered stand — the rocks drawn down From yon remotest waste have overthrown The limits of the dead and living world 115 Never to be reclaimed — the dwelling place Of insects, beasts and birds becomes its spoil Their food and their retreat for ever gone So much of life and joy is lost — the race Of man flies far in dread, his work and dwelling 120 Vanish like smoke before the tempest’s stream And their place is not known: — below, vast caves Shine in the gushing torrents’ restless gleam Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling Meet in the vale — and one majestic river 125 The breath and blood of distant lands, forever Rolls its loud waters to the Ocean waves Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.

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Mont Blanc yet gleams on high — the Power is there The still and solemn Power of many sights And many sounds, and much of life and death. In the calm darkness of the moonless nights Or the lone light of day the snows descend Upon that Mountain — none beholds them there Nor when the sunset wraps their flakes in fire Or the starbeams dart through them — winds contend Silently there, and heap the snows, with breath Blasting and swift — but silently — its home The voiceless lightning in these solitudes Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods Over the snow. The secret strength of things Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome Of Heaven is as a column, rests on thee, And what were thou and Earth and Stars and Sea If to the human mind’s imaginings Silence and solitude were vacancy?

119. dread, his] dread. his SDMS. 120. tempest’s] tempests SDMS. 122. known: —] known — RES. 133. Mountain —] mountain — RES. 140. snow. The] snow. the SDMS. 144. mind’s] minds SDMS. 145. vacancy?] vacancy SDMS.

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B. Mont Blanc. Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni

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I. The everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark — now glittering — now reflecting gloom — Now lending splendour, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings Of waters, — with a sound but half its own, Such as a feeble brook will oft assume In the wild woods, among the mountains lone, Where waterfalls around it leap for ever, Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves. II. Thus thou, Ravine of Arve — dark, deep Ravine — Thou many-coloured, many-voicèd vale, Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail Fast cloud shadows and sunbeams: awful scene, Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down From the ice gulfs that gird his secret throne, Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame Of lightning through the tempest; — thou dost lie, Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging,

¶ 8. (Text B). Title. The scene of [At Pont canc.] Pellisier, at the [opening canc.] extremity [of the valley canc.] of the vale of Servoz. draft (see headnote for S.’s choice of title in 1817). 1. In daylight thoughts, bright or obscure draft canc. In day the eternal stream of various thoughts draft canc. In day the stream of [?] things draft. 2. the mind] The Universal Mind as distinct from the individual mind (lines 5, 37), whose contribution to experience is ‘but half its own’. Locock compares Daemon ii 248–50, but although there are affinities between S.’s Daemon and the Power embodied in Mont Blanc (see headnote to Daemon, Longman i 489–91, no. 115), the metaphors here and in Daemon ii 248 ff. imply differing conceptions of mind. 4. springs] caves draft. ‘The interwoven rhymes of [the draft] are more regular (abcbadcd); Shelley may have been consciously striving in 1817 for the more irregular rhyme effects of Lycidas’ (Chernaik). 5. source of human thought] fountain of the mind draft canc. tribute] Puns on ‘tributary’ (cp. PU III iii 155). 6. but half its own] S.’s formulation suggests Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798) 107–8. With the ambivalence of its (source of thought, or universe of things?), cp. Upon the wandering winds (Longman i 520, no. 121) 10n. 9. for ever] forever Chernaik. 10. vast] loud above vast canc. draft. 11. ceaselessly] forever draft canc. 14. pines, and crags] rocks and pines draft. 15. Fast cloud shadows] And mingling draft canc. 16. Power] See note to lines 96–7. 17. secret] aerial draft canc.

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Children of elder time, in whose devotion The chainless winds still come and ever came To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging To hear — an old and solemn harmony; Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep Of the etherial waterfall, whose veil Robes some unsculptured image; the strange sleep Which when the voices of the desert fail Wraps all in its own deep eternity; — Thy caverns echoing to the Arve’s commotion, A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame; Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion, Thou art the path of that unresting sound — Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee I seem as in a trance sublime and strange To muse on my own separate fantasy, My own, my human mind, which passively Now renders and receives fast influencings,

22. chainless] charmed draft canc.; unchained draft. 23. mighty] solemn draft; Chernaik discerns mighty as the original draft reading. 24. solemn] awful draft. 25–9. These lines are preceded in the draft by a version of lines 30–4 below; there are also two lines in the draft not used in 1817, which correspond to the A text lines 28 and 30. S.’s line 29 in the present B text is a conflation of two lines in the draft which read ‘And its hues wane, doth blend them all and steep/Their tumult in its own eternity, ’. Chernaik (following GM) comments that ‘the original order of [the draft] is probably clearer than [1817]: the “ceaseless motion” and “unresting sound” . . . summarise the coming and going of the winds, the swinging of the pines, and the commotion of the Arve, the “awful harmony” of one and the “loud lone sound” of the other; whereas the “rainbows” stretched across the waterfall and the “sudden pause” are what the poet observes when he gazes on the ravine.’ Rossetti 1870 notes that lines 27–29 have no defined syntactical position; S.’s syntax is in fact resumed at line 30, which returns the reader to the attributes of the Ravine. 25–7. Thine earthly rainbows .  .  . unsculptured image] A  conflation of two waterfalls seen from the road to Chamonix: one caused a mist of spray ‘in the midst of which hung a multitude of sunbows, which faded or became unspeakably vivid, as the inconstant sun shone through the clouds’; the other ‘fell from the overhanging brow of a black precipice on an enormous rock, precisely resembling some colossal Egyptian statue of a female deity. It struck the head of the visionary image, and gracefully dividing there, fell from it in folds of foam more like to cloud than water, imitating a veil of the most exquisite woof ’ (1817 145–6, 148). 26. etherial] aerial draft. 27. unsculptured] ‘not man-made’. image; the strange sleep] image — even the sleep draft. The phrase ‘strange sleep’ evokes the eerie silence and stillness of the landscape when its sounds are momentarily inaudible. 28. And when the words and waves [         ] sunbeams draft canc. voices] tumult draft canc. 32. ceaseless] unceasing draft canc.; untameable draft canc. 33. that unresting] unreposing draft canc. 34. Dizzy Ravine!] Mighty Ravine [of Arve canc.] draft. 35–40. Cp. Daemon ii 248–55. trance sublime] vision deep draft. 36. I seem to muse on my own phantasy draft. separate] separate draft canc. various draft.

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shelley: selected poems Holding an unremitting interchange With the clear universe of things around; One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings Now float above thy darkness, and now rest Where that or thou art no unbidden guest, In the still cave of the witch Poesy, Seeking among the shadows that pass by, Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast From which they fled recalls them, thou art there! III. Some say that gleams of a remoter world Visit the soul in sleep, — that death is slumber, And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber Of those who wake and live. — I look on high; Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled The veil of life and death? or do I lie In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep Spread far around and inaccessibly Its circles? For the very spirit fails, Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep

39. unremitting] unremitted draft. 40. clear] vast draft uncanc. alt. 41–4. Cp. Lucretius, De Re. Nat. iv 26–41. 41. wild] untold draft canc., wild thoughts refers back to influencings, line 38 above. 42. darkness,] wonders draft canc. 43. This line is cancelled in the draft, and omitted in SDMS. that or thou art] thou art surely draft canc. alt. The ambiguous reference of the pronouns makes for real difficulty: the likeliest intended sense is that thou refers to the Ravine, and that to the legion of wild thoughts (see Locock 1911 490; Cameron (1974) 247; Reiman (1977) 90). 44–7. Cp. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III v; the passage has affinities with The Earth’s speech in PU I 191 ff. 44. In the still] Near the wierd draft. witch] shade draft canc. S.’s cave suggests in general (but not specific) terms Plato’s myth of the Cave, Republic 514 ff. 45. by,] by 1817. shadows is in apposition to Ghosts in the following line. 46. all] the draft. 47. phantom,] likeness draft canc. Reiman (1977) 90 suggests that the breast is an anthropomorphised source for the Ghosts of all things that are of line 46. 49–57. Cp. Byron, ‘The Dream’ 1–26 (dated ‘July 1816’), and ‘A Fragment’ (dated ‘Diodati, July 1816’). S.’s phrasing suggests an increasingly characteristic scepticism. remoter] Concordance glosses as ‘future’, but the sense is probably ‘less accessible to human comprehension’. 52. on high;] above draft canc. 53–4. Cp. L&C XII xv 4.581–2. unfurled] The gloss in Locock 1911, ‘drawn aside’, appears to offer the best sense in context, but see E. B. Murray, ‘Mont Blanc’s Unfurled Veil’, K-SJ xviii (1969) 39–48, for a defence of the word in its usual sense. The emendation ‘upfurled’ in Rossetti 1870 has been followed by some modern eds, e.g. Harold Bloom (ed.), English Romantic Poetry (New York 1963) 163. 56. Spread] Speed 1839. 57. spirit fails,] mind is faint/With aspiration, draft canc. 58. Cp. I visit thee but thou art sadly changed (Longman i 571–2, no. 137) 13 and note.

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That vanishes among the viewless gales! Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, Mont Blanc appears, — still, snowy, and serene — Its subject mountains their unearthly forms Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps, Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread And wind among the accumulated steeps; A desert peopled by the storms alone, Save when the eagle brings some hunter’s bone, And the wolf tracks her there — how hideously Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high, Ghastly, and scarred, and riven. — Is this the scene Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea Of fire envelop once this silent snow? None can reply — all seems eternal now. The wilderness has a mysterious tongue Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,

59. That] Which draft. 61. still, snowy, and serene —] every pyramid draft canc. 63. around] round draft. 67. desert peopled] [lifeless canc.] desert draft. 68. when] where draft. 69. tracks her there —] 1824; watches her [afar canc.] draft; tracts her there — 1817.1817 strongly suggests a transcription error; ‘watches’ in the draft is written with a gap between the c and h. ‘A wolf cannot track an eagle, of course, but would in fact watch (hungrily) from a distance’ (GM). S.’s journal-letter to Peacock of 22–5 July 1816 gives an account of wolves in the area of Chamonix (L i 501–2). 70. shapes] rocks draft. 71–4. Cp. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III xciii. S. draws in this passage on his knowledge of the geological theories of Buffon; see headnote. fire] fire, 1817. 76–83. These lines have attracted much critical and textual commentary, particularly in relation to the phrase in line 79, ‘But for such faith’. S.’s basic intended sense — ‘only by such a faith’ — is clarified by the reading in SDMS, ‘In such a faith’ (A text, line 80). S. clearly had difficulty with these lines, which are much-cancelled and heavily palimpsested in the draft; early and intermediate stages of composition include line 77: or faith so mild] faith above belief canc. a voice which to the wise canc. a voice not understood canc. Line 79: But for such faith with] With such faith canc. In such a faith draft. To such high thoughts of Nature reconciled canc. But for such canc. Even with his mother nature canc. S. wrote out the line again completely as ‘In such a faith with Nature reconciled — ’. Line 80: Ye have a voice great Mountains — to repeal draft Mountains ye have a voice not understood canc. Several critics have offered detailed explication of S.’s ‘But’ in line 79, including notably Joan Rees, RES n.s. xv (1964) 185–6, and John Kinnaird, N&Q n.s. xv (1968) 332–4. ‘But’ in the sense of ‘only’ or ‘just only’ is not unusual in S.: cp. e.g. Q Mab viii 97, PU III iv 194–7 and note. 76–83 S.’s experience of the Mountain in its landscape produces a conviction that institutionalised forms of political and social oppression and their human effects (large codes of fraud and woe) may be challenged by those who realise they have no sanction in a Divinity which may be inferred from nature. Nature, and its magnificent but enigmatic causal Power, may rather be understood either in a spirit of constructive scepticism (awful doubt, glossed as ‘reverent open-mindedness’ in Reiman (1977)), or of serene confidence (faith so mild) in an unChristian and morally indifferent Power, informing nature, which may be susceptible of human understanding and control.

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shelley: selected poems So solemn, so serene, that man may be But for such faith with nature reconciled; Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood By all, but which the wise, and great, and good Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

IV. The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams, 85 Ocean, and all the living things that dwell Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain, Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane, The torpor of the year when feeble dreams Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep 90 Holds every future leaf and flower; — the bound With which from that detested trance they leap; The works and ways of man, their death and birth, And that of him and all that his may be; All things that move and breathe with toil and sound 95 Are born and die; revolve, subside and swell. Power dwells apart in its tranquillity Remote, serene, and inaccessible: And this, the naked countenance of earth, On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains 100 Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains, Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice, 80–2. For S.’s earlier draft of these lines, see headnote. voice may suggest Coleridge’s influence; cp. the passage from his ‘Hymn: Before Sunrise’, quoted in headnote. 84. The draft at first read ‘The powers that move [above rule canc.] the world themselves are still/ Remote serene and inaccessible’. 86. daedal] Gk δαίδαλος, ‘cunningly wrought’. 87. fiery flood,] flouds of waterspout draft canc. 88. The sleep of winter when no human dream draft canc. torpor] slumber draft. feeble] deathlike draft canc. 94–7. Cp. Daemon i 286–91. 94. All things are changed with tumult and with sound/Wave rolling upon wave with restless swell draft canc. Locock 1911, following Rossetti 1870, places a comma after breathe so that ‘the alteration in sense gives the required contrast with 96’. But the required contrast is not between sound and silence but between the verbs of 95 and the serene Power that underlies evolution. 96–7. S.’s conception of the Power embodied in Mont Blanc suggests the account of Necessity in his note to Q Mab vi 198. 97. Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in Western Europe (4810m.). When S. saw it in 1816, it had been climbed only three times, in 1786 and 1787 (twice). 100. adverting] ‘heedful, attentive’ (Concordance). Cameron (1974) 250 cites Godwin, Political Justice Bk IV ch. ix, i 404: ‘Consciousness is a sort of supplementary reflection, by which the mind not only has the thought, but adverts to its own situation, and observes that it has it. Consciousness therefore, however nice the distinction, seems to be a second thought.’

8  mont blanc. lines written in the vale of chamouni

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Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power Have piled: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle, A city of death, distinct with many a tower And wall impregnable of beaming ice. Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing Its destined path, or in the mangled soil Branchless and shattered stand; the rocks, drawn down From yon remotest waste, have overthrown The limits of the dead and living world, Never to be reclaimed. The dwelling-place Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil; Their food and their retreat for ever gone, So much of life and joy is lost. The race Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream, And their place is not known. Below, vast caves Shine in the rushing torrents’ restless gleam, Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling Meet in the vale, and one majestic River, The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever Rolls its loud waters to the ocean waves, Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.

103. Frost] [Which canc.] frost draft. 105. distinct] ‘decorated, adorned’ (a latinism; cp. PU III iii 162). 107. flood] stream draft canc. 108. boundaries] silence draft canc.; desarts draft canc. sky] air draft canc. 109. perpetual] eternal draft canc. 110. mangled] ruined draft canc. 116–17. An absolute construction: ‘Their food being gone, the world is so much the poorer by losing the insects, beasts and birds’. is lost.] has fled draft canc. 118. man] man, 1817. 119. like] as draft. 120. And their place is not known] Cp. Psalms ciii 15–16, and Nahum iii 17 (a more specific echo, perhaps suggested by a recollection of Nahum i 5–6 in connection with the poem’s volcanic imagery). 121. rushing] gushing draft. torrents’] torrent’s 1817. 122. An unmistakable echo of Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’. Although S. did not receive his copy of Coleridge’s Christabel volume until 26 August 1816, too late to influence Mont Blanc, he may well have known the poem already in MS, or through Byron or even Southey; see Robinson 36–7. 123–4. one majestic River . . . distant lands] The Arve flows into Lake Geneva, from which the Rhône flows out through France to the Mediterranean. 123. the] one draft. 124. for ever] forever Chernaik. 125. Rolls] Bears draft. 126. swift] Chernaik reads ‘soft’ in the draft.

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V. Mont Blanc yet gleams on high: — the power is there, The still and solemn power of many sights And many sounds, and much of life and death. 130 In the calm darkness of the moonless nights, In the lone glare of day, the snows descend Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there, Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun, Or the star-beams dart through them: — Winds contend 135 Silently there, and heap the snow with breath Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home The voiceless lightning in these solitudes Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods Over the snow. The secret strength of things 140 Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee! And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, If to the human mind’s imaginings Silence and solitude were vacancy?

9 Ozymandias Composed probably between 26 and 28 December  1817. The sonnet was first published in The Examiner on 11 January 1818 over the name GLIRASTES, and was followed on 1 February by a sonnet of Horace Smith’s with the same title, introduced in these words: ‘The subject which suggested the beautiful Sonnet, in a late number, signed “Glirastes”, produced also the enclosed from another pen, which, if you deem it worthy insertion, is at your service’. The text of Smith’s sonnet — which was subsequently reprinted in his Amarynthus the Nympholept (1821) under the title ‘On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by itself in the deserts of Egypt, with the inscription inserted below’ — reads as follows (Examiner No. 527, p. 73):

128. sights] sights, 1817. 129. life and death.] good and ill draft canc. 131. In the lone glare] Or in the starlight draft canc.; Or the lone light draft. descend] flakes fall draft canc. 132. there,] then draft. 133. Nor when the sunlight wraps their flakes in flame draft canc. 139. The draft reads ‘Over the snow — The unpolluted dome/Of Heaven is not more silent. — ’ 140. to the infinite] rules the starry draft canc. 142. And what were thou] A characteristic construction in Coleridge, e.g. ‘The Eolian Harp’ 44; ‘The Destiny of Nations’ 60. 142–4. ‘What would your effect be if the mind did not detect (infer) the existence of this strength in your silent solitudes?’ (GM).

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-9

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Ozymandias In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone, Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws The only shadow that the Desart knows: — “I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone, “The King of Kings; this mighty City shows “The wonders of my hand.” — The City’s gone, — Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose The site of this forgotten Babylon. We wonder, — and some Hunter may express Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace, He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess What powerful but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place. Smith stayed for two nights after Christmas 1817 at Marlow, and the two sonnets were probably written then in friendly competition. Leigh Hunt’s later mistake in sending S.’s Ozymandias to Monckton Milnes as the Nile sonnet written in competition with himself and Keats (see Longman ii 349–50, no. 163) may have arisen partly from his remembrance that this sonnet had also been the product of a friendly contest. The title ‘The Revolt of Islam’ is written in ink at right angles to the draft of the poem in Nbk 5 f. 85v; this revised name was presumably adopted as a result of the conference with S.’s publisher on 15 December (see headnote to L&C), which helps to confirm the date. S.’s pseudonym is a jokey compound of Lat. Glis (dormouse) and Gk ἐραστής (lover) to make GLIRASTES, ‘dormouse-lover’. ‘The Dormouse’ was one of S.’s pet names for Mary S. (see Longman i 446). Much scholarly effort has been devoted to the question of S.’s sources for his famous poem. ‘Ozymandias’ is the Greek name for the notorious Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses II. His statue stood across the Nile from Luxor near the funereal temple at Thebes now known as the Ramesseum. It is computed to have been 60 feet high and to have weighed 1,000 tons. It now lies mutilated, and no inscription is visible. According to the Napoleonic Army’s 20-volume Description de l’Egypte (1809–26), by the early nineteenth century, the legs of the statue were completely destroyed. All versions of the lost inscription, whether in late Classical sources or from the accounts of travellers, appear to derive from Diodorus Siculus, whose description in his Library of History (i 47) itself paraphrases the historian Hecataeus’s Aigyptiaka: Ten stades from the first tombs, he says, in which, according to tradition, are buried the concubines of Zeus, stands a monument of the king known as Osymandias . . . beside the entrance are three statues, each of a single block of black stone from Syene, of which one, that is seated, is the largest of any in Egypt, the foot measuring over seven cubits, while the other two at the knees of this, the one on the right and the other on the left, daughter and mother respectively, are smaller than the first one mentioned. And it is not merely for its size that this work merits approbation, but it is also marvellous by reason of its artistic quality and excellent because of the nature of the stone, since in a block of so great a size there is not a single crack or blemish to be seen. The inscription upon it runs: ‘King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am

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But Diodorus’s account has frequently been attributed by travellers to a different Egyptian statue, the Colossus of Memnon at Thebes, renowned in Strabo’s account of the sound it was reputed to emit at dawn. This has led to bewildering confusion among the many accounts of travels in the East which may possibly have been in S.’s mind when composing the sonnet. S. is known to have had a taste for travel books since at least as early as his brief undergraduate career (see Hogg i 108), and may well have known one or more of the various works which have been proposed as sources. Most plausible among these are Dr Richard Pococke, A Description of the East and Some Other Countries (1742; also in vol. x of J. Pinkerton, General Collection of Voyages (1808–1814)), which includes striking illustrations and a number of descriptive passages which accord with details in the poem; Dominique Vivant Denon, Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte pendant les campagnes du general Bonaparte (2 vols, Paris 1802; trans. by Arthur Aikin as Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt . . . , 3 vols [2 vols in the American edition], 1803); E. Claude Savary, Letters on Egypt (English trans., 2 vols, 1787); Count Volney, Travels through Syria and Egypt . . . (English trans., 2 vols, 1793); and a number of other works, including Raleigh’s History of the World, James Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (5 vols, 1790), and Robert Walpole’s Memoirs (1817). In short, the account in Diodorus Siculus had filtered by many routes into the general literary culture in which S. was steeped, and he was undoubtedly familiar with the figure of Ozymandias and his remnants. What is needed is a stimulus rather than an obvious single source for the poem. S. could not have received his account from a real traveller: there was no such single isolated ruin in the Egyptian desert; the broken figure of Osymandias (Rameses II) is at the entrance to a temple, is seated, and is flanked by two other seated figures (indeed all the surviving large statues are seated, with or without torsos); none of the statues is of marble, brown or grey, which are drafted as alternative possibilities for description of the statue in S.’s working notes in Nbk 5; no inscription existed in S.’s day, nor could it have been deciphered if it had existed (Champollion used the Rosetta Stone as the key to Egyptian hieroglyphic script in 1822); sculptors of the nineteenth dynasty did not express character in the faces of their subjects. S.’s draft notes also strongly suggest that the ‘Traveller’ was not in the original conception of the sonnet; the draft first line reads ‘There stands by Nile a single pedestal’ (Nbk 5 f. 85v). S.’s sonnet is a composite work, drawing its details from various sources which have been thoroughly investigated, and based on Diodorus Siculus’ widely-quoted account of the statue and its inscription. One immediate stimulus may have been an article in the Quarterly Review xvi (October 1816) 1–27 (see especially pp. 10–1), reviewing Thomas Legh, Narrative of a Journey in Egypt and the Country beyond the Cataracts (1816). This article mentions all of the important recurring details in descriptions of the statue of Osymandias, including the inscription, together with reflections on the best-known traveller’s accounts (including those of Pococke and Denon). The Quarterly article definitely seems to be the main source for Horace Smith’s sonnet quoted above, and the two poems seem very likely to have shared the same occasion, as they both oddly spell ‘Ozymandias’ with a ‘z’ rather than an ‘s’; no other known source does this. Other possible immediate influences in late December 1817 may have included passages from Godwin’s Mandeville, which was published on 1 December 1817 (see notes). Suggestions by various commentators that S. may also have been influenced by the arrival at the British Museum of the sculpted head of a ‘younger Memnon’ are however not persuasive. A  colossal excavated head of Rameses II (known to contemporary antiquaries as the Younger Memnon) was sent by Joseph Banks through the agency of Henry Salt, British Consul-General in Egypt, via Alexandria in 1816; but by May 1819, Salt was still negotiating for its sale to the Museum, and it was not exhibited before

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1820, though some interest may have been excited by its expected arrival in 1817 and 1818 (see Edward Miller, That Noble Cabinet: A History of the British Museum (Athens, Ohio, 1974) 198–200). An account in the Quarterly Review xviii (1818) 368 cannot be a source for S.’s poem, as it contains a review of Hunt’s Foliage, which was published in March 1818. The rhymes are subtle; six are used in a pattern approximating to a Petrarchan octave/ sestet arrangement but with a late ‘turn’ after line 11 and a difficult pattern further complicated by half-rhymes. The octave and sestet are connected by the rhyme of line 7 with line 10. The formal handling is in keeping with other Romantic experiments in sonnet form in the Regency period, notably in Keats’s work, where the culminating instances are the stanza forms of the Odes. The poem’s implicit judgement on its subject is a version of a classical topos; cp. e.g. Simonides in Lyra Graeca (Book vi, No. 31): Who that hath understanding would praise Cleobulus the man of Lindus for his pitting of the might of a gravestone against the ever-running rivers and the flowers of the Spring, against the flame of sun and of golden moon, and against the eddies of the ocean-wave? All these are subject to the Gods; but a stone, even mortal hands may break it. This is the rede of a fool. (Loeb trans.) See also Diogenes Laertius, Lives i 89–90. The choice of text represents a minor problem. There is a carefully-written holograph fair copy in Nbk 5 f. 85r (S.’s cancelled first draft notes are on the reverse side, f. 85v; see BSM iii for a transcription), but S. evidently made substantive changes in lines 5, 9, and 12 before the sonnet was sent to the Examiner. The Examiner text, however, is carelessly printed, and Hunt introduced editorial emphases, as he also did with Horace Smith’s sonnet. The 1819 text is tidier, but presumably derives from the Examiner and was punctuated by Peacock in S.’s absence abroad. A compromise seems unavoidable: the text here reproduces S.’s careful faircopy, but incorporates the three revisions that he must have authorised. Text from Nbk 5 f. 85r, with three verbal revisions from Examiner No. 524, 11 January 1818, p. 24. Published in the Examiner No. 524, 11 January 1818 (reprinted unchanged in same No., 12 January, same page); 1819.

Ozymandias

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I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said — ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

¶ 9. 1. traveller] Traveller Examiner. land,] land 1819. The occasion of the poem cannot have been an actual meeting with a real traveller; see headnote. 2. said — ‘Two] said — “two Nbk 5; said, “Two Examiner; said: Two 1819. 3. desert . . . near] desert. Near Examiner, 1819. 4–5. Cp. Godwin, Mandeville (1817) (Mandeville on Clifford, ‘puffer of his own worth’): ‘His skin is smooth, and the contour of his body is sleek . . . the emblem of that overweening and venomous self-conceit by which he is inflated. I see the insolence of his gait, assumed to trample on all merit, but his own . . . I see the insidious curl of that lip . . . the hostile gesture, that effectually betrays the secret soul’ (Godwin Novels vi 173). For similar images elsewhere in S.’s poetry, cp. Q Mab ix 26–30; the description of Othman’s face in L&C V xxiii; and especially PU III iv 138, 168–76. sunk] sunk, Examiner, 1819. lip] Examiner, 1819; lips Nbk 5.

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shelley: selected poems Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away’. —

10  To Constantia (‘Thy voice, slow rising like a Spirit, lingers’) Composed between 29 April 1817, when ‘the piano arrives’ at Albion House (Mary Jnl i 168), and 19 January 1818, when Claire Clairmont recorded ‘Copy part of Verses to Constantia’ (Claire Jnl 79), most likely in December or early January (see Longman ii 328–9, 333–4). The poem was drafted in Nbk 5, and written out by S. into Claire’s nbk (Harvard Nbk 2) except for a final line, which he must have supplied when she copied the poem to send to the Oxford University and City Herald (‘O’). This last line is the only important variant between Harvard Nbk 2 and O, and Claire Clairmont, ironically, may not have been shown the only version known to posterity up to 1969. This is because it exists only in the draft, which Mary S. had been compelled to rely on for her reconstruction of the poem in 1824 under her own title ‘To Constantia, Singing’. Edward Silsbee, who came to own Harvard Nbk 2, noted below this poem — no doubt from Claire herself — ‘Written at Marlowe 1817 wd not let Mary see it sent it to Oxford Gazette or some Oxford or 6–8. GM: ‘those passions which, preserved on this broken image, still outlive the sculptor’s hand that copied (and derided) them, and the king’s living heart that nourished them’; ‘them’ in line 8 is a pronoun for ‘passions’ (from line 6), and the same pronoun is understood after ‘fed’. read] read, Examiner. them,] them 1819. fed;] fed: Examiner, 1819. 9. pedestal these words appear:] pedestal, this legend clear: Nbk 5. 10–11. Diodorus Siculus, Library of History i 47, records the inscription on the monument of Osymandias (the Greek name for Rameses II, 1304–1237 BC, 3rd king of the 19th dynasty of Egypt) as follows: Βασιλεὺς βασιλέων Ὀσυμανδύας εἰμί. εἰ δέ τις εἰδέναι βούλεται πηλίκος εἰμὶ καὶ ποῦ κεῖμαι, νικάτω τι τω̂ν ἐμω̂ν ἔργων (‘King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works’. Loeb trans.). ‘My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.’ Examiner; ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: 1819. Works] works Examiner; works, 1819. despair!] despair!’ 1819. 12–14. Cp. Peacock, Palmyra (2nd edition, 1812): Where shattered forms of ancient monarchs lie, Mid grass-grown halls, and falling colonnades Beneath the drifting sand, the clustering weed, Rest the proud relics of departed power. 12. beside remains.] remains beside. Nbk 5. 13. colossal Wreck,] Colossal Wreck, Examiner; colossal wreck, 1819. bare] bare, Examiner. 14. away’ —] away. Examiner, 1819.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-10

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county paper without his name’. See MYR v Introduction xviii for discussion of the possible whereabouts of Harvard Nbk 2 in the years following the departure of S. and his party from Marlow. The original published text remained undiscovered until Judith Chernaik traced and reprinted it in 1969 (see below). It appeared over the signature PLEYEL, perhaps (as suggested in 1975 404) from Haydn’s living pupil Ignaz Pleyel, who may plausibly have composed the music Claire had been singing, or from Henry Pleyel, the rationalist hero of Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Wieland, or The Transformation (New York 1798). Certainly, S.’s pet name for Claire Clairmont came from Brown’s Ormond; or, the Secret Witness (New York 1799), for ‘The heroine of this novel, Constantia Dudley, held one of the highest places, if not the very highest place, in Shelley’s idealities of female character’ (Peacock Works viii 77). Mary S. had probably read this novel in July (Mary Jnl i 177, which however identifies Mary’s entry ‘Read Miss E’s Harrington and ormond — Arthur Mervyn’ as a reference to Edgeworth’s Harrington, a tale, and Ormond, a tale). That Claire accepted the name is proved by the inscription on her former tomb at Antella near Florence, which gave her full name as ‘Clara Mary Constantia Jane Clairmont’ (N&Q 10th series, 8 October 1904, 284). The accomplished musician in Ormond was in fact Constantia’s rival, Helena Cleves, but ‘if ever human tones were qualified to convey the whole soul, they were those of Constantia’ when she did sing a ditty to herself in ch. xix. S. was extremely fond of vocal music, and had arranged at Marlow for Claire to resume lessons under a music master. Rogers describes the poem’s background and thematic significance in KSMB v (1953) 20–5; a good critical account is in Chernaik 52–8. Its affinities with Schiller’s ‘Laura am Klavier’ may be coincidental, but the influence of the ninth of Moore’s ‘Odes to Nea’ (1806) is less speculative: It felt as if her lips had shed A sigh around her, ere she fled, Which hung, as on a melting lute, When all the silver chords are mute, There lingers still a trembling breath After the note’s luxurious death, A shade of song, a spirit air Of melodies which had been there! (5–12) S. is known to have admired these Odes (see Mary S.’s letter to Thomas Moore, 18 January 1839, Mary L ii 308). Working from an erratic draft, Mary S. mistook the sequence of the stanzas, so that earlier eds have printed them in the order 4, 3, 1, 2. Text from The Oxford University and City Herald, 31 January 1818. Published in The Oxford University and City Herald, 31 January  1818, reprinted in TLS 6 February  1969, p.  140; 1824 143–4 (lines 35–44, 23–33, 1–22, from Nbk 5, ff. 36v–34v), revised by Locock, Locock Ex 60–2 (adding line 34); Boston Herald, 21 December 1925, p. 12 (text from Harvard Nbk 2), corrected in TLS 17 January 1935, p. 33, and 11 April 1935, p. 244; Chernaik, 196–7.

To Constantia Thy voice, slow rising like a Spirit, lingers O′ershadowing me with soft and lulling wings; ¶ 10. 1. Spirit,] Harvard Nbk 2; spirit, O. 1–2. (a) Constantia’s voice is on my soul — it lingers/upon the heart like loves oershadowing wings (b) Her voice is hovering oer my soul — it lingers/Oershadowing it with soft & lulling wings (alternative drafts in Nbk 5; see BSM iii 141). 2. me] it Harvard Nbk 2 (An inadvertence in copying the draft).

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15

20

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shelley: selected poems The blood and life within thy snowy fingers Teach witchcraft to the instrumental strings. My brain is wild, my breath comes quick, The blood is listening in my frame, And thronging shadows fast and thick Fall on my overflowing eyes, My heart is quivering like a flame; As morning dew, that in the sunbeam dies, I am dissolved in these consuming ecstasies. I have no life, Constantia, but in thee Whilst, like the world-surrounding air, thy song Flows on, and fills all things with melody: Now is thy voice a tempest, swift and strong, On which, as one in trance, upborne Secure o’er woods and waves I sweep Rejoicing, like a cloud of morn: Now’tis the breath of summer’s night Which, where the starry waters sleep Round western isles with incense-blossoms bright, Lingering, suspends my soul in its voluptuous flight. A deep and breathless awe, like the swift change Of dreams unseen, but felt in youthful slumbers, Wild, sweet, yet incommunicably strange, Thou breathest now, in fast ascending numbers: The cope of Heaven seems rent and cloven By the enchantment of thy strain, And o’er my shoulders wings are woven

12. thee] Harvard Nbk 2; thee; O. (The listener’s dependence on the singer is only while her song lasts, as the draft emphasises; O’s semicolon would make it unconditional). 13. world-surrounding] This adjective predates the earliest usage recorded in OED; cp. PU I 661. 16. trance, upborne] Harvard Nbk 2, Draft; trance upborne, O, Chernaik. 21. incense-blossoms] Harvard Nbk 2; incense blossoms O, Chernaik. 24. slumbers,] slumbers; O; slumbers Harvard Nbk 2, Nbk 5. A semicolon is impossible, as awe, qualified by the adjectives of line 25, is the object of Thou breathest. 26. numbers] ‘Lyrical measures’ (cp. the ‘plaintive numbers’ of Wordsworth’s ‘Solitary Reaper’). 27. the cope of Heaven] the deep Earth Nbk 5 canc. 29–34. And o’er my shoulders . . . madmen learn:] A Platonic image: ‘Such a one [a beauty-lover], as soon as he beholds the beauty of this world, is reminded of true beauty, and his wings begin to grow; then is he fain to lift his wings and fly upward; yet he has not the power, but inasmuch as he gazes upward like a bird, and cares nothing for the world beneath, men charge it upon him that he is demented’ (Phaedrus 249e).

11  sonnet (‘lift not the painted veil which those who live’) 30

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To follow its sublime career, Beyond the mighty moons that wane Upon the verge of Nature’s utmost sphere, Till the world’s shadowy walls are past, and disappear. Cease, cease — for such wild lessons madmen learn: Long thus to sink — thus to be lost and die Perhaps is death indeed — Constantia turn! Yes! in thine eyes a power like light doth lie, Even though the sounds its voice that were Between thy lips are laid to sleep — Within thy breath and on thy hair Like odour it is lingering yet — And from thy touch like fire doth leap: Even while I write my burning cheeks are wet — Such things the heart can feel and learn, but not forget!

11  Sonnet (‘Lift not the painted veil which those who live’) Printed by Mary S. in 1839 with the Poems of 1818; dating is difficult, but possibly composed during the first week of July 1818 (although eds, e.g. Reiman (1977) generally place the poem somewhat later). Four versions survive: a draft in Nbk 11 (its position and context in the nbk do not suggest any conclusive dating; see BSM xviii 24–5, 281); a holograph fair copy on pages detached from Harvard Nbk 1 and now in the Morgan Library & Museum (see MYRS v Introduction xxii–xxiv, 76, 170 for discussion of this MS and its implications); and two posthumously-printed texts, 1824 and 1839. The descent of the text is perplexing, as Mary S. printed in 1824, and again in 1839, with one entirely different line, a version conspicuously better than S.’s fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1, which itself was copied into that nbk presumably some two years after the poem’s composition. Mary S.’s own source or sources are unknown. It is possible that the mood of isolated and disappointed dejection in the second part of the sonnet is related to the vindictive personal attack on S. as author of RofI in the Quarterly, news of which reached S. in early July 1818. The poem shares with Alas, this is not what I thought life was (see Longman ii 415–7, no. 174), which is drafted a few pages later in Nbk 11, the possible influence of Barthelemy, which Mary and S. were reading in June and July 1818 (Mary Jnl i 215–21). If a connection with RofI is valid, S. might have returned to this sonnet at the time of his proposing a revised edition of RofI to Ollier (16 February, 25 September 1821; L ii 263, 354). DP, submitted to Ollier at the same time, also introduces the 34. for such wild lessons madmen learn:] for of such things do maniacs tell — Nbk 5 canc. 35. to sink] Chernaik notes (Chernaik 55) that this ‘falling away, which follows ecstasy’ anticipates much in S.’s later poetry, e.g. Epipsychidion 587–91. 38–9. ‘Even though the sounds that constituted the Power’s voice are now silent’. 40–1. Cp. Sydney Owenson, The Missionary: an Indian Tale (1811) i 161: ‘her dark and flowing tresses left an odour on the air, which penetrated his senses’. S. had been deeply influenced by this novel in 1811 (L i 107). 44. Omitted in Harvard Nbk. Alas that the torn heart can bleed but not forget Nbk 5.

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‘veil’ symbol (‘and whether [poetry] spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being’; Prose 295). The sonnet may also, or alternatively, have been revised as one of the accompanying poems sent with J&M to Ollier in November 1820 as one of S.’s ‘saddest verses [all] raked up into one heap’ (L ii 246; see headnote to J&M). Besides improving lines 12–3, S. may perhaps have inserted an alternative version above line 6 and then underlined the original to indicate re-instatement (possibly after realising the awkward repetition of there in lines 2 and 6, referring to different locations). If Mary S. mistook the underlining for a cancellation when preparing 1824, she may have realised her error when preparing 1839. Otherwise, it is hard to explain the appearance of line 6 in 1824, which does not occur either in the draft or in Harvard Nbk 1 (or in Mary S.’s own subsequent editions). The text here adopted is 1839, on the hypothesis that this text probably derives from S.’s own best-revised version. The poem’s central symbol has attracted commentary which discerns a heavily Platonic influence; see e.g. Notopoulos 230–1, Rogers 122ff. But S.’s veil symbol here is probably not from Plato (who appears never to employ it in this form) but from Lucretius, who explains how visual appearances are thrown off from objects as thin films, And yellow, red, and rust-coloured canopies (vela) do this conspicuously, when they flap and billow, spread abroad on poles and crossbeams over a roomy theatre; for then in waves of their own colour they stain the audience in the pit below and the whole face of the stage and the crush of dignitaries. And the more completely enclosed the sides of the theatre, the more the whole interior, flooded with beauty, rejoices in being deprived of daylight. (De Re. Nat. iv 75–83) S. was no doubt reminded of this passage by Barthelemy, in which Philocles condoles with an Egyptian priest who, having tried ‘to penetrate the origin and end of all things, said to me, with a sigh: Woe to him who shall attempt to lift up the veil of nature! And I will say: Woe to the man who shall refuse to yield to that theatrical illusion which our prejudices and necessities have diffused over all objects! Soon shall his soul, enfeebled and languishing, find itself plunged in the abyss of nihility, the most dreadful of all punishments. At these words, tears fell from his eyes . . .’ (Barthelemy vi 397–8). The sonnet is formally interesting in its inversion of the Petrarchan structure, and in its experimental rhymes. Text from 1839 iii 157. Published in 1824 225.

Sonnet: ‘Lift not the painted veil’ Lift not the painted veil which those who live Call Life; though unreal shapes be pictured there, And it but mimic all we would believe With colours idly spread, — behind, lurk Fear ¶ 11. 1. the painted veil] Identical imagery is used in PU III iv 190–2, with a quite different meaning (see B. P. Kurtz, The Pursuit of Death (New York 1933) 180–3): in PU III, the veil is a ‘loathsome mask’ of false creeds and conventions, discarded after social revolution; here the veil divides the living from the dead, as in The Voyage (Longman i 247–57, no. 89) 59–62, Mont Blanc 53–4, and The pale, the cold, and the moony smile (Longman i 424–7, no. 93) 25–8. The passage from Barthelemy quoted in the headnote above explicitly distinguishes the two meanings. those who live] men deceived Nbk 11 canc. 4. spread, —] spread: — 1824.

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And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave Their shadows, o’er the chasm, sightless and drear. I knew one who had lifted it — he sought, For his lost heart was tender, things to love, But found them not, alas! nor was there aught The world contains, the which he could approve. Through the unheeding many he did move, A splendour among shadows, a bright blot Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.

6. The shadows, which the world calls substance, there. 1824. Nbk 11, Harvard Nbk 1 and 1839 all read as the text, and the source of 1824’s line is mysterious; see headnote. The 1824 meaning must be that it is only the speculations of the living that invent the circumstances of an afterlife. sightless] ‘Impenetrable to vision’. 7–9. he sought . . . found them not] ‘With a spirit . . . trembling and feeble thro its tenderness, I have every where sought [ ] &  found only repulse and disappointment’ (‘On Love’, quoted from Nbk 6 f. 2; S.’s essay may have been written in the same week of July 1818 as Lift not the painted veil). 7. knew] met Nbk 6 canc. who had lifted] who lifted 1824 (probably a misprint). 11–14. The draft in Nbk 11 ends: Like an unheeded shadow he did move Among the careless crowd that marked him not I should be happier had I never known This mournful man — he was himself alone As Wasserman 181 notes, ‘ “Being himself alone” was S.’s standard phrase for self-possession, or for absoluteness and autonomy’; e.g. Sonnet: Political Greatness (Longman iii 618–25, no. 342) 10–11, 13–14: ‘Man who man would be,/Must rule the empire of himself .  .  ./.  .  . quelling the anarchy/Of hopes & fears, — being himself alone — ’; and see also Suns and stars are rolling ever (Lines connected with Hellas, Longman v, no. 411 Appendix C). 12–13. Originally in Nbk 6: ‘a blight/Cast on the sunny world, — a wave’. Then blight was canc. for blot, and sunny for gloomy; presumably, the first cancellation suggested the text’s bright blot. Wasserman 67 explains the paradox of bright blot, a splendour among shadows, as expressing the misanthropy of a too-eager idealist; but the imagery can work the other way: in Adonais 280–6, idealism is subduable only by overwhelming despair. 12. A splendour among shadows,] a shadow among shadows — Harvard Nbk 1. S.’s splendour is borrowed from Dante’s splendor: e.g. Paradiso xiii 52–4: ‘Ciò che non more e ciò che può morire/non e se non splendor di quella idea/che partorisce, amando, il nostro sire’ (‘That which dies not,/And that which can die, are but each the beam/Of that idea, which our Sovereign Sire/Engendereth loving’, trans. Cary), where it means the light reflected by or induced into secondary things by the supreme Light. The word supports a late date for the revision of the sonnet, as this usage seems confined to the poetry of 1821–2. 13. Cast on this gloomy world — a thing which strove Harvard Nbk 1. 14. the Preacher] Ecclesiastes, who declared that all was vanity, even the search for wisdom: ‘Then I beheld all the work of God, that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun: because though a man labour to seek it out, yet he shall not find it; yea further; though a wise man think to know it, yet shall he not be able to find it’ (viii 17).

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12  The Two Spirits. An Allegory As Charles Robinson demonstrates (Robinson 263), this draft must predate those of PU Act II (spring 1819) in Nbk 11. It begins on the page following Behold, sweet Sister mine, (Longman ii 423–4, no. 182) to which it relates, and is probably of the same date: late September or early October 1818 (its inclusion by Mary S. among ‘Poems written in 1820’ is an error). At the top of f. 13 is a jotted reminder of the epigraph for Alastor: ‘the good die first — ’. Between the original opening lines, which are cancelled — Two genii stood before me in a dream Seest thou not the shades of even [BSM xviii reads Wert for Seest] — S. has inserted the present title, evidently after completing the poem and in a different ink, together with headings ‘1st Spirit’ and ‘2nd Spirit’ to the first and second stanzas, respectively, also in different ink. As these headings were hasty additions, it may be assumed that similar headings were implied, though not added, for stanzas 3 and 4, and possibly also for 5 and 6; however, the last two stanzas seem to be detached reflections arising from the Spirits’ debate rather than a continuation of it, or of the Second Spirit’s argument, and most eds after 1846 rule them off from the first four. The two Spirits, or genii, are closely akin to the ‘two shapes’ of PU I 752, the opposite but hitherto inseparable twins Love and Pain (see headnote to Behold, sweet Sister mine, Longman ii 423, no. 181). On f. 2 of Nbk 11 are the draft lines: ‘Twin nurslings of the [BSM xviii reads this] all sustaining air/Whom one nest sheltered’, a version of PU I 752–4: Behold’st thou not two shapes from the east and west Come, as two doves to one belovèd nest, Twin nurslings of the all-sustaining air — an image deriving from Dante’s Inferno v 82–4, where the doves were Paolo and Francesca, whose true love had brought only calamity. Text from Nbk 11 ff. 13–7. The poem is unpunctuated in MS except at lines 2, 8, 12, 32, 39 and 44. Published in 1824 179–80; Chernaik 239–42.

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First Spirit Thou who plumed with strong desire Would float above the Earth — beware! Shadow tracks thy flight of fire — Night is coming. Bright are the regions of the air

¶ 12. 1. Thou] Oh thou 1824; O Thou Chernaik. ‘O Thou’, ‘Floatest’ (line 2), and ‘A shadow’ (line 3) are canc. by similar oblique strokes in Nbk 11 (although BSM xviii does not note the canc. of ‘O thou’) and ‘Thou’ is capitalised, so all three cancellations are assumed to stand. 2. Would] ‘The auxiliary verb agrees with “who” rather than “thou” ’ (Chernaik). Mary S. first regularised the form to ‘Wouldst’ in her errata list to 1824. 3. Shadow] A shadow 1824, Chernaik (see note to line 1).

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-12

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And when winds and beams [  ] It were delight to wander there — Night is coming!

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Second Spirit The deathless stars are bright above. If I should cross the shade of night Within my heart is the lamp of love And that is day — And the moon will smile with gentle light On my golden plumes where’er they move, The meteors will linger around my flight And make night day. First Spirit But if the whirlwinds of darkness waken Eclipse and lightning and stormy rain See, the bounds of the air are shaken, Night is coming; And swift the clouds of the hurricane Yon declining sun have overtaken, The clash of the hail sweeps o’er the plain — Night is coming. Second Spirit I see the black cloud, I hear the sound — I’ll sail on the flood of the tempest dark With the calm within and light around Which make night day; And thou when the gloom is deep and stark

6. No rhyme-word in Nbk 11. 13. gentle] silver Nbk 11 canc. Stanzas 3–6 have no speaker headings in Nbk 11. 18. Eclipse] Hail 1824, Chernaik; in Nbk 11 S. first wrote ‘The hail and the’, which is canc. with ‘Hail’ written in below, either canc. or underlined. ‘Eclipse’ is written in above. 21. And swift the clouds] The red swift clouds 1824. 22. declining] [?darkening] BSM xviii. 25. I see the black cloud, I] I see the light, and I 1824; I see the glare and I Chernaik; I see & rejoice Nbk 11 canc.; see BSM xviii for a differing transcription. Stanza 5. S. seems to recall legends of Mount Pilatus in the canton of Lucerne, perhaps read in the guide-book for his Alpine visit of 1816. J. G. Ebel’s Manuel du Voyageur en Suisse, available in several editions and in three languages in 1816, describes a strange and gigantic pine-tree near Pilatus, and a pool once known as ‘la Mare-infernale’; from there a fountain of vapour sometimes rises to the summit of the mountain, ‘se dilate, et devient enfin si grande et si formidable qu’elle finit par crever sur les contrées voisines au milieu de l’orage et des plus terribles coups de tonnerre . . . on prétendoit qu’il suffisoit d’en approcher pour mettre Pilate en fureur, et que dans ses transports il excitoit la tempête, la grèle et les orages’ (Zurich, iv (1811), 36–7). The second legend (‘Some say . . .’) may be S.’s own invention.

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13  Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October, 1818 The Advertisement to 1819, dated 20 December 1818, concludes with this paragraph: I do not know which of the few scattered poems I left in England will be selected by my bookseller, to add to this collection. One, which I sent from Italy, was written after a day’s excursion among those lovely mountains which surround what was once the retreat, and where is now the sepulchre, of Petrarch. If any one is inclined to condemn the insertion of the introductory lines, which image forth the sudden relief of a state of deep despondency by the radiant visions disclosed by the sudden burst of an Italian sunrise in autumn on the highest peak of those delightful mountains, I can only offer as my excuse, that they were not erased at the request of a dear friend, with whom added years of intercourse only add to my apprehension of its value, and who would have had more right than any one to complain, that she has not been able to extinguish in me the very power of delineating sadness. 33. is] 1824; hangs Nbk 11 uncanc. alt., Chernaik; [?hans] BSM xviii. 37. leagued] languid 1824, Chernaik, BSM xviii. The word is dubious in Nbk 11, but the storm’s pursuit is unrelaxing, and its banded powers were stressed in lines 17–24. 41. dry] day BSM xviii. and] Omitted in Nbk 11. 45. a shape] a silver shape 1824. Nbk 11 has canc. alt. adjectives silver/winged before shape. 45–6. Cp. Song for Tasso (Longman ii 445–7, no. 186) 15–17: ‘Sometimes I see before me flee/A silver-shining form like thee/O Leonora’.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-13

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Lines 56–112 survive at the Huntington Library as part of Mary S.’s transcript for the printer (HM 331, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; see MYRS iii 113–20), so her jnl entries for 18–19 December, ‘write out Shelley’s Poem . . . Finish Copying his Poem’ (Mary Jnl i 244–5) probably refer to this poem, or to R&H, or to both, as the volume’s other contents were already in England. The date of the Advertisement was presumably the date of despatch to Ollier. The poem itself is dated pointedly in the title, ‘October, 1818’. The poem celebrates a single ‘island’ of happiness, temporal and geographical, in a sea of calamity, and if the physical descriptions were from life, the day celebrated can be identified. Lines 321–6 describe an autumn sunset with an ‘infantine moon’ and the planet Venus so close to the moon as to seem to minister light to it. There was a new moon on 30 September, and a striking conjunction of the newborn moon with Venus occurred near the western horizon on 3 October, when about two hours after sunset Venus was passed within less than one diameter of the moon (the editors are indebted to Dr Desmond King-Hele for full statistics and astronomical details). Shelley was at ‘I Cappucini’ from 30 September through 10 October, and this date accords with S.’s prose description in his next recorded letter (8 October) of Venice ‘with its domes  & turrets glittering in a long line over the blue waves’ and of the view from the Euganean Hills of ‘the wide flat plains of Lombardy, in which we see the sun  & moon rise  & set,  & the evening star,  & all the golden magnificence of autumnal clouds’ (L i 42–3). The 3 October was ten days after Clara Shelley (Mary Wollstonecraft’s granddaughter) had died in Venice (24 September); it was, moreover, within a week of the anniversary of Fanny Godwin’s suicide, which Fanny herself had timed for the anniversary eve of her mother’s second suicide attempt in 1795 (10 October; see Margaret Tims, Mary Wollstonecraft: a Social Pioneer, 1976, 293–6). These calamities help to explain the obscure ‘introductory lines’ of the poem and Mary S.’s special interest in them, revealed in the Advertisement, as well as some of its imagery, such as the mariner (line 3), the ‘northern sea’ (lines 45–6), the fratricidal King (lines 57–9), and the Norwegian forest fire (lines 269–79). It has been argued that the poem’s opening section is heavily autobiographical, but such speculation must be qualified by the implication of lines 45–6, which are taken (as Chernaik 80–1 suggests) from Sophocles’s famous Chorus deploring human adversity in Oedipus at Colonus (1239–44): ‘Meanwhile this wretched man, not I alone — as some northern shore struck by waves in winter is shaken on all sides — so him too on the shore the terrible ruinous breakers continually shake’. This reference (here rendered literally) universalises the adversity (οὐκ ἐγὼ μόνος); S.’s introductory lines appear deliberately to generalise from the specific, very distressing circumstances of his personal experience during the period of the poem’s composition. Peacock had translated some of the Sophoclean lines in 1812–13 (Peacock Works vii 228–9), and incorporated into his Rhododaphne (v 21–4) earlier lines which (according to Peacock) S. was always repeating to himself at the time of his separation from Harriet; and Mary S. quoted six translated lines in The Last Man (1826: iii ch. 4; see MSW iv 290). Other elements from this Chorus are echoed in the present poem (see note to line 8). S.’s ‘northern sea’ probably does have personal as well as universal bearing. Reference to Harriet S. (drowned in London), or to Fanny Godwin (who took poison near the Bristol Channel) is implausible. Clara S. had just been buried on the Lido at Venice, where there were rushes and sea-mews; but although the Adriatic is traditionally stormy (see e.g. Horace, Odes II xiv 13–14), its appearance as a sea ‘which tempests shake eternally’ would invalidate that of the ‘level quivering line/Of the waters crystalline’ two verse-paragraphs later, and no English refugee could refer to the Adriatic as a ‘northern sea’. The personal allusion may rather be the same as that to the ‘remote and lonely shore’ of Her voice did quiver as we parted (Longman i 550–3, no. 126),

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and the sea would then be the Baltic or the Skagerrak, where Mary Wollstonecraft in her despair had often longed to die: How often, passing through the rocks, I have thought, ‘But for this child, I would lay my head on one of them, and never open my eyes again!’ With a heart feelingly alive to all the affections of my nature — I have never met with one, softer than the stone that I would fain take for my last pillow. (Letters to Imlay lxv: MWW vi 427) In her letters to Imlay, she repeatedly compared her life to that of a sailor in a storm (‘I am again tossed on the troubled billows of life’, ‘No poor tempest-tossed mariner ever more earnestly longed to arrive at his port’; Letters to Imlay lxvii: MWW vi 429), and this metaphor, based on quotations from her letters, had been taken up in a verse biography which S. is likely to have known, as it went into a second edition in 1816. This was The Wanderer in Norway, with other Poems, by Thomas Brown, Professor of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh University, who was well informed and who based his imagery, as S. does in lines 1–65, on quotations from Mary W.’s letters, such as ‘. . . how can I expect that she [Fanny] will be shielded, when my naked bosom has had to brave continually the pitiless storm?’ (Brown p. 50n): Dim on the prow, what form, with bosom bare And step disorder’d, haunts the midnight air; As tho’ with passion’s fiercer swell opprest, She sought the tempest to her burning breast? (Brown p. 47) D. H. Reiman (‘Structure, Symbol, and Theme in “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills” ’, PMLA lxxvii (1962) 404–13) takes the whole of lines 1–65 to be about S. himself only, noting that ‘The spirit of the dead person is . . . clearly masculine’, and identifying the ‘One white skull and seven dry bones’ as symbolising ‘his old self . . . lying dead on a tempest-torn beach’, the bones representing ‘the seven years between his expulsion from Oxford (March 1811) and his final departure from England (March 1818)’. These dates seem arbitrary, especially for a poem begun in October, and in the light of the Sophocles Chorus, little importance attaches to the sex of the mariner or of the dead: S.’s despondency in October 1818 relates to several generations. No exclusive identifications are plausible; but the careful ambiguity of lines 60–5 allows one reading to be that while the remains are mourned by Nature, no lament is deserved by the mere soulless body (the ‘sunless vapour’) that once inspired the unburied one with emotion and thought. Private miseries are caused by selfish relationships (‘Senseless is the breast, and cold,/ Which relenting love would fold’), just as social calamity results from distorted social attitudes (‘The despot’s rage, the slave’s revenge’). The ‘seven dry bones’ could be interpreted as the seven surviving items of Mary Wollstonecraft’s wasted potential, in the Posthumous Works Godwin published after her death. The one existing leaf of printer’s copy, sold from Ollier’s papers by Puttick & Simpson (19 July 1877) and now in the Huntington Library, may help to confirm that more than one figure was involved in lines 45–65. It is in Mary S.’s hand, and the verso, containing 30 lines, is numbered 4; presumably, p. 1 carried the title so that only the verso pages were numbered. Unfortunately, this leaf is damaged, but the first six lines of the recto read: ]?ter was overblown ] wrecked limbs — but there came none Then he laughed in [blank] The grey hairs crawled on every limb Or the whirlwind up an down Howling, like a slaughtered town (HM331r)

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Lines 1–4 are cancelled by a vertical line and by many diagonal erasures, probably in S.’s hand. Mary S. seems to have been transcribing from an early draft (as she could not decipher some of line 3) and inadvertently copied some material S. had discarded. Its meaning is obscure, but it suggests that unburied bones/sunless vapour parallels slaughtered town/king in glory and senseless breast/relenting love; i.e. that a relationship and not a single figure is involved. The poem depends so entirely on locality, and S. was so soon to be overwhelmed by the scenery of Rome and Naples, that most of it was probably written within a few days of 3 October. But if copied and sent for printing only late in December, parts could have been completed later; in particular, lines 1–65, which have affinities with parts of J&M, may have been literally an ‘insertion’, as the Advertisement hints. The ‘Byron’ section (lines 167–205) was certainly composed after the despatch of the rest, perhaps in consequence of Peacock’s (lost) comments on Childe Harold iv, to which S. replied on 17–18 December (L ii 57–8): if S. had had the poem in front of him he would not have misquoted the key for the passage’s insertion (see note to lines 165–6) — indeed, such a two-line key would not then have been needed. The seven-syllable lines of S.’s poem suggest various similarities with parts of PU I (on which S. was working at the same time), both in thematic organisation (a long-term political optimism; the desire for a peaceful haven from suffering, out of human and social time) and particularly in a formal affinity with some of the Furies’ choruses. These choruses themselves recall among other influences some of Coleridge’s poems, such as ‘Fire, Famine and Slaughter’, and ‘The Ancient Mariner’ whose influence is also evident in the Lines. More generally, the poem ultimately derives, like many other influential poems of the period, from the meditative ‘prospect poetry’ of the eighteenth century, some of which itself deploys the basic device of a hill-top survey, combining personal reflection with historical and political concerns. The use of a short lyric line is not uncommon in the genre, for instance in the poetry of Dyer. More direct influences include the recent meetings with Byron in Venice, together with those poems of Byron which deal with the history and present situation of the city, the famous passage in Childe Harold iv, and the ‘Ode to Venice’. The text Mary S. transcribed for publication was apparently not a fair copy, so her punctuation was very erratic, and S. did not trouble to add it himself, though he made verbal corrections; much pointing must therefore have been supplied by the printer or (as Forman conjectured) by Peacock, who probably saw 1819 through the press. But lines 167–205 are printed below from the Yale MS in S.’s own hand (see MYRS viii 186–93), despite the lack of conformity in accidentals with the rest of the poem; all eds since Forman have followed this course, and it would be perverse not to do likewise, especially as the MS corrects an unnoticed error in line 169. Text from 1819; lines 56–112 corrected from HM 331, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California (MYRS iii 119–20) and lines 167–205 from Tinker 1897, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (Yale MS; facsimile and transcription in MYRS viii 190–3). Published in 1819.

Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October, 1818

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Many a green isle needs must be In the deep wide sea of misery, Or the mariner, worn and wan, Never thus could voyage on Day and night, and night and day,

¶ 13. 1. a green isle] The Colli Euganei form an isolated mountainous group in the plain west of Padua. S. in Venice described them as ‘Those famous Euganean hills, which bear,/As seen from Lido through the harbour piles,/The likeness of a clump of peaked isles’ (J&M 77–9).

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shelley: selected poems Drifting on his weary way, With the solid darkness black Closing round his vessel’s track; Whilst above the sunless sky, Big with clouds, hangs heavily, And behind the tempest fleet Hurries on with lightning feet, Riving sail, and cord, and plank, Till the ship has almost drank Death from the o’er-brimming deep; And sinks down, down, like that sleep When the dreamer seems to be Weltering through eternity; And the dim low line before Of a dark and distant shore Still recedes, as ever still Longing with divided will, But no power to seek or shun, He is ever drifted on O’er the unreposing wave To the haven of the grave. What, if there no friends will greet; What, if there no heart will meet His with love’s impatient beat; Wander wheresoe’er he may, Can he dream before that day To find refuge from distress In friendship’s smile, in love’s caress? Then ’twill wreak him little woe Whether such there be or no: Senseless is the breast, and cold, Which relenting love would fold; Bloodless are the veins and chill Which the pulse of pain did fill; Every little living nerve That from bitter words did swerve Round the tortured lips and brow, Are like sapless leaflets now Frozen upon December’s bough. On the beach of a northern sea

8. round] The adverbs defining the direction of the threats, round (8), above (9), behind (11), before (19), generally correspond to the sources of menace in Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 1245–9: night (encompassing), moon (overhead), evening (West), morning (East). 27. What, if . . .] Imitated from the rhetorical questions in Pope’s ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’ (who has committed suicide) 55–62. 36. ‘Cold is that breast which warm’d the world before’ (Pope, ‘Elegy’ 33). 44–5. There is no space between these lines in 1819.

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Which tempests shake eternally, As once the wretch there lay to sleep, Lies a solitary heap, One white skull and seven dry bones, On the margin of the stones, Where a few grey rushes stand, Boundaries of the sea and land: Nor is heard one voice of wail But the sea-mews, as they sail O’er the billows of the gale; Or the whirlwind up and down Howling, like a slaughtered town, When a king in glory rides Through the pomp of fratricides: Those unburied bones around There is many a mournful sound; There is no lament for him, Like a sunless vapour, dim, Who once clothed with life and thought What now moves nor murmurs not. Aye, many flowering islands lie In the waters of wide Agony: To such a one this morn was led My bark by soft winds piloted: ’Mid the mountains Euganean I stood listening to the paean With which the legioned rooks did hail The sun’s uprise majestical; Gathering round with wings all hoar, Through the dewy mist they soar Like grey shades, till th’eastern heaven

54. sea-mews] sea-mews’ Locock 1911. Reiman (PMLA lxxvii (1962) 407) traces the word (meaning ‘seagulls’, i.e. the common gull, Lams canus) to Paradise Lost, but it was common in the early nineteenth century, and S. had found it in e.g. Eustace i 177–8: ‘That bold independence which filled a few lonely islands, the abode of sea-mews and of cormorants, with population and with commerce, is bowed into slavery; and the republic of Venice . . . is now an empty name’. 57–9. a slaughtered town . . . fratricides] Probably based on the bloodbath wreaked by Christian II of Denmark (the ‘Christiern’ of Q Mab) after his entry into Stockholm on the conquest of Sweden in 1520. pomp] triumphal celebration. 68. this morn] Probably 4 October 1818 (see headnote). 70. Euganean] Not stressed on the second syllable as in Italian, but Anglicised by stressing on the third, as in ‘Caribbean’. 71. paean] Hymn to Apollo. 72. the legioned rooks] In the mist, S. mistook the jackdaws which still haunt the ruins of Este Castle for rooks, which are not found in Italy. Rooks are normally birds of good omen. 76. th’eastern] The elision is in 1819 and in Mary S.’s transcript for the printer.

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shelley: selected poems Bursts, and then, as clouds of even, Flecked with fire and azure, lie In the unfathomable sky, So their plumes of purple grain, Starred with drops of golden rain, Gleam above the sunlight woods, As in silent multitudes On the morning’s fitful gale Through the broken mist they sail, And the vapours cloven and gleaming Follow, down the dark steep streaming, Till all is bright, and clear, and still, Round the solitary hill.

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Beneath is spread like a green sea The waveless plain of Lombardy, Bounded by the vaporous air, Islanded by cities fair; Underneath day’s azure eyes 95 Ocean’s nursling, Venice lies, A peopled labyrinth of walls, Amphitrite’s destined halls, Which her hoary sire now paves With his blue and beaming waves. 100 Lo! the sun upsprings behind, Broad, red, radiant, half reclined On the level quivering line Of the waters crystalline; And before that chasm of light, 105 As within a furnace bright, Column, tower, and dome, and spire, Shine like obelisks of fire, Pointing with inconstant motion From the altar of dark ocean 110 To the sapphire-tinted skies;

82. sunlight] The usual contemporary form of mod. ‘sunlit’. 89. Round the weird and lonesome hill. Mary S.’s transcript, alt. in S.’s hand. 90–3. S. wrote to Peacock from ‘I Capuccini’ on 8 October: ‘We see before [us] the wide flat plains of Lombardy, in which we see the sun & moon rise and set, & the evening star, & all the golden magnificence of autumnal clouds’ (L ii 43). 97. Amphitrite] Daughter of Oceanus, from whom she will inherit the halls of Venice when the sea engulfs them. 100. behind] I.e. behind Venice, to the East. 108. with inconstant motion] I.e. quivering in the heated air currents.

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As the flames of sacrifice From the marble shrines did rise, As to pierce the dome of gold Where Apollo spoke of old. 115 Sun-girt City, thou hast been Ocean’s child, and then his queen; Now is come a darker day, And thou soon must be his prey, If the power that raised thee here 120 Hallow so thy watery bier. A less drear ruin then than now, With thy conquest-branded brow Stooping to the slave of slaves From thy throne, among the waves 125 Wilt thou be, when the sea-mew Flies, as once before it flew, O’er thine isles depopulate, And all is in its ancient state, Save where many a palace gate 130 With green sea-flowers overgrown Like a rock of ocean’s own, Topples o’er the abandoned sea As the tides change sullenly. The fisher on his watery way, 135 Wandering at the close of day, Will spread his sail and seize his oar Till he pass the gloomy shore, Lest thy dead should, from their sleep Bursting o’er the starlight deep, 113. dome of gold] Often taken as referring to Delphi; but if a comma after gold has been omitted or displaced, the meaning would be: ‘as the flames used to rise from Apollo’s marble shrines as if to pierce his very dwelling’. This would provide a more exact simile for lines 106–10. Apollo, god of prophecy, ‘spoke’ in numberless places besides Delphi, while his palace as sun-god was ‘bright with glittering gold’ (‘Regia Solis erat . . . clara micante auro’; Ovid, Met. ii 1–2). 115. Sun-girt] Suggested as a misprint of ‘Sea-girt’, used e.g. in Comus, in Scott’s Marmion, (1808) VI ii 29, and of Venice itself in Thomson’s Liberty (iv 300) and Byron’s Marino Faliero (IV i 76), discussed with S. in the city concerned. But S.’s coinage is apt after lines 100–14, and is most unlikely to be an error for the more commonplace ‘sea-girt’. 116. Built on the sea, Venice was known as ‘regina del Adriatico’. 117. a darker day] At this date, it was believed ‘almost universally’ that the occupying Austrians planned to hasten the destruction of Venice (Lord Broughton, Italy: Remarks Made in Several Visits from the Year 1816 to 1854, 2 vols, 1861, ii 118). 123. the slave of slaves] It has been urged (TLS 5 June 1919, 313) that this title translates the Pope’s ‘Servus servorum Dei’, but it refers more probably to Austria, ‘slave’ of the ‘slaves’ constituting the Congress of Vienna; i.e. the Queen of the Adriatic will be less dishonoured when sunk under Ocean’s waves than she is at present under foreign dominion. 139. starlight] An adj. (see note to line 82).

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140 Lead a rapid masque of death O’er the waters of his path.

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Those who alone thy towers behold Quivering through aërial gold, As I now behold them here, Would imagine not they were Sepulchres, where human forms, Like pollution-nourished worms To the corpse of greatness cling, Murdered, and now mouldering: But if Freedom should awake In her omnipotence, and shake From the Celtic Anarch’s hold All the keys of dungeons cold, Where a hundred cities lie Chained like thee, ingloriously, Thou and all thy sister band Might adorn this sunny land, Twining memories of old time With new virtues more sublime; If not, perish thou and they, — Clouds which stain truth’s rising day By her sun consumed away, Earth can spare ye: while like flowers, In the waste of years and hours, From your dust new nations spring With more kindly blossoming. Perish — let there only be Floating o’er thy hearthless sea As the garment of the sky

142. ‘Any who were to see just your sunlit towers’. 146. human forms] ‘Venice which was once a tyrant, is now the next worst thing, a slave . . . I had no conception of the excess to which avarice, cowardice, superstition, ignorance, passionless lust, & all the inexpressible brutalities which degrade human nature could be carried, until I had lived a few days among the Venetians’ (S. to Peacock, 8 October 1818, L ii 43). 152. the Celtic Anarch] Austria. ‘Celtic’ corresponded to mod. ‘Teutonic’; all tyranny was lawless, so all tyrants were anarchs. 165–6. S.’s key to the printer for his insertion of lines 167–205 (Yale MS) was probably from memory: From thy dust shall nations spring With more kindly blossoming 167–205. The MS of these lines on Byron is bound into a copy of 1819 at Yale University (Tinker 1897, Tinker Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library). S. sent them to his publisher for insertion into Mary S.’s transcript of the poem, perhaps in consequence of Peacock’s (lost) comments on Childe Harold iv to which S. replied on 17 or 18 December 1818 (L ii 57–8). 168. hearthless] Deprived of inhabitants (127) and spiritual life (105–10). 169. the sky] Yale MS; thy sky 1819, 1839, eds. A printer’s dittography from line 168.

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170 Clothes the world immortally, One remembrance, more sublime Than the tattered pall of time Which scarce hides thy visage wan; — That a tempest-cleaving Swan 175 Of the songs of Albion, Driven from his ancestral streams By the might of evil dreams, Found a nest in thee; and Ocean Welcomed him with such emotion 180 That its joy grew his, and sprung From his lips like music flung O’er a mighty thunder-fit Chastening terror: — what though yet Poesy’s unfailing River, 185 Which through Albion winds forever Lashing with melodious wave Many a sacred Poet’s grave, Mourn its latest nursling fled? What though thou with all thy dead 190 Scarce can for this fame repay Aught thine own? oh, rather say Though thy sins and slaveries foul Overcloud a sunlike soul? As the ghost of Homer clings 195 Round Scamander’s wasting springs; As divinest Shakespeare’s might Fills Avon and the world with light Like Omniscient power which he Imaged’mid mortality; 172. time] time. MYR viii (there is what must be an unluckily placed ink-spot in Yale MS; a stop makes no sense); time, eds. Line 173 predicates tattered pall of time, and not remembrance. 174–5. Apparently, ‘a swan (Byron) whose flight mastered the tempest of British poetry’ (see note to line 184). The suggested emendation ‘sons’ is meaningless; the word is clear in MS. Swans were sacred to Apollo, god of prophecy and poetry (cf. Plato, Phaedo 84). 177. evil dreams] Scandal aroused by Byron’s separation from his wife. 178–82. Ocean . . . thunder-fit] S.’s strictures to Peacock on Byron’s way of life ended ‘But that he is a great poet, I think the address to Ocean proves’: i.e. the concluding stanzas 178–84 of Childe Harold iv. 184. Cf. Gray’s Ode ‘The Progress of Poesy’: ‘Now the rich stream of music winds along/Deep, majestic, smooth, and strong/. . . Now rowling down the steep amain,/Headlong, impetuous, see it pour:/The rock and nodding groves rebellow to the roar’ (7–12). Much of S.’s lines 174–204 follow the imagery of Gray’s Ode, which also includes the prophecy of a successor to the powerful flights of Milton (95–6), Dryden (103–6) and Pindar (113–7), ‘Yet shall he mount, and keep his distant way/Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate’ (121–2). Verbally S.’s echo is of Thomson’s Autumn 743–4, ‘. . . where the numerous wave/For ever lashes the resounding shore’. 187. Poet’s] Poets’ Yale MS. 195. Scamander’s wasting springs] A famous river near Troy, ‘wasting’ because no longer celebrated. 198. Like Omniscient power] I.e. Shakespeare’s power gives an impression of superhuman understanding of mortal men and women.

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200 As the love from Petrarch’s urn Yet amid yon hills doth burn, A quenchless lamp by which the heart Sees things unearthly; — so thou art Mighty spirit — so shall be 205 The City that did refuge thee.

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Lo, the sun floats up the sky Like thought-wingèd Liberty, Till the universal light Seems to level plain and height; From the sea a mist has spread, And the beams of morn lie dead On the towers of Venice now, Like its glory long ago. By the skirts of that grey cloud Many-domèd Padua proud Stands, a peopled solitude, ’Mid the harvest-shining plain, Where the peasant heaps his grain In the garner of his foe, And the milk-white oxen slow With the purple vintage strain, Heaped upon the creaking wain, That the brutal Celt may swill Drunken sleep with savage will; And the sickle to the sword Lies unchanged, though many a lord, Like a weed whose shade is poison, Overgrows this region’s foison, Sheaves of whom are ripe to come To destruction’s harvest home: Men must reap the things they sow, Force from force must ever flow,

200. Petrarch’s urn] urn, Yale MS. The village of Arquà Petrárca, where the poet lived and has his tomb (‘Petrarch’s house & tomb are religiously preserved & visited’: L ii 43), is near Este on the South edge of the Euganean Hills. 208–9. Wasserman 202 note quotes Isaiah xl 4: ‘Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made plain’ — a vision of social equality. 216. a peopled solitude] ‘Excepting Ferrara, [Padua] had an air of desolation and desertion more striking than that of any Italian city . . . She had, in 1816, only 25,000 inhabitants’ (Lord Broughton, Italy i 94–5). 228. foison] Abundance. 232. ‘Wrong hath but wrong, and blame the due of blame’ (Buckingham in Richard III, V i 9, going to deserved execution).

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Or worse; but’tis a bitter woe That love or reason cannot change 235 The despot’s rage, the slave’s revenge.

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Padua, thou within whose walls Those mute guests at festivals, Son and Mother, Death and Sin, Played at dice for Ezzelin, Till Death cried, ‘I win, I win!’ And Sin cursed to lose the wager, But Death promised, to assuage her, That he would petition for Her to be made Vice-Emperor, When the destined years were o’er, Over all between the Po And the eastern Alpine snow, Under the mighty Austrian. Sin smiled so as Sin only can, And since that time, aye, long before, Both have ruled from shore to shore, That incestuous pair, who follow Tyrants as the sun the swallow, As Repentance follows Crime, And as changes follow Time.

In thine halls the lamp of learning, Padua, now no more is burning; Like a meteor, whose wild way Is lost over the grave of day, 260 It gleams betrayed and to betray: Once remotest nations came To adore that sacred flame, When it lit not many a hearth On this cold and gloomy earth:

238–44. Death and Sin] In Paradise Lost ii 648–870, Satan and Sin appear as father and mother. The dicing was probably suggested by Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ 196–7. Sin’s compensation for the loss of Ezzelin is to be made deputy to the Emperor of Austria (with a pun on Vice). Ezzelin] Eccelino da Romano (1194–1259), an atrocious military hireling who tyrannised Padua for eighteen years. He killed himself by exposing his wounds after his final defeat and capture. 256. the lamp of learning] S.’s account of Padua’s internationally famous eleventh-century University follows Eustace i 154–5: ‘Of eighteen thousand students six hundred only remain, a number . . . barely sufficient to shew the deserted state of the once crowded Schools of Padua . . . The decrease of numbers . . . is to be attributed to the establishment of similar institutions in other countries, and to the general multiplication of the means of knowledge over the Christian world’. 258. a meteor] Here, an ignis fatuus. 260. A line used (of ‘Tomorrow’) apparently in a draft of Lines written in dejection — December 1818, near Naples (Nbk 6 ff. 70–71rev).

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265 Now new fires from antique light Spring beneath the wide world’s might; But their spark lies dead in thee, Trampled out by tyranny. As the Norway woodman quells, 270 In the depth of piny dells, One light flame among the brakes, While the boundless forest shakes, And its mighty trunks are torn By the fire thus lowly born: 275 The spark beneath his feet is dead, He starts to see the flames it fed Howling through the darkened sky With a myriad tongues victoriously, And sinks down in fear: so thou, 280 O tyranny, beholdest now Light around thee, and thou hearest The loud flames ascend, and fearest: Grovel on the earth; aye, hide In the dust thy purple pride! 285 Noon descends around me now: ’Tis the noon of autumn’s glow, When a soft and purple mist Like a vaporous amethyst, Or an air-dissolvèd star 290 Mingling light and fragrance, far From the curved horizon’s bound To the point of heaven’s profound, Fills the overflowing sky; And the plains that silent lie 295 Underneath, the leaves unsodden Where the infant frost has trodden With his morning-wingèd feet, Whose bright print is gleaming yet; And the red and golden vines, 266. might] A  misprint for ‘night’ has been suspected; but the intended meaning of ‘oppression’ is confirmed by lines 279–81. 269–79. As the Norway woodman . . . down in fear] Suggested by the scene of a forest fire near Christiania (Oslo) in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written . . . in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, 1796, Letter xv: ‘Fires of this kind are occasioned by the wind suddenly rising when the farmers are burning roots of trees, stalks of beans, &c. with which they manure the ground. The devastation must, indeed, be terrible, when this, literally speaking, wild fire, runs along the forest, flying from top to top, and cracking amongst the branches. The soil, as well as the trees, is swept away by the destructive torrent; and the country, despoiled of beauty and riches, is left to mourn for ages’ (MWW vi 310). 270. piny dells] These words occur in association with the draft of lines 45–6 in Nbk 3, f. 215. 289. an air-dissolvèd star] A star whose light is blurred by the atmosphere.

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300 Piercing with their trellised lines The rough, dark-skirted wilderness; The dun and bladed grass no less, Pointing from this hoary tower In the windless air; the flower 305 Glimmering at my feet; the line Of the olive-sandalled Apennine In the south dimly islanded; And the Alps, whose snows are spread High between the clouds and sun; 310 And of living things each one; And my spirit which so long Darkened this swift stream of song, Interpenetrated lie By the glory of the sky: 315 Be it love, light, harmony, Odour, or the soul of all Which from heaven like dew doth fall, Or the mind which feeds this verse Peopling the lone universe. 320 Noon descends, and after noon Autumn’s evening meets me soon, Leading the infantine moon, And that one star, which to her Almost seems to minister 325 Half the crimson light she brings From the sunset’s radiant springs: And the soft dreams of the morn (Which like wingèd winds had borne To that silent isle, which lies

303. this hoary tower] The tower of the Benedictine Monastery of the Olivetani (suppressed in 1767) on Monte Venda, the topmost point of the Euganean Hills. The summit of M. Venda was taken over as a NATO base in the 1960s. 306. the olive-sandalled Apennine] The Apennine Mountains with olive groves at their feet. Ancient Greek sandals had olive-wood soles. 308. the Alps] The Julian Alps beyond Venice to the north-east, also visible from Monte Venda in clear weather. 313. The subjects which interpenetrated lie include the plains (294), the leaves (295), the vines (299), the grass (302), the flower (304), the line of the . . . Apennine (305–6), the Alps (308), the livings things (310), and the speaker’s spirit (311). 318–9. ‘Or if the mind that creates this poem is also creating the reality it perceives’. Cp. Mont Blanc 142–4, and L&C II xxx 1–2: ‘For, before Cythna loved it, had my song/Peopled with thoughts the boundless universe’. All three quotations recall Richard II in prison: ‘And these same thoughts people this little world’ (V v 9). 323. that one star] Venus (see headnote). 327. morn] morn, 1819.

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330 ’Mid remembered agonies, The frail bark of this lone being) Pass, to other sufferers fleeing, And its ancient pilot, Pain, Sits beside the helm again. 335 Other flowering isles must be In the sea of life and agony: Other spirits float and flee O’er that gulf: even now, perhaps, On some rock the wild wave wraps, 340 With folded wings they waiting sit For my bark, to pilot it To some calm and blooming cove, Where for me, and those I love, May a windless bower be built, 345 Far from passion, pain, and guilt, In a dell ’mid lawny hills, Which the wild sea-murmur fills, And soft sunshine, and the sound Of old forests echoing round, 350 And the light and smell divine Of all flowers that breathe and shine: We may live so happy there, That the spirits of the air, Envying us, may even entice 355 To our healing paradise The polluting multitude; But their rage would be subdued By that clime divine and calm, And the winds whose wings rain balm 360 On the uplifted soul, and leaves Under which the bright sea heaves, 331. being)] being,) 1819. 343–4. An inversion, following ‘perhaps’ (338): ‘where a bower may (already) be awaiting us’. 353–6. . . . . the spirits . . . multitude] ‘I should have then this only fear,/Lest men, when they my pleasures see,/Should hither throng to live like me,/And so make a City here’ (Cowley, ‘The Wish’ 33–40). The impulse anticipates Epipsychidion 407–587. 361. heaves,] heaves; 1819. The interpretation of lines 357–70 depends on punctuation for which S. was not finally responsible. Bradley (MLR i (1905) 36) plausibly suggested that a semicolon after melodies would allow the passage And the love . . . brotherhood to be taken in an absolute sense: ‘and, since [or while] the love which heals all strife encircles all things in that sweet abode, what would be changed would be the multitude, not the abode’. Locock 1911 decided that And the love depends on subdued: ‘the rage of the multitude would be subdued by that clime . . . and [by] the winds . . . and [by] the leaves . . . and [by] the love which heals all strife’. This is the reading preferred here. And the love cannot coherently depend on supplies (‘the inspired soul supplies each interval in the music with its own melodies and [with] the love which heals all strife’) as this would make the all-embracing love merely intermittent.

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While each breathless interval In their whisperings musical The inspired soul supplies 365 With its own deep melodies, And the love which heals all strife Circling, like the breath of life, All things in that sweet abode With its own mild brotherhood: 370 They, not it, would change; and soon Every sprite beneath the moon Would repent its envy vain, And the earth grow young again.

14  Stanzas written in dejection — December 1818, near Naples The rough draft of this poem is in Nbk 6, and there are two holograph fair copies, in Bodleian MS Shelley e. 5, and in the Morgan Library & Museum. Both copies give the date of composition as December 1818, as do Mary S.’s texts in 1824 and 1839. S. was in Naples from 1 December 1818 to 28 February 1819. The poem’s opening description seems to echo phrasing from S.’s letter to Peacock of 23–24 January (see note to lines 1–4) describing the Shelleys’ visit to Pompeii on 22 December (Mary Jnl i 245), which suggests a more specific date in late December; but S. was impressed by the scenery around Naples from the period of his first arrival, and the dejection articulated in the poem appears to have persisted throughout his stay in the city. Following the death of Clara in Venice, Mary’s mood was very dark, which in turn strongly affected S. Her ‘Note on Poems of 1818’ recalls that at this time S. ‘suffered greatly in health . . . Constant and poignant physical suffering exhausted him; and though he preserved the appearance of cheerfulness . . . many hours were passed when his thoughts, shadowed by illness, became gloomy, and then he escaped to solitude, and in verses, which he hid from fear of wounding me, poured forth morbid but too natural bursts of discontent and sadness. One looks back with unspeakable regret and gnawing remorse to such periods . . .’ (1839 iii 162; see also e.g. Mary L i 85 for Mary’s own depression in Naples). The note goes on to make plain the extent of S.’s feelings of isolation and despair. A letter to Peacock of mid-December closes on an uncharacteristically subdued note: ‘I have depression enough of spirits & not good health, though I believe the warm air of Naples does me good. We see absolutely no one here’ (L ii 64), and a few days later he strikes the note again in a letter to Hunt (‘I have neither good health or spirits just now’: L ii 68). According to a story of Trelawny’s, S. actually attempted suicide in Naples (see White ii 570–1). S.’s chastened sense of responsibility for the calamity of Clara’s death (see headnotes to Behold, sweet Sister mine (Longman ii 423, no. 181) and The Two Spirits), and his reaction to Mary’s own consequent depression, may also have coincided with a renewed sense of the injustice and malicious distortions of public attacks on him in the 370. They, not it, would change;] 1839, eds; They, not it would change; 1819. I.e. ‘the multitude would change, not the abode’. 371. ‘Every creature subject to transience’.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-14

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Quarterly Review and elsewhere (see L ii 66, and headnotes to Alas, this is not what I thought life was, (Longman ii 415–6, no. 174) and Lift not the painted veil). He was also involved at this time in the mysterious affair of the ‘Neapolitan baby’. White ii 546–50 prints documents from Neapolitan archives which register that a child named ‘Elena Adelaide’ was born to S. and Mary at their lodgings in the Riviera di Chiaia on 27 December 1818. She was baptised on 27 February 1819, and according to a death certificate died on 10 June 1820. It is obviously impossible that this child could actually have been Mary’s, and although scurrilous stories, circulated by a disaffected former servant of the Shelleys, claimed that the child was Claire Clairmont’s by S., that too seems under the circumstances entirely incredible, not to say physically impossible. Mary Jnl i 249–50 gives a lucid review of the circumstances and known facts of the affair (and see also Claire Jnl 97). It has also been suggested that this child was possibly born to the Shelleys’ nursemaid, Elise, and that S. was the father, but this too seems implausible (see Ursula Orange, ‘Elise, Nursemaid to the Shelleys’, KSMB vi (1955) 24–34). A possible explanation is that S. sought in his desperation to console Mary for the loss of Clara by the adoption of a little girl, and that for unknown reasons, the scheme, once in train, was abandoned. A further separate but possibly related story, that S. was followed to Naples by a lady admirer who had conceived a passion for the poet after reading his verses, and who after meeting with S. subsequently died in Naples, lacks any corroborating evidence (see headnote to Misery. — A Fragment, Longman ii 701–3, no. 202). Whatever the true circumstances, it is scarcely surprising against such a background that S. should suffer from depression in December 1818, and that he should during this period produce one of the most openly personal of all his lyrics. In formal terms, S.’s ‘Stanzas’ adapt the Spenserian stanza by combining its rhyme scheme and final alexandrine with fluent octosyllabics akin to the seven-syllable lines of Lines Written among the Euganean Hills. There is also a marked influence from Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, in mood and some details of phrasing but also in the use of the hexameter as an element of a lyric stanza (cp. the Immortality Ode, lines 9, 18). S.’s octosyllabics are, like Milton’s in ‘Il Penseroso’, distinctive in their fusion of light metrical movement with a tone of quiet and sometimes dark reflection, recalling the use of similar effects in Act 1 of PU; and this too suggests an influence from the passages including seven-syllable lines in Wordsworth’s Ode, particularly 180–7: We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy Which having been must ever be; In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering; In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind. Stanzas written in dejection was almost certainly one of the poems that S. collected as ‘all my saddest verses raked up into one heap’ and sent to Ollier on 10 November 1820 for publication with J&M (L ii 246); see Longman ii 701–2 for details of the other poems probably included in the collection. Neil Fraistat has shown (BSM ix Introduction liii–liv; see also BSM xxi 448–53) that the fair copy of Stanzas written in dejection in Bodleian MS Shelley e. 5 came originally from a small MS booklet made up by S. in which his collection of personal lyrics was probably sent to Ollier. This copy is very clean and is punctuated with unusual care, and must be later than the Morgan holograph, which is written on leaves originally in Harvard Nbk together with Lift not the painted veil (see MYRS v), probably as a safe-keeping copy. The Morgan MS (Morgan) has ‘cloudless’ for ‘stainless’ in line 44, according with the

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draft in Nbk 6 and presumably therefore closer to it than e. 5, whose readings are identical with 1824 (except for errors of printing; see notes); Morgan also has ‘cold’ in line 37 altered (probably in the hand of Edward Williams) from ‘dead’, a perplexing circumstance again suggesting a closer relation to the rough draft, which has the same alteration. Text from Bodleian MS Shelley e. 5 (commas have been added in lines 5, 8, 9 and 19; after power and love in 24; and after linger in 45; full stops have been added in lines 9, 18, 27 and 36). Published in 1824 164–5, Chernaik 198–200.

Stanzas written in dejection — December 1818, near Naples

5

10

15

20

The Sun is warm, the sky is clear, The waves are dancing fast and bright, Blue isles and snowy mountains wear The purple noon’s transparent might, The breath of the moist earth is light Around its unexpanded buds; Like many a voice of one delight The winds, the birds, the Ocean-floods; The City’s voice itself is soft, like Solitude’s. I see the Deep’s untrampled floor With green and purple seaweeds strown, I see the waves upon the shore Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown; I sit upon the sands alone; The lightning of the noontide Ocean Is flashing round me, and a tone Arises from its measured motion, How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion. Alas, I have nor hope nor health, Nor peace within nor calm around,

¶ 14. 1–4. Cp. S.’s description of the scenery near Pompeii, in his letter to Peacock of 23–4 January 1819 (L ii 73); ‘Above & between the multitudinous shafts of the [?sunshiny] columns, was seen the blue sea reflecting the purple heaven of noon above it, & supporting as it were on its line the dark lofty mountains of Sorrento, of a blue inexpressibly deep, & tinged towards their summits with streaks of new-fallen snow’. The Shelleys visited Pompeii on 22 December 1818 (Mary Jnl i 245). 4–5. 1824 reads light for might in line 4, and omits line 5; a printer’s error corrected in an errata slip, and probably accounting for the mistake in line 4. 10–11. Cp. S.’s letter to Peacock of 17 or 18 December 1818 (L ii 61): ‘We set off an hour after sunrise one radiant morning in a little boat, there was not a cloud in the sky nor a wave upon the sea which was so translucent that you could see the hollow caverns clothed with the glaucous sea-moss, & the leaves & branches of those delicate weeds that pave the unequal bottom of the water’. 13. star-showers] OED defines star-shower as ‘a shower of falling meteors’, with S.’s usage here as the only citation. See William Keach, Shelley’s Style (1984) 125. 19. S.’s draft in Nbk 6 at first began this stanza ‘Alas — that I were not alone’.

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shelley: selected poems Nor that content surpassing wealth The sage in meditation found, And walked with inward glory crowned; Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure — Others I see whom these surround, Smiling they live and call life pleasure: To me that cup has been dealt in another measure. Yet now despair itself is mild Even as the winds and waters are; I could lie down like a tired child And weep away the life of care Which I have borne and yet must bear Till Death like Sleep might steal on me, And I might feel in the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony. Some might lament that I were cold, As I, when this sweet day is gone, Which my lost heart, too soon grown old, Insults with this untimely moan — They might lament, — for I am one Whom men love not, and yet regret; Unlike this Day, which, when the Sun Shall on its stainless glory set, Will linger though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet.

21–3. Reiman (1977) notes M. H. Abrams’s suggestion that S. is thinking in these lines of the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius (the draft in Nbk 6 at first read ‘empire’, with a more Stoic feel than the received reading ‘glory’); the passage also perhaps recalls the sage described in the closing lines of Milton’s ‘II Penseroso’. 27. The hexameter line, and its particular cadence here, recall Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ 9: ‘The things which I have seen I now can see no more’. 29. are;] Morgan; are, e. 5. 30–1. Cp. Psalms cxxxvii 1: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion’. 33. Death and Sleep were children of Night in classical mythology; see Q Mab i 2 and note, and cp. Mont Blanc 49–52. 35. There is apparently a full stop after sea in e. 5, which must be an error. 37. cold,] Altered from ‘dead’ in Nbk 6 and Morgan; neither MS has a rhyme-word for ‘dead’. 38–45. ‘Some might lament were I to die, just as I will lament the passing of this beautiful day (which is insulted by this dejected poem); but whereas my passing will, like my life, cause others regret, the joy of this day will not cease with its passing, but will live again when remembered’. 42. regret] I.e. ‘feel mental distress on account of ’ (OED v. 2); S. thinks of himself as a cause of regret in both his life and death. 44. stainless] e. 5, 1824; cloudless Nbk 6, Morgan.

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15  Prometheus Unbound A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts Composition and Publication S.’s interest in the Prometheus myth, and its treatment by Aeschylus in Prometheus Bound, dates from at least as early as his first term at Oxford (Hogg Life i 70), but he doubtless knew the play from schooldays. S. had ordered an Aeschylus from Rickman in 1812 (L i 344), and was reading and translating the play with Byron in 1816 (Medwin i 268), from which period S.’s interest in writing a poem on the Prometheus theme may well originate (cp. Byron’s ‘Prometheus’ of July 1816). S. was also translating Prometheus Bound in July 1817 (Mary Jnl i 177). Mary famously recalled in 1823, when retracing the route taken through the Alps on their journey to Italy in March 1818, that S. had conceived the idea of his drama at that time while passing ‘la Montagne des Eschelles, whose dark high precipices towering above, gave S — the idea of his Prometheus’ (Mary L i 357). An entry in S.’s hand in Mary’s jnl for 26 March 1818 bears this out: After dinner we ascended Les Echelles winding along a road cut thro perpendicular rocks of immense elevation by Charles Emmanuel Duke of Savoy in 1582. The rocks which cannot be less than 1000 feet in perpendicular height sometimes overhang the road on each side & almost shut out the sky. The scene is like that described in the Prometheus of Aeschylus — Vast rifts & caverns in the granite precipices — wintry mountains with ice & snow above — the loud sounds of unseen waters within the caverns, & walls of topling rocks only to be scaled as he describes, by the winged chariot of the Ocean Nymphs. (Mary Jnl i 200) While it is certain that S.’s ideas for PU must have originated before this date, it is equally plain that S.’s specific conception of the first three acts owes a great deal to the Shelleys’ journey through the wintry Alps in March 1818, and their rapid transition to a warm Italian spring. This experience seems to have prompted a coalescence in S.’s imagination of many diverse literary, philosophical, political, scientific and personal influences, to produce a poem which, in the scale and quality of its achievement, goes far beyond anything S. had hitherto written. His thinking towards the project matured through the first Italian summer of 1818, as he busied himself with translations of Plato’s Symposium, Euripides’ Cyclops (see Longman ii 371–412, no. 172), various other classical translations, and much other reading connected with the conventional tourist sights and activities that the party were anticipating (e.g. Eustace, and Barthelemy; see notes below). At Bagni di Lucca from June to August, S. was also reading in various classical accounts of Greek life, perhaps with a view to an Introduction for his translation of the Symposium, the ‘Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Athenians’ (as SC vi 639 notes, the short essay ‘On Love’, also written around this time, may represent a false start on this essay). A note in Nbk 11 p. 4 (see headnote to no. 175), apparently derived from Herodotus, reads ‘Asia γυναικη Προμεθεως [i.e. “wife of Prometheus”]’; Herodotus is the only classical source for Asia as Prometheus’s wife (Histories iv 45), and Mary Jnl i 219–21 records S.’s systematic reading of Herodotus at Bagni di Lucca in July and August, suggesting that S. was by then engaged in detailed working out of the characters and action for PU. By the end of August, S. had definitely begun work in earnest on his drama. The composition and publication history of PU is exceptionally complex, and constitutes an editorial problem which defies any single completely satisfactory solution. S. states in his Preface to PU that the poem was ‘chiefly written upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, among the flowery glades, and thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees, which

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-15

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are extended in ever-winding labyrinths upon its immense platforms and dizzy arches suspended in the air. The bright blue sky of Rome, and the effect of the vigorous awakening of spring in that divinest climate, and the new life with which it drenches the spirits even to intoxication, were the inspiration of this drama’. Mary’s jnl for Saturday 13 March 1819 (i 252–3) records a visit to the Baths, and S.’s long letter to Peacock of 23 March (L ii 84–7) gives a detailed description suggesting close familiarity. Mary’s ‘Note on the Prometheus Unbound’ (1839 ii 132) expands on S.’s Preface: We spent a month at Milan [on first arriving in Italy] . . . Thence we passed in succession to Pisa, Leghorn, the Baths of Lucca, Venice, Este, Rome, Naples, and back again to Rome, whither we returned early in March 1819. During all this time Shelley meditated the subject of his drama, and wrote portions of it . . . At last, when at Rome, during a bright and beautiful spring, he gave up his whole time to the composition . . . At first he contemplated the drama in three acts. It was not till several months after, when at Florence, that he conceived that a fourth act . . . ought to be added to complete the composition. This emphasis on the Roman spring of 1819 as the inspiration for the drama is however misleading. Act I was being written from at least the period of S.’s meeting with Byron in Venice in August 1818, and the dramatic structure of the play strongly suggests that Act II was substantially worked out during the visit to Naples at the end of the year, with Act III following in the spring (see BSM ix, Introduction lxiii–lxxv, and K. Everest, ‘ “Mechanism of a kind yet unattempted”: The Dramatic Action of Prometheus Unbound’, DUJ lxxxv (1993) 237–46). In her ‘Note on Poems of 1818’, Mary is more precise about the composition of Act I; at ‘I Cappuccini’, the villa in Este secured for the Shelleys by Byron, ‘a vine-trellised walk, a Pergola, as it is called in Italian, led from the hall door to a summer-house at the end of the garden, which Shelley made his study, and in which he began the Prometheus’ (1839 iii 160). Mary arrived at Este on Saturday 5 September, noting in her jnl for Wednesday 2 to Monday 14 September ‘poor Clara is dangerously ill — Shelley is very unwell from taking poison in Italian cakes — He writes his drama of Prometheus’ (i 226). S. worked quickly at first, and had probably been writing since at least his own arrival at ‘I Cappuccini’ at the end of August, for his letter of Tuesday 22 September, written to Mary at Este from Padua, asks her to ‘bring . . . the sheets of “Prometheus Unbound” which you will find numbered from 1 to 26 on the table of the pavilion’ (L ii 39–40). S.’s composition on loose sheets, rather than in a notebook, explains the almost total disappearance of draft materials for Act I; and the mention of numbered sheets suggests that Act I may already have been in a relatively advanced state (26 sheets might imply somewhere between 500 and 600 lines). On 8 October, S. states in a letter to Peacock that he has ‘just finished the first act of a lyric & classical drama to be called “Prometheus Unbound” ’ (L ii 43). This rapid progress was in spite of the trauma of Clara’s illness and death on 24 September, and the hectic travelling and stress occasioned by this catastrophe, and by S.’s efforts to effect a reconciliation between Byron and Claire over their daughter Allegra (the original purpose of his visit to Venice). S. seems to have continued work on Act I after his party left Venice and travelled south from Padua and Este (leaving on Thursday 5 November; Mary Jnl i 235) towards Rome and Naples, staying en route at Ferrara to visit places associated with Ariosto and Tasso, and at Bologna where S. was impressed by the paintings of Correggio, Raphael, and others (see II i 73–4 and note). The party arrived in Rome on Friday 20 November (Mary Jnl i 237), and S. continued on to Naples a week later, where he was joined by Mary, Claire, and the others on Tuesday 1 December (Mary Jnl i 241). S.’s mood in Naples was dejected and lonely, and saddened by further difficult personal problems (see headnote to Stanzas written in dejection — December 1818, near Naples), but his visits to the surrounding areas and his experience of Vesuvius became central to his conception of Acts II and III of PU. He wrote to Peacock from Naples, in a letter postmarked 26 January 1819, ‘At present I write little else

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but poetry, & little of that. My 1st Act of Prometheus is complete, & I think you would like it’ (L ii 70–1). The Shelleys left Naples for Rome on Sunday 28 February, arriving on Friday 5 March 1819 (Mary Jnl i 249–51). They remained in Rome until just after William’s death on 7 June, leaving for Leghorn (Livorno) on 10 June (Claire Jnl 113–4). On 6 April, S. wrote to Peacock ‘My Prometheus Unbound is just finished [i.e. the first three Acts] & in a month or two I shall send it. It is a drama, with characters & a mechanism of a kind yet unattempted; & I think the execution is better than any of my former attempts’ (L ii 94). S. presumably copied out his rough drafts for Acts II and III from the notebooks from which he was working (including Nbk 6, Nbk 10, Nbk 11 and Nbk 12; see MYR iv and vi, BSM xv and xviii) into the neat fair copy, very lightly punctuated but otherwise quite highly finished, which fills Nbk 7, Nbk 8 and Nbk 9. This fair copy is reproduced with a transcription and excellent commentary by Neil Fraistat (BSM ix), whose detailed account of the genesis and composition of PU should be consulted. S.’s fair copy was ready before the end of April, as Mary notes in her jnl for Sunday 25 April ‘Read Shelley’s Drama’ (i 260). S. did however continue to alter and add to Acts II and III right up to, and indeed beyond the despatch in December 1819 of Mary’s transcription of S.’s fair copy of Act IV (see e.g. II iii 54 and notes, and cp. SC vi 1070–1). Other evidence suggests the further inference that by August 1819 at least S. was working simultaneously on the fairly substantial additional passages for Act II (‘fairly substantial’ judging by the number of insertions in Nbk 7 and Nbk 8; in addition to the Song in II iii, other substantial later passages include Asia’s Song at the end of II v, and the exchange between the Fauns at II ii 64–97 (see notes)), and various lyrical passages for Act IV (see notes, and SC iv 1070–1). There is strong stylistic evidence that the additional passages in Act II are influenced by the manner of Act IV. There is also clear evidence for S.’s continuing local revision to the fair copy (see below). S. left the first few pages of Nbk 7 blank when he began his fair copy, presumably to accommodate the as yet unwritten Preface. He then began his copy of Act I on f. 18 and proceeded using verso sides only, leaving recto sides blank for later corrections and additions. Act I is completed on f. 20 of Nbk 8; Act II fills the remaining verso pages, and finishes on f. 10 of Nbk 9. Act III follows on f. 11 and is completed on f. 36. The first four paragraphs of the Preface were subsequently copied into Nbk 7 ff. 14–6, but the remaining blank pages in Nbk 7 were then taken up by other material, so that when S. came to add five more paragraphs to the Preface (see below) these were copied (from his rough draft in Nbk 10) into Nbk 9 turned upside down and reversed, ff. 38–30. Act IV was copied into the remaining blank pages of Nbk 7, starting at f. 2 and continuing up to the start of the Preface (i.e. stopping at the bottom of f. 13), and then covering up those pages not already occupied by corrections and additions to Act I, finishing with the last line of the completed poem written at the top of f. 36. S. appears to have thought of the three-act version of the poem as its final form, at least up until late August. He wrote to Peacock from Livorno in July  1819, ‘My Prometheus though ready, I do not send until I know more [about Ollier’s activities as S.’s publisher]’ (L ii 103). In a letter to Hunt of August 15, he speaks of the poem as finished (L ii 108), and in a letter to Ollier from Livorno written c. 20 August, S. writes, ‘I have two works of some length [PU and The Cenci], one of a very popular character, ready for the press’ (L ii 111). But his intention to add a fourth act must have been formed very soon after this. The probability of S.’s work on Acts II and IV together in August is further strengthened by other circumstances. S. informed Ollier on 6 September ‘My “Prometheus” which has long been finished, is now being transcribed, & will soon be forwarded to you for publication’ (L ii 116–17). S.’s plans for the transcription of the poem to be ‘forwarded’ were complex and have been the source of much subsequent confusion (e.g. in Zillman Variorum, Introduction). He sent the transcript to Peacock, for him to forward to Ollier at a future time to be communicated by letter from S. (letter to Peacock, 21 September, L ii 120; S.’s letter to Hunt, Monday 27 September, L ii 123, confirms the arrangement). The transcript was to be transported to England personally by Maria Gisborne’s husband, John, who left for

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England on business on 12 September (Mary Jnl i 296; see also SC vi 930). Mary’s jnl shows that the poem was delivered to the Gisbornes on Friday 10 September, as soon as Mary had finished transcribing it (the entry is dated ‘Sunday 12’ but may well record activities for the previous few days; there are no entries between September 5 and 12):

Sunday 12 Finish copying my tale [The Fields of Fancy, the first version of Mathilda] — Copy Shelley’s Prometheus — work — read Beaumont & Fletcher’s plays — on Friday [10 September] — Shelley sends his tragedy to Peacock — on Sunday [12 September] — Mr. G sets out for England. Evidence from the MS suggests that as soon as Mary had finished with the notebooks containing S.’s fair copy (and assuming she transcribed last the first four paragraphs of the Preface, in Nbk 7), S. started work on — or at least started to think of work on — putting together a fourth act to be copied into the blank pages then at the beginning of Nbk 7. At the top of the first page of this notebook, f. 2, is written in S.’s hand ‘Sept 11’ (Zillman Variorum and BSM ix both argue that the reading may be either ‘Sept 11’ or ‘Act 4’, but the date seems very clear; see facsimile in BSM ix 10). S. perhaps thought to begin copying out a fourth act immediately on Mary’s completion of her transcripts of the first three acts, but was prevented from making progress by the more urgent occasion of The Mask of Anarchy (see headnote to MA), and then (as Cameron (1974) 651 suggests) by the composition of PB3(see headnote in Longman iii 70–82), the letter in defence of Richard Carlile (dated 3 November 1819; L ii 136–48), and the birth of S. and Mary’s son Percy Florence on 12 November. BSM ix (Introduction lxxii–lxxiv), however, points out that MS evidence suggests that Act IV was not composed in the sequence of the received text, and that it is therefore highly unlikely that the opening lines of the fourth act could have been copied on 11 September; but the date may still stand as a strong indication that S. had decided by that date to add a fourth act. The evidence of the nbks suggests that Act IV was drafted in four sections, corresponding to lines 1–179, 194–318 (in Nbk 11), 319–502 (the exchange between Earth and Moon, probably the earliest conception for the Act, with various complex drafts in Nbk 10, Nbk 11 and Nbk 12), and 519–78 (in Nbk 12). Act IV was presumably written out, for the most part, in November and December 1819, after the Shelleys had left Livorno and returned to Florence on 30 September. The Preface to PU was written in two parts. The first four paragraphs were copied by S. at the same time as the first three acts, i.e. by September 1819, as is clear from their position in the notebooks (see BSM ix (Introduction lxxiii)). The last five paragraphs were added by S. in response to the Quarterly Review’s attack on him for plagiarism (see notes), and were added to S.’s fair copy by late December 1819 (the first part of the Preface is partly drafted in Nbk 6, and the later part is mainly drafted in Nbk 10; see BSM xv, MYR iv). John Gisborne did not deliver the transcript of Acts I, II and III on his visit to England because as BSM ix (Introduction lxxvi; cp. SC vi 930) points out he had fallen ill en route in Marseilles and turned back to Italy, bringing the undelivered transcript back with him, as is indicated by S.’s letter to Mrs Gisborne of 13 or 14 October (L ii 125–6). S. is ‘anxious to hear of Mr Gisborne’s return’, and asks the Gisbornes to send the transcript of PU directly on to England by ship, together with the 250 copies of The Cenci which S. had had printed in Italy for publication by Ollier (see headnote to The Cenci, Longman ii 713–24). S. wrote to Ollier on 15 October informing him that 250 copies of The Cenci were on their way, and that ‘The “Prometheus”, a poem in my best style, whatever that may amount to, will arrive with it, but in MS., which you can print and publish in the season’ (L ii 127). The ship carrying the copies of The Cenci and the transcript of the first three acts of PU did not in fact actually leave for England until the middle of December, as S. states to Ollier in a letter of 6 March 1820 (L ii

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174); and by 13 March, S. had still not received confirmation from Ollier of the arrival of the parcel containing the books and MS (letter to Ollier, L ii 177–8). In the meantime, S. had clearly decided that Ollier should proceed as quickly as possible with the printing of PU (but see BSM ix (Introduction lxxvii) for the view that S.’s dealings with Ollier up to May 1820 actually served to delay final publication). S.’s letter to Hunt of 14–8 November states that ‘The Prometheus I wish to be printed and to come out immediately’ (L ii 153), and S. had possibly already decided to send the fourth act, when ready, by surface mail so that its arrival would correspond as nearly as possible with the arrival of the shipped material (S. was not yet aware of the delay in the ship’s departure). By 15 December, S. was still uncertain about the arrival of his consignment to Ollier: ‘When the box comes . . . Let Prometheus be printed without delay’, adding ‘You will receive the additions, which Mrs. S. is now transcribing, in a few days’ (L ii 163–4). A week later, on Thursday 23 December, S. wrote two letters relating to PU. To the Gisbornes he explained that he has ‘just finished an additional act to Prometheus which Mary is now transcribing; & which will be enclosed for your inspection before it is transmitted to the Bookseller’ (L ii 165); that this letter contained the MS of PU Act IV is made clear by Gisborne’s endorsement of the letter (L ii 166), and by Mary’s letter to Mrs Gisborne of 28 December: ‘I am glad that you are pleased with the Prometheus — the last act though very beautiful is certainly the most mystic of the four — ’ (Mary L i 121). To Ollier, he wrote explaining that the ‘additions’ to PU announced in his previous letter were to be extensive; the whole letter is of great interest (it is not in L; the MS is damaged by a burn, and the resulting gaps are here conjecturally reconstructed by GM. For alternatives see SC vi 1100): My Prometheus I suppose you [have already begun] printing before this letter reaches you — [I am] somewhat doubtful about this said question of pr[oofs.] Who will revise the press? If possible, & if there is time, I should be very glad that the printer could divide the whole poem into two proofs & send it to me for the last corrections. — In this case [it ought to be canc.] the proofs ought to be taken off on thin paper and sent to me by the Post . . . If there is any difficulty in this, allow me to recommend you the utmost caution in revising the press . . . of course I would pay whatever might be necessary for the revision . . . provided it were done correctly. — Mr. Hunt is [revising] Julian & Maddalo, but I will not [burden] him with the Prometheus — [I am the] more anxious because I consider [Prometheus Un] bound as the least imperfect of [my compositions] & because typographical [slips, by confusing fin]e distinctions of the ideal [& philosophical style] in which it is written, cause [errors in the sense p]eculiarly difficult to [seize & adjust corr] ectly —— [Please be kind] enough to give me constant [informatio]n [of the state of canc.] as to what Mr. [Hunt] has consigned to you for publication — There is another Act written to Prometheus, and some lyrical insertions. They will be prepared for Thursday’s Post. (SC vi 1099, with facsimile 1097–8; the date ‘Dec. ’23.’ was originally written as ‘Dec. ’20’) The commentary to SC 554 (SC vi 1104–6) notes that S.’s correspondence concerning PU provides substantial and conclusive evidence that ‘he took all possible pains to insure that his poem was published exactly as he had prepared it for the press and that if any changes of words or significant punctuation were introduced, they be changes he himself had chosen’. It is certainly true that S. was seriously concerned about arrangements for the printing of PU, although there is also evidence that S. was inconsistent in his own involvement with the press transcript (see below). No doubt S. had been alerted to possible problems by the printing of 1819 (see headnote to R&H (Longman ii, no. 144). His letter to Ollier of 23 December, quoted above, proposes two methods of checking proofs. The best option was to have the proofs sent to Italy so that S. could correct them himself, just as John Murray commonly

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sent Byron’s proofs. Otherwise, S. suggests paying for a careful revising of the press in England by someone he could trust (i.e. a checking of proofs against the copy provided by S.). S. provided a further possibility to Ollier on 13 March 1820: I am anxious to hear that you have received the parcel from Leghorn, & to learn what you are doing with the Prometheus. — If it can be done without great difficulty I should be very glad that the revised sheets might be sent by the Post to me at Leghorn. — It might be divided into four partitions, sending me four or five sheets at once. — (L ii 177–8) This arrangement would have given two stages of correction, with S. checking already revised sheets. It is also probable that S. wished to add in further detailed alterations which he had made to his own fair copy (see below). But Ollier refused, as is clear from S.’s letter to him of 14 May: As to the printing of the ‘Prometheus’, be it as you will. But, in this case, I shall repose or trust in your care respecting the correction of the press; especially in the lyrical parts, where a minute error would be of much consequence. Mr. Gisborne will revise it; he heard it recited, and will therefore more readily seize any error. (L ii 196) Unfortunately, even this compromise was to prove unworkable, though S. was still pursuing it later in the month when he wrote on 26 May from Pisa to the Gisbornes in London (they had left Livorno on Tuesday 2 May; Gisborne Jnl 19): I write to you thus early, because I have determined to accept of your kind offer about the correction of Prometheus. The bookseller makes difficulties about sending the proofs to me, & to whom else can I so well entrust what I am so much interested in having done well, & to whom would I prefer to owe the recollection of an additional kindness done to me? I enclose you two little papers of corrections & additions; — I do not think you will find any difficulty in interpolating them into the proper places. — (L ii 201) In fact, the Gisbornes were not eventually involved in the publication of PU. Perhaps because of the breach which opened in relations between the Shelleys and the Gisbornes in the course of their visit to London (Gisborne Jnl 9–10; see Mary Jnl i 334–5 for an excellent account of the circumstances surrounding the rift between the two families), the revision of the press finally fell to Peacock, to whom S. wrote on 12 July ‘I make bold to write to you on the news that you are correcting my “Prometheus”, for which I return thanks; and I send some things which may be added [presumably the same ‘corrections and additions’ forwarded to the Gisbornes in May]’ (L ii 212). By late July, S. was expecting publication in England at any moment (see BSM ix (Introduction lxxvii–lxxviii) for arguments that Ollier may have been making active arrangements for printing from as early as December 1819). He wrote to Medwin on 20 July expressing his ‘wish to present you with “Prometheus Unbound”, a drama . . .’ and adding ‘I hear it is just printed, and I probably shall receive copies from England before I see you’ (L ii 219). On 27 July, he wrote advising Keats to expect a copy of PU ‘nearly at the same time with this letter’ (L ii 221), and to Southey he wrote on 17 August that he has ‘desired Mr. Ollier to send you those [verses] last published [i.e. The Cenci and PU]’ (L ii 231). Zillman shows that it is ‘almost certain that the poem was published in August’ (see Zillman Variorum 7; BSM ix argues for 14 August as the actual date). S. did not see a copy of the volume until October,

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however, when the Gisbornes brought one back from England on their return to Livorno, probably on the 5 October (Mary Jnl i 333; see also Gisborne Jnl 9). The 1820 printing of PU was a complete disaster, as S. immediately realised. He wrote with admirable and even wry restraint to Peacock on 8 November ‘Thank you for your kindness in correcting “Prometheus”, which I am afraid gave you a great deal of trouble’ (L ii 244). But to Ollier on 10 November he was much more direct: Mr. Gisborne has sent me a copy of the Prometheus which is certainly most beautifully printed. It is to be regretted that the errors of the press are so numerous, & in many respects so destructive of the sense of a species of poetry, which I fear even with[out?] this disadvantage very few will understand or like. I shall send you the list of errata in a day or two. (L ii 246) The importance of this errata list is discussed below. S. was still sensitive about the printing of PU almost a year later, when he wrote to Ollier on 8 June 1821 explaining why he had decided to take exceptional pains with the printing of Adonais: ‘My poem [Adonais] is finished . . . I shall send it to you, either printed at Pisa, or transcribed in such a manner, as it shall be difficult for the reviser to leave such errors as assist the obscurity of the “Prometheus” ’ (L ii 257; see headnote to Adonais). After 1820, no further edition of PU was published in S.’s lifetime. Except for two pirated editions, published by William Benbow in July 1826 (taking advantage of Sir Timothy Shelley’s suppression of 1824; see Taylor 11–17), which have no relevance to the textual transmission of PU, the next important witness to the text is 1829. Galignani’s text is based on 1820 but incorporates a number of improvements (as well as some new corruptions; see e.g. II i 171 and note, III iii 126 and note, and cp. Taylor 41). At first sight, this fact appears to suggest that the errata list, mentioned by S. in his letter to Ollier quoted above, was forwarded to Galignani by Mary for inclusion in 1829, as her letter to Cyrus Redding, 3 September 1829, indicates: ‘I send you the Errata of the Prometheus’ (Mary L ii 86). Redding himself later provided an account which seems to confirm the arrangement: In Shelley’s ‘Prometheus’, as printed, there were some errata. Those she sent to me . . . Singular enough . . . Galignani’s edition contains the errata of the author, as given me by Mrs. Shelley, and not found, I presume, in the English editions of his work, but I have not collated them. (Cyrus Redding, Fifty Years’ Recollections, Literary and Personal, with Observations on Men and Things, 3 vols, 1858. (2nd edn ii 352–3) But the situation is really more complicated, for of the changes between the 1820 and 1829 texts of PU, only nine of Galignani’s new readings agree with new readings in 1839, the edition in which, according to Mary’s note on PU, ‘the verbal alterations in . . . Prometheus are made from a list of errata, written by Shelley himself ’ (1839 ii 140). Indeed the changes which are in both 1829 and 1839 are all of the type which, as Taylor 22 observes, ‘any attentive reader might have made’, and by no means necessarily imply that Galignani was working from an authoritative list of errata. There is also the problem that the relatively few corrected readings in 1829 hardly correspond to S.’s own description of the errata list he compiled to send to Ollier: ‘I send you . . . the Errata of “Prometheus”, which I ought to have sent long since — a formidable list, as you will see’ (to Ollier, 20 January 1820, L ii 257). It is in fact probable, as Taylor cogently argues, that although Mary did indeed send the errata list to Galignani for inclusion in 1829, the list eventually arrived too late to be incorporated. That she sent the list, and then assumed that it had been incorporated, is suggested by her use of pages from 1829 as printer-copy for PU in 1839 (and for the rest of the text of the second of the four volumes of 1839, i.e. the volume in which PU is printed), but not for other

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poems in 1839, for which she used pages from Ascham’s pirated edition of 1834. But PU was printed relatively early in 1829, and its text was perhaps already set when the errata list arrived; whereas other shorter poems published in 1820 and printed later in 1829, for which the errata list would have arrived in time to be usable by Galignani’s printer, are printed with improved texts in 1829 (see Taylor 22). Mary therefore probably remembered in 1839 when preparing copy that 1829 already included the errata she had sent ten years previously, and deliberately chose to use it rather than Ascham as printer-copy for 1839, only to discover that the errata changes had not in fact been made. She then introduced them herself — PU is revised with exceptional care in 1839 — into the 1829 text as printer-copy (at the same time inadvertently perpetuating those errors introduced into the text in 1829). The relatively small number of substantive variants in the 1829 text of PU is then not too difficult to explain. More problematic is Mary’s statement in her Note on PU that she has incorporated S.’s errata list in 1839, for the changes between 1820 and 1839, while very considerable in accidentals and punctuation, do not really constitute ‘a formidable list’ of ‘verbal alterations’ (there are some forty such alterations between 1820 and 1839; see textual notes for details). The corrections written into S.’s presentation copy of 1820 to Leigh Hunt (now in the Huntington Library, catalogue number 22460), about a dozen in number, may well derive from a relatively short errata list. C. D. Locock offers a plausible hypothesis: It still remains to explain the continuance of a large proportion of these errors [i.e. the errors in 1820] in Mrs. Shelley’s editions, in spite of the ‘formidable list’ sent by Shelley and generally assumed to have been seen by Mrs. Shelley. May we suppose that Mrs. Shelley never made use of that particular list at all? that what she did use was a preliminary list, — the list which Shelley ‘hoped to despatch in a day or two’ (November 10, 1820) [slightly misquoted from Shelley’s letter to Ollier, L ii 246; see above] — not the ‘formidable list’ which he sent off some ten weeks later (January 20, 1821 [L ii 257; see above]), and which may in the course of nine years have been mislaid? (Locock 1911 i 596) This hypothesis would help to explain the quite small — though significant — number of substantive changes in 1839, and the much greater number of substantive differences between S.’s fair copy (in Nbk 7, Nbk 8, and Nbk 9) and both 1820 and 1839 (actually it is worth noting that S.’s errata list may have included at least a few important changes in punctuation as well, e.g. the pointing of II ii 49–51, and the closing lines of III iv; see notes). The editorial problem of PU thus centres on three different states of the text: the holograph fair copy, the first edition (1820), and Mary’s carefully revised text in her collected edition of the poems (1839); and to these we should add for consideration the secondary but still influential text of 1829. But the textual problems go further than the mere effort to adjudicate between the claims of these three candidates for copy text, for it is necessary to explain various features of the relation between the holograph, 1820, and 1839 by hypothetical reconstruction of the lost press transcript (which would of course, had it survived, represent the best copy text for a modern editor). As we have seen, this was sent to London, and then presumably used by Peacock in his revision of the press on S.’s behalf. This crucially important final MS form of PU has disappeared (it makes no appearance in the provenance of Ollier’s papers). It is safe to assume that this transcript was made by Mary: she definitely transcribed Act IV, and S. says of Acts I, II and III in his letter to Ollier of 6 September 1819 that they are ‘being transcribed’ (L ii 116), which hardly implies that he was doing it himself. It also seems likely that S. left Mary not only to transcribe his fair copy, but to punctuate it; and a further inference must be that while S. was very careful in checking and altering the transcript in important places, he nevertheless missed various errors in Mary’s transcript. It is all but impossible to explain certain features of PU in 1820 by any other hypothesis; see e.g. II iii 50 and note, IV 208 and note. The situation is still

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further complicated by the fact that Mary’s transcript must have been copied from a state of S.’s fair copy at least as late as many of the corrections made on it by S., including not just the many later added and altered passages which take up initially blank pages, but also the fair number of small (mostly pencil) alterations which are present throughout S.’s copy (see e.g. III iii 138). It is, on the other hand, equally clear that a number of S.’s alterations to his fair copy were made after Mary’s transcript was copied from it (see e.g. I 157–8). It is probable in fact that S. continued to make corrections and alterations of this sort, after Mary had copied and despatched her transcript, because he still hoped to be able to revise the proofs of PU himself by having Ollier send them to Italy (see above), which would have given him the opportunity to make the alterations. These changes made in the three nbks containing his fair copy were probably also the source of the corrections and additions he later sent to Gisborne and Peacock. There is finally evidence which strongly suggests that, although the points already made about transcription errors in the press transcript indicate that S. did not make an exhaustive check of its accuracy, he nevertheless must have made corrections and alterations to Mary’s transcript before it was sent to England, but without entering these changes on to his own fair copy. There are a number of substantive differences between S.’s holograph fair copy and 1820 which are too emphatic to be attributed to either Mary, or to an interfering printer (see e.g. II iii 4 and note). If Mary was responsible for the punctuation of PU in the press-copy, this would explain what is otherwise very odd, that she failed to make use of the three nbks containing S.’s fair copy of PU in her preparation of the poem for 1839, even though these nbks were at that time in her possession. Mary’s probable responsibility for the punctuation in the lost press-copy, taken together with the manifest limitations of 1820, and the fact that S.’s fair copy in the Bodleian is clearly far too lightly pointed to form a basis for accidentals (particularly in the context of S.’s exceptionally difficult and elaborate syntactical structures in the writing of PU), all suggest 1839 as the best choice of copy text for PU. No choice can be ideal under the circumstances, and it is sobering to remember that the pointing of PU in 1839 includes substantial intervention by Mary (although presumably sanctioned by S. himself), supplemented by possible details in S.’s errata list or lists, modified by three printers (1820, 1829, and 1839) and by Peacock’s alterations made in his correction of proofs. Peacock’s ‘correction’ by his own account involved removing S.’s ‘frequent dashes’ (see H. B. Forman, The Shelley Library: An Essay in Bibliography (1886) 88), and he may well have interfered with the press transcript itself before printing. The copy text in 1839 has therefore been modified to an unusually extensive degree in the text given here. Sometimes this modification is justified on strictly textual grounds, but there are many cases where literary judgement, together with assumptions about probability and articulacy, have come significantly into play. Such cases receive appropriate discussion in the notes.

Sources, Plot, Characters, Commentary PU draws in an obviously direct way on Aeschylus, in its dramatic conception, and in numerous verbal echoes, particularly in the first act, and to a lesser extent the second act. S. includes an account of Prometheus in his note to Q Mab viii 211–2, taken from J. F. Newton’s Return to Nature (see notes to Q Mab in Longman i); but as in his Preface to PU, S.’s explanation of the myth’s meaning in his Q Mab note (where Prometheus is said to ‘represent the human race’) is to be understood as a gloss on the meaning of the source myth, and not on S.’s own handling of it. PU departs significantly from its source-myth in Aeschylus, as the Preface makes plain. The action and characters of Aeschylus’s play are taken from the story of the Titans and the Olympians, as set forth in Hesiod’s Theogony. In Prometheus Bound, Prometheus, one of the Titans overthrown by the Olympian gods under Zeus, has helped the new order to victory by advising Zeus to win by intelligence rather than force (the Titans having ignored this advice from Prometheus). But Zeus has aped the overthrown order by himself becoming a tyrant, seeking to dominate by force and looking to destroy primitive

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mankind. Prometheus takes pity on humanity and improves their condition by showing them the uses of intelligence, and stealing for them from heaven the gift of fire. Zeus punishes him for this by nailing him to the rocky Caucasus. In Aeschylus, Prometheus, whose name means ‘forethinking’, refuses to win his freedom by disclosing the secret he knows of Zeus’s future downfall. The secret is that if Zeus marries Thetis he will beget a child stronger than himself, which will lead to his downfall. After being nailed on Caucasus by Hephaestus (encouraged by Might and Force), Prometheus is visited by Oceanus and then by his daughters the Oceanides (anticipating the roles of Panthea and Ione in S.’s drama), whose absent sister Hesione is Prometheus’s bride, thus corresponding to S.’s Asia. There is a long dialogue with Io, who like Prometheus suffers under the persecution of Zeus (there is no equivalent character in PU), then Hermes (corresponding to S.’s Mercury) arrives and attempts by threats and guile to wheedle the secret out of Prometheus; he refuses to yield, and is cast down to Tartarus, although he is not deserted by the Oceanides. According to various classical sources, Prometheus Bound was the first play of an otherwise lost trilogy, the second play of which represented Prometheus’s reconciliation with Zeus. Prometheus is brought back from Tartarus to Caucasus, where an eagle comes each day to gnaw at his entrails. He is at last freed by Zeus, to whom he discloses his secret, thus enabling the tyrant to avert his fate by marrying Thetis to Peleus. It is this compromise which S. consciously refuses in his own rehandling of the myth (see Preface). S. follows normal early nineteenth-century practice in Latinising Gk names (cp. his practice in the Homeric Hymns, nos 156–161 in Longman ii, and in his translation of The Cyclops, no. 172 in Longman ii). PU uses the Roman names Jupiter and Mercury for Zeus and Hermes (and also Hercules for Heracles in III iii); the tyrannical regime represented in the play would anyway bear closer similarity for S. to the Roman imperialism he loathed than to the Greek culture, which has such a strong influence on S. (for discussion of contemporary resonances of the Prometheus myth see Stuart Curran, ‘The Political Prometheus’, SiR xxv (1986) 429–55). PU is of course only in general terms derived from Aeschylus; the ‘action’ is abstract and operates on many levels, one of which certainly works around the symbolic possibilities of its oblique relation to and various departures from the Aeschylean plot (for telling commentary on S.’s deployment of mythic materials see Wasserman). S.’s conception of the marriage of Prometheus and Asia introduces a new dimension into the plot, which enables S. to dramatise a means of breaking the recurrent cycle, embodied in the classical sources, of tyrannous regimes which are overthrown by new generations who promptly reinstall a tyranny in their own conduct (this cycle had immediate and direct resonances for S. and his generation in the failure of the French Revolution; see Preface to L&C in Longman ii). While the symbolic meanings of S.’s Prometheus are complex and elusive, it is clear that Asia represents a transcendent form of Love (just as her sisters Panthea and Ione represent lesser and mediated forms of Love), and that Prometheus’s victory over Jupiter requires the presence of Asia to avoid reversion to the old cycle of oppression. Prometheus himself seems to approximate to those positive products and potentialities of human intelligence which are not confined to individual minds (although only knowable in and through such minds). The marriage of Asia and Prometheus carries many associations, including the relation of East to West, Oriental to Hellenic cultural traditions, female and male, and also different modes of perception and understanding (Prometheus is locked into a fruitless urge to rational understanding and control, whereas Asia’s emotional and intuitive understanding actually leads to change in the second act). Jupiter represents tyranny, but PU offers subtle reflection on the close relation of Prometheus to Jupiter, and there is a clear implication that Jupiter has been created and sustained in being by the actions and attitudes of Prometheus himself. Asia’s sisters are themselves clearly differentiated in PU, and are to be understood as aspects of her larger encompassing significance (cp. S.’s discussion of ‘that profound and complicated sentiment, which we call love’, and its relation to ‘the sexual impulse’, in the closing paragraphs of DMAA); Panthea mediates between Prometheus and Asia in their long period of separation, and thus embodies those forms of human love accessible in the dark epoch of prerevolutionary

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oppression, particularly sexual love (Panthea is more confident and experienced than Ione, and relates to Prometheus in physical terms); Ione is more timid, shy and inexperienced (she looks to Panthea for explanation of events and characters), and also more sensitive and alert, embodying innocent and purer forms of human love, such as altruism. The sisters appear to begin to merge into each other, and then into Asia, from Act II. The names Panthea and Ione have no obvious significance: S. consistently gives to characters who embody a distinctive departure from the source myth names which cannot be pinned down within any received framework of meaning. The most strikingly original of S.’s conceptions in PU is the figure of Demogorgon. Mary Shelley characterises him as ‘the Primal Power of the world’ in her note to PU (1839 ii 134). In Peacock’s Rhododaphne (1817), reviewed by S. in February 1818 (Prose 311–3; see Mary Jnl i 194), Demogorgon is described in a note as ‘the Genius of the Earth, and the Sovereign Power of the Terrestrial Daemons. He dwelt originally with Eternity and Chaos, till, becoming weary of inaction, he organised the chaotic elements, and surrounded the earth with the heavens. In addition to Pan and the Fates, his children were Uranus, Titaea, Pytho, Eris, and Erebus. This awful Power was so sacred among the Arcadians, that it was held impious to pronounce his name . . . He has been supposed to be a philosophical emblem of the principle of vegetable life’ (Peacock Works vii 94). Peacock refers to Boccaccio, Genealogia Deorum, as his source, and it is probable that S. himself used it. Demogorgon is there described as the primordial god of ancient mythology, mysterious ancestor of all the gods and creator of all things, dwelling in the vaporous depths of the earth, whose name men feared to speak. Boccaccio also suggests Mount Etna or Taenarus as sites for the entrance to Demogorgon’s lair, which S. develops into an association with the hundred-headed monster Typhon who was imprisoned beneath Etna by Zeus as a punishment for rebellion. Boccaccio derives the name from δαίμων and γεωργός, ‘daemon of the earth’. The actual origins of the name are not classical but medieval; Statius, Thebaid, has a pseudo-classical medieval commentary by Lactantius Placidus which glosses iv 514–6, ‘Scimus enim et quicquid dici, noscique timetis,/Et turbare Hecaten, ni te, Thymbraee, vererer,/Et triplicis mundi summum quem scire nefastum’ as ‘Dicit deum Demogorgona summum’ (Scholia in Statii Thebaidem iv 516, ed. Jahnke (1898) iii 228). The name appears to originate here as a scribe’s error for the Platonic δημιουργός, which in Timaeus 28ff. is the power responsible for the material creation. Demogorgon was taken up by demonology and appears in Renaissance literature as an obscurely powerful figure identified variously and loosely with Eternity (his companion in Boccaccio), Chaos, or Fate (cp. Faerie Queene I v 22, Paradise Lost ii 964, Jonson, The Alchemist II i 104, Anon. (Elizabethan drama), Locrine, I ii 276). Late medieval and Renaissance conceptions of Demogorgon were frequently read back into classical sources via commentary. Although clearly pseudo-classical, in S.’s presentation, Demogorgon has some affinity with the Greek conception of fate as a power of destiny and natural law greater than any god (Cp. Prometheus Bound 511–20). S.’s choice of a non-classical character reflects the fact that ‘unlike earlier rebels’, in PU, Demogorgon ‘genuinely possesses the power to overthrow Jupiter, so that no figure named by Hesiod could have served Shelley’s purpose’ (GM). Demogorgon’s characteristics in PU seem especially influenced by Lucan, Pharsalia, a great favourite of S.’s, where he found the conjunction of an obscure subterranean god with oracular inspiration and utterance, and the legend of Typhon: Which of the immortals is hidden here? What deity, descending from heaven, deigns to dwell pent up in these dark grottoes? What god of heaven endures the weight of earth, knowing every secret of the eternal process of events, sharing with the sky the knowledge of the future, ready to reveal himself to the nations, and patient of contact with mankind? A great and mighty god is he, whether he merely predicts the future or the future is itself determined by the fiat of his utterance. It may be that a large part of the whole divine element is embedded in the world to rule it, and supports the globe poised upon empty space; and this

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See also vi 496–9, 742–9, and cp. Nicholas Rowe’s note to vi 794 in his influential trans. (Lucan’s Pharsalia, 2 vols, 2nd edn (1722) ii 43): The Poet seems to allude here to that God whom they called Demogorgon, who was the Father and Creator of all the other Gods; who, though he himself was bound in Chains in the lowest hell, was yet so terrible to all the others that they could not bear the very mention of his name . . . Him Lucan supposes to be the subject of the Power of Magic, as all the other Deities of what kind soever were to him. In PU, Demogorgon is the one figure in whom most levels of the poem coincide. He corresponds in the source myth to the secret known only to Prometheus, Zeus’s child who will prove stronger than his father. He represents Necessity, ‘the mysterious law, that [in S.’s view] no-one yet understands, which compels effects to follow causes, whether in the physical or the social or the moral world’ (GM; cp. Q Mab vi 198 and note, and S.’s note, Mont Blanc 76–83 and note). Demogorgon ‘cannot initiate anything on a moral level — this needs the will and purpose of man; he can only operate in terms of a chain of cause and effect: he has to be activated . . . On the physical level, he is the volcanic, geological force that inevitably recreates the living earth as it is worn away. He is activated [i.e. into volcanic eruption; see II iv 129] by the entry into his cavern of water in the form of the sea-sisters, the Oceanides Asia and Panthea . . . on the political level he is Historical Necessity, the inevitable causal process that will induce man to rebel, to overthrow his oppressors, to remake himself as a truly human being . . .’ (GM). It is likely that S. also associates Demogorgon with ‘the people’, in the sense of the new ‘class’ of ‘the unrepresented multitude’ (see ‘Philosophical View of Reform’, Prose 242), and that the name is to be understood as punning on the Gk δῆμος, ‘people’, and γοργός, ‘grim, terrible’. As many commentators have shown, the play has a direct relation to the political situation in Europe in the years following the defeat of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (see notes, especially to Act I, and Cameron (1974) for extensive commentary). There is a significant, strangely conceived and wholly original scientific dimension in PU, first discussed in detail in Grabo (1930). Act IV famously embodies a rich variety of scientific allusion without parallel in writings of the period; as the notes below demonstrate, its organisation is informed by an imaginative exploration of contemporary scientific speculation on the nature of time and space. But, in a different and more dramatically focused way, the first three acts build from the metaphoric and symbolic potential of volcanic activity, earthquake and tempest, by which S. was fascinated from boyhood, to elaborate a complex geophysical symbolic narrative first noted and explained in GM, ‘A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley’, ELH xxiv (1957) 191–228. Some elements of the play’s scientific conception derive from the ‘proper machinery for a philosophic poem’ in Darwin (note to i 73) which embodies natural processes, functions and attributes of the physical world in ‘genii’; S.’s use of characters which partly subsume physical, philosophical and historical features of the universe, such as ‘Earth’, or the Fauns in II ii, is a sophisticated development of Darwin’s approach. The scientific dimension in PU is imaginatively fused with an extensive network of allusion to classical lore and literature of volcanic and related activity, which is frequently inseparable from beliefs about oracular prophecy and the power of the Earth to control human affairs. PU

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is steeped in such material, with a richness of detail presumably owing much to S.’s ‘Grecian’ period at Marlow in 1817, in the company and under the informed influence of Peacock. The Grecian classicism of the play clearly also owes much to S.’s interests in Platonic and Neoplatonic thought and writings, in which he had been closely involved in the eighteen months preceding composition of PU. Perhaps most importantly, PU is a metaphysical drama, concerned with the nature of good and evil, the relation of the physical and temporally finite to transcendent and abstract modes of existence, and the intersection of moral absolutes with historical and political specifics; this dimension of PU is given extended and brilliantly illuminating treatment in Wasserman, which remains the most challenging and persuasive single reading of the poem as a whole. The rich cultural and religious syncretism, which informs S.’s materials and allusions in the play, and which draws on belief-systems and elements of associated ritual (such as Zoroastrianism) beyond the more obvious Hellenic and Hebraic dimensions of the drama, is powerfully treated in Curran (1975). There is a particular focus in Act II on the relation of individual free will to large movements of historical change, and on the role of poetry in this relation (see notes, especially to II ii), which has close connection with S.’s more concentrated and lyrically impassioned articulation of this problem in Ode to the West Wind. The overall ambition and scale of PU are more broadly in the manner established by S. in Q Mab and L&C; all three poems offer, in their different stylistic idioms, extended treatment of current historical and political questions in a very long-term physical and metaphysical perspective. The wider range of literary and intellectual influences discernible in PU is too extensive and diverse for brief summary; the notes which follow attempt to give at least an indication of the variety and density of the play’s cultural reference. Paradise Lost is a pervasive influence, as is the Bible; Shakespeare, Spenser, Dante, Lucretius and Virgil are all central, and the Greek tragedians. Plato and Platonic ideas are important, including their mediation in many classical and Renaissance sources. There are marked local influences from many of S.’s contemporaries, particularly Byron, Hunt, Coleridge, Peacock, and Godwin. The play also makes some coded reference to S.’s immediate circle and biographical circumstances; e.g. Mercury suggests Byron’s cynical worldliness as S. may recently have experienced it directly in Venice in the late summer of 1818; Prometheus, Asia and Proteus in III iii equate with S., Mary and Godwin; sometimes Panthea and Ione may suggest Mary and Claire Clairmont (see also notes to III i 19, III iii 64–8). In short, PU brings to a focus of extraordinary brilliance the complex diversity of S.’s literary intelligence and cultural inheritance in 1819. In formal terms, it is a truly remarkable achievement. There is a mix of blank verse which varies in register from a sometimes almost parodic Miltonising, through a development of the post-Wordsworthian style of Alastor and Mont Blanc, to a wholly distinctive Shelleyan manner typified for example in the exchanges between Asia and Panthea in II i. The blank verse alternates with an array of lyrical forms which, although they are often individually anticipated in the wide range of stanza forms attempted by S. between 1804 and 1818, occur nowhere else in such profusion of variety and detailed invention (see e.g. headnotes to Stanzas written in dejection, and Misery. — A Fragment (no. 202 in Longman ii), for commentary on S.’s developing use of lyric metres in late 1818). This alternation of blank verse with complex lyric passages shadows the dramatic device of an alternation between relatively static dramatic exchanges, and choric elements, which S. adapts from Greek tragic drama (cp. S.’s use of this adaptation from the Gk in his translation of The Cyclops). PU has attracted a vast amount of critical and scholarly commentary. Most book-length studies of S.’s poetry and thought include detailed consideration of the play, and the number of articles and chapters concerned with questions of theme, style and context in PU runs into several hundred. In addition to the studies in Cameron (1974), Curran (1975), and Wasserman, the reader is directed to the bibliographical listings in Rognoni 1506–8, in Shelley: Poems and Prose, ed. Timothy Webb (1995) 536–44, and to Stuart Curran’s chapter on S. in English Romantic Poets: A Review of Research and Criticism, 4th rev. edn, ed. Frank Jordan, 1985.

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Text from 1839; many readings are adopted from the fair copy in Nbk 7, Nbk 8 and Nbk 9, and the notes record all such decisions, including all cases where the fair copy punctuation has been preferred. All other departures from the text of 1839 are also indicated, and explained where necessary. Capitalisation is a vexed issue in PU; S.’s capitals in the fair copy are interesting and extensive, but not systematic, and there are numerous divergencies between them, 1820 and 1839. Broadly, the text here follows 1839 for capitals, but with many exceptions, sometimes derived from the fair-copy, and sometimes based on surmise concerning what S.’s practice might have been, had he consistently observed the intentions that can be inferred from his MSS and printed texts. All variant capitals in the three principal witnesses are recorded in the notes. Patterns of indentation in lyric stanzas are generally more elaborate in 1820 and 1839 than in the fair copy, and its simpler forms are usually followed in the present text. There are substantial draft materials surviving for PU, in Nbk 6, Nbk 10, Nbk 11, Nbk 12, Box 1, British Library (Ashley Manuscript 4086) and CHPL (SC 548, 549). Published in 1820.

Prometheus Unbound A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts AUDISNE HAEC, AMPHIARAE, SUB TERRAM ABDITE?

¶ 15. Epigraph. ‘Do you hear this, Amphiaraus, in your home beneath the earth?’ Amphiaraus was a seer who fought as one of the Seven against Thebes; he foresaw the failure of the expedition, and Zeus saved him by causing him to be swallowed up by the earth. He became an oracular god. S.’s epigraph appears on the title-page of 1820. S. quotes it in Nbk 6, p. 115 rev., under the heading ‘To the Ghost of Æschylus’, and with the reference ‘Epigon — [Æsch.] ad Cic.’ The line is from the Epigoni, a lost play by Aeschylus, and its context in Cicero, Tusculan Disputations II xxv 69–61, makes for complex irony: ‘Dionysius of Heraclea, a person certainly of little resolution, after learning from Zeno to be brave was taught by pain to forget his lesson. For upon an attack of kidney trouble, even amid his shrieks, he kept on crying out that the opinions he had himself previously held about pain were false. And on being asked by Cleanthes, his fellow-pupil, what was the reason that had seduced him from his former opinion, he replied: “Because if, after I had given such devoted attention to philosophy, I yet proved unable to bear pain, that would be sufficient proof that pain was an evil. Now I have spent many years in studying philosophy and am unable to bear pain: pain is therefore an evil.” Then Cleanthes stamped with his foot upon the ground and, according to the story, recited a line from the Epigoni: Do you hear this, Amphiaraus, in your home beneath the earth? meaning Zeno and grieving that Dionysius was false to his teaching.’ (Loeb trans.) S. adapts the line to turn it against its author Aeschylus: just as Dionysius betrayed the teachings of his Stoic master Zeno by refusing to ignore the reality of pain, so S. in PU defiantly rejects the acceptance of pain implicit in the suffering of the Aeschylean hero. ‘The protest is to the dead master concerning the living disciple’s disagreement: enduring prolonged pain in order to eliminate it (Prometheus’s steadfast objective in S.) is quite different from (indeed can be the opposite of) enduring it because it is of no consequence in relation to virtue [the Stoic position]. Pain is an evil . . . the pain inflicted by Jupiter is not to be deemed unimportant and not an evil. It is not to be endured simply as if it did not exist, and eventually accepted because it comes from a god’ (GM). See also Wasserman 283.

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Preface

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The Greek tragic writers, in selecting as their subject any portion of their national history or mythology, employed in their treatment of it a certain arbitrary discretion. They by no means conceived themselves bound to adhere to the common interpretation, or to imitate in story, as in title, their rivals and predecessors. Such a system would have amounted to a resignation of those claims to preference over their competitors which incited the composition. The Agamemnonian story was exhibited on the Athenian theatre with as many variations as dramas. I have presumed to employ a similar license. The ‘Prometheus Unbound’ of Aeschylus supposed the reconciliation of Jupiter with his victim as the price of the disclosure of the danger threatened to his empire by the consummation of his marriage with Thetis. Thetis, according to this view of the subject, was given in marriage to Peleus, and Prometheus, by the permission of Jupiter, delivered from his captivity by Hercules. Had I framed my story on this model, I should have done no more than have attempted to restore the lost drama of Aeschylus; an ambition, which, if my preference to this mode of treating the subject had incited me to cherish, the recollection of the high comparison such an attempt would challenge might well abate. But, in truth, I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind. The moral interest of the fable, which is so powerfully sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high language and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary. The only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgement, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandisement, which, in the Hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. The character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider that magnificent fiction with a religious feeling, it engenders something worse. But Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends. This Poem was chiefly written upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, among the flowery glades, and thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees, which are extended in ever winding labyrinths upon its immense platforms and dizzy arches suspended in the air. The bright blue sky of Rome, and the effect of the vigorous awakening of spring in that divinest climate, and the new life with which it drenches the spirits even to intoxication, were the inspiration of this drama. The imagery which I  have employed will be found, in many instances, to have been drawn from the operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed. This is unusual in modern poetry, although Dante and Shakespeare are full of instances of the same kind: Dante indeed more than any other poet, and with greater success. But the Greek poets, as writers to whom no resource of awakening the sympathy of their contemporaries was unknown, were in the habitual use of this power; and it is the study of their works (since a higher merit would probably be denied me), to which I am willing that my readers should impute this singularity. Pref. 7–9. S. refers to the lost second play by Aeschylus, known only through fragments in classical sources (e.g. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations II x 23–5), in the supposed trilogy of which Prometheus Bound was thought to be the first part (see headnote, and Prometheus Bound, ed. Mark Griffiths (1983) 281–305). Pref. 7–27. S.’s discussion of Prometheus in this paragraph refers to his character and significance in the source myth, and not in PU itself. Pref. 15. catastrophe] In the Gk sense, i.e. the concluding resolution of a tragic plot. Pref. 20. majesty,] Nbk 7, 1820; majesty 1839. Pref. 29–30. ever winding] Nbk 7, 1820; ever-winding 1839.

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One word is due in candour to the degree in which the study of contemporary writings may have tinged my composition, for such has been a topic of censure with regard to poems far more popular, and indeed more deservedly popular, than mine. It is impossible that any one who inhabits the same age with such writers as those who stand in the foremost ranks of our own, can conscientiously assure himself that his language and tone of thought may not have been modified by the study of the productions of those extraordinary intellects. It is true, that, not the spirit of their genius, but the forms in which it has manifested itself, are due less to the peculiarities of their own minds than to the peculiarity of the moral and intellectual condition of the minds among which they have been produced. Thus a number of writers possess the form, whilst they want the spirit of those whom, it is alleged, they imitate; because the former is the endowment of the age in which they live, and the latter must be the uncommunicated lightning of their own mind. The peculiar style of intense and comprehensive imagery which distinguishes the modern literature of England, has not been, as a general power, the product of the imitation of any particular writer. The mass of capabilities remains at every period materially the same; the circumstances which awaken it to action perpetually change. If England were divided into forty republics, each equal in population and extent to Athens, there is no reason to suppose but that, under institutions not more perfect than those of Athens, each would produce philosophers and poets equal to those who (if we except Shakespeare) have never been surpassed. We owe the great writers of the golden age of our literature to that fervid awakening of the public mind which shook to dust the oldest and most oppressive form of the Christian religion. We owe Milton to the progress and development of the same spirit: the sacred Milton was, let it ever be remembered, a republican and a bold inquirer into morals and religion. The great writers of our own age are, we have reason to suppose, the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition, or the opinions which cement it. 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. As to imitation, poetry is a mimetic art. It creates, but it creates by combination and representation. Poetical abstractions are beautiful and new, not because the portions of which they are composed had no previous existence in the mind of man, or in nature, but because the whole produced by their combination has some intelligible and beautiful analogy with those sources of emotion and thought, and with the contemporary condition of them: one great poet is a masterpiece of nature, which another not only ought to study but must study. He might as wisely and as easily determine that his mind should no longer be the mirror of all that is lovely in the visible universe, as exclude from his contemplation the beautiful which exists in the writings of a great contemporary. The pretence of doing it would be a presumption in any but the greatest; the effect, even in him, would be strained, unnatural, and ineffectual. A poet is the combined product of such internal powers as modify the nature of others; and of such external influences as excite and sustain these powers; he is not one, but both. Every man’s mind is, in this respect, modified by all the objects of nature and art; by every word and every Pref. 41. The five paragraphs commencing at this point were added by S. in response to the review of RofI which had appeared in April in the Quarterly Review xxi (1819) 460–71, and which S. received in Florence in October 1819 together with Hunt’s reply in the Examiner for 26 September 1819 (see S.’s letter to Ollier, 15 October 1819, L ii 126–8). This exceptionally hostile and indeed vitriolic review, which S. believed to be the work of Southey (it was in fact by J. T. Coleridge), accused S. of plagiarising from Southey and Wordsworth, and offered a savage characterisation of the subversive and immoral nature of his ideas. Pref. 43. and indeed] Nbk 9, 1820; and, indeed, 1839. Pref. 46. those extraordinary intellects] S.’s draft in Nbk 10 f. 27r shows that he had Coleridge and Byron specifically in mind.

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suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon his consciousness; it is the mirror upon which all forms are reflected, and in which they compose one form. Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age. From this subjection the loftiest do not escape. There is a similarity 85 between Homer and Hesiod, between Aeschylus and Euripides, between Virgil and Horace, between Dante and Petrarch, between Shakespeare and Fletcher, between Dryden and Pope; each has a generic resemblance under which their specific distinctions are arranged. If this similarity be the result of imitation, I am willing to confess that I have imitated. Let this opportunity be conceded to me of acknowledging that I have, what a Scotch phi90 losopher characteristically terms, ‘a passion for reforming the world:’ what passion incited him to write and publish his book, he omits to explain. For my part, I had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon, than go to Heaven with Paley and Malthus. But it is a mistake to suppose that I  dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree as containing a reasoned system on the the95 ory of human life. Didactic poetry is my abhorrence; nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse. My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarise the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are 100 seeds cast upon the highway of life, which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness. Should I live to accomplish what I purpose, that is, produce a systematical history of what appear to me to be the genuine elements of human society, let not the advocates of injustice and superstition flatter themselves that I should take Aeschylus rather than Plato as my model. 105 The having spoken of myself with unaffected freedom will need little apology with the candid; and let the uncandid consider that they injure me less than their own hearts and minds by misrepresentation. Whatever talents a person may possess to amuse and instruct others, be they ever so inconsiderable, he is yet bound to exert them: if his attempt be ineffectual, let the punishment of an unaccomplished purpose have been sufficient; let none 110 trouble themselves to heap the dust of oblivion upon his efforts; the pile they raise will betray his grave, which might otherwise have been unknown. Pref. 81–88. Anticipating similar resonant articulations of S.’s view that poets stand inescapably in a dialectical relation to their historical period, in e.g. the last paragraph of DP, and in PVR (see Prose 240, 297). Pref. 89–91. Peacock in Nightmare Abbey (ch. ii) attributes to Scythrop Glowry (a humorously satirical representation of S. himself), ‘the passion for reforming the world’. The phrase refers to Robert Forsyth’s Principles of Moral Science (Edinburgh, 1805; see i 291–2) quoted by Peacock in Melincourt (1817) ch. xxi. Pref. 90–92. See S.’s letter to Peacock of 23–24 January 1819: ‘Fortunately Plato is of my opinion, & I had rather err with Plato than be right with Horace’ (L ii 75). Cp. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations I xvii 39: ‘Errare mehercule malo cum Platone, quem tu quanti facias scio et quem ex tuo ore admiror, quam cum istis vera sentire’ (I prefer, before heaven, to go astray with Plato, your reverence for whom I know, and admiration for whom I learn from your lips, rather than hold true views with his opponents’. Loeb trans.). Paley and Malthus] For Malthus, see note to III i 19, and note on L&C Preface. William Paley was a well-known popular theologian, and author of Evidences of Christianity (1794), whose complacent Christianity attracted S.’s especial impatience and scorn; see e.g. L i 200, and Refutation of Deism (Prose Works i 97, 107). Pref. 92. Heaven] Nbk 9, 1820; heaven 1839. Pref. 99–101. Recalling the Parable of the Sower, Matthew xiii 3–9. Pref. 102–3. a systematical history of . . . human society] S. wrote PVR probably in late 1819, i.e. around the time of the composition of this part of the Preface (see SC vi 951–5); but it remained unpublished until 1920.

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Scene, a ravine of icy rocks in the Indian Caucasus. Prometheus is discovered bound to the precipice. Panthea and Ione are seated at his feet. Time, night. During the scene, morning slowly breaks.

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Prometheus Monarch of Gods and Dæmons, and all Spirits But One, who throng those bright and rolling worlds Which Thou and I alone of living things Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this Earth Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou Requitest for knee-worship, prayer and praise, And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts, With fear and self-contempt and barren hope; Whilst me, who am thy foe, eyeless in hate, Hast thou made reign and triumph, to thy scorn, O’er mine own misery and thy vain revenge . . .

I. SD. Indian Caucasus] The Prometheus story was traditionally placed in the Georgian Caucasus mountains, between the Black Sea and the Caspian, although there is no specific sanction for this in Aeschylus (see Prometheus Bound, ed. Mark Griffith (1983) 79–80). S. moves the setting to the Indian Caucasus (i.e. the Hindu Kush), thus placing his action in a region traditionally associated with the birth of civilisation, and away from an area tainted by the presence of reactionary political forces in S.’s contemporary milieu (see Curran (1975) 61ff. et passim). 1–7. There are dense Miltonic echoes throughout Prometheus’s opening speech, often of an elusively composite kind; with these lines cp. e.g. Paradise Lost i 84ff., 242ff. 1. Dœmons] Beings which hold ‘an intermediate place between what is divine and what is mortal’ (S.’s trans. of Symposium 202; and cp. Kathleen Raine, ‘Thomas Taylor, Plato, and the English Romantic Movement’, Sewanee Review lxxvi (1968) 230–57, 255). 2. One] Usually identified as Prometheus himself (cp. I 265, III iii 1–4, IV 34); but Demogorgon is a possibility, ironically hinted thus early to Jupiter (the Monarch of line 1) as the secret of his downfall which P. refuses to disclose (cp. I 371 and note, II iii 79). The Spirits . . . who throng those bright and rolling worlds refers to life on other planets; cp. I 163–5. worlds] Worlds Nbk 7. 3. Cp. Southey’s Curse of Kehama (1810) XVIII vii: ‘There is it written, Maid, that thou and I,/Alone of human kind a deathless pair . . .’. 4. sleepless] Sleeplessness (conventionally common in tyrants, but shared by Prometheus at line 12) is an element of the curse in Kehama II x. Cp. Prometheus Bound 32 (ἄϋπνος), Pope’s Iliad ii 2. 6. Echoing the Miltonic ‘knee-tribute’, Paradise Lost v 782. prayer] Nbk 7; prayer, 1820, 1839. 7. hecatombs] Large-scale public sacrifices; cp. S.’s use in the Letter to Lord Ellenborough (1812; Prose Works i 65), and see his note to Hellas 1090–1. 8. hope;] Nbk 7; hope. 1820, 1839. 9–11. ‘Blind with hatred, you have made me triumph over my own misery and your revenge’ (GM; eyeless in hate refers to thou in line 10, but the syntax is aptly ambiguous). 11. revenge . . .] Nbk 7; revenge. 1820, 1839.

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Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours And moments, aye divided by keen pangs Till they seem years, torture and solitude, Scorn and despair, — these are mine empire. More glorious far than that which thou surveyest From thine unenvied throne, O Mighty God! Almighty, had I deigned to share the shame Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain, Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb, Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life — Ah me, alas, pain, pain ever, forever! No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure.

12. Three thousand years] The Fall of Troy (understood by antiquarian convention as the beginning of recorded human history) was traditionally dated at 1184 bc, which counting forwards would place the action of the play in S.’s contemporary world of 1816. Plutarch (Moralia v 115, ‘On Isis and Osiris’ 370 bc) says of Zoroaster that he believed ‘a time appointed by fate is coming, in which Arimanios . . . must needs be destroyed . . . and utterly vanish; when the earth becoming plain and level there shall be one life and one government for men, all happy and of one language. Theopompus says that, according to the Magi, one of the Gods [i.e. Oromazes and Arimanios] shall conquer, the other be conquered, alternately for 3,000 years, for another 3,000 years they shall fight, war, and undo one the works of the other; but in the end Hades shall fail, and man shall be happy, neither requiring food nor constructing shelter . . .’ (Bohn trans.). hours] Nbk 7; hours, 1820, 1839. 13–15. Cp. J&M 416–19: As the slow shadows of the pointed grass Mark the eternal periods, his pangs pass Slow, ever-moving, — making moments be As mine seem — each an immortality! 13. moments,] Nbk 7; moments 1820, 1839. 14. seem] Nbk 7; seemed 1820, 1829, 1839. Prometheus’s torments still continue, as the present tense are of line 15 confirms. 17. O] Nbk 7; O, 1820, 1839. 20–1. Cp. Prometheus Bound 15, ϕάπαγγι πρòς δυσχειμέρωι (‘by the wintry crag’), and 65, στέρνων διαμπὰξ (‘right through the breast’). 21–2. Cp. Prometheus Bound 20–2, τῶιδ’ ἀπανθρώπωι πάγωι,/ἵν’ οὔτε ϕωνὴν οὔτε τον μορϕὴν βροτων/ ὄφηι (‘this hill, far from humankind, where no mortal will observe [lit. ‘see’] a voice or the shape of something . . .’). 22. life —] Nbk 7; life. 1820, 1839. 23. Ironically echoed at III i 81. The refrain recalls Prometheus Bound 98–100: ϕεῦ ϕεῦ τò παρòν τό τ’ ἐπερχόμενον πῆμα στενάχω, πη̂ι ποτε μόχθων γρὴ τέρματα τω̂νδ’ ἐπιτεῖλαι.

(‘Woe! Woe! For misery present and misery to come I groan, not knowing where it is fated deliverance from these woes shall rise.’). Forever] Nbk 7; for ever 1820, 1839. In S.’s usage ‘forever = continually, for ever = eternally’ (GM); cp. Alastor 209, 357, 407, 425.

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shelley: selected poems I ask the Earth, have not the mountains felt? I ask yon Heaven — the all-beholding Sun, Has it not seen? the Sea, in storm or calm Heaven’s ever-changing Shadow, spread below, Have its deaf waves not heard my agony? Ah me, alas, pain, pain ever, forever! The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears Of their moon-freezing crystals; the bright chains Eat with their burning cold into my bones. Heaven’s wingèd hound, polluting from thy lips

25–9. Cp. Prometheus Bound 88–92: ὦ δῖος αἰθὴρ καὶ ταχύπτεροι πνοαί, ποταμω̂ν τε πηγαὶ ποντίων τε κυμάτων ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα παμμῆτόρ τε γῆ, καί τòν πανόπτην κύκλον ἡλίον καλῶ, ἴδεσθέ η’ οἷα πρòς θεῶν πάσχω θεός.

(‘O thou bright sky of heaven, ye swift-winged breezes, ye river-waters, and multitudinous laughter of the waves of ocean, O universal mother Earth, and thou, all-seeing orb of the sun, to you I call! Behold what I, a god, endure of evil from the gods.’) 26. Heaven —] Nbk 7; Heaven, 1820, 1839 (Heaven and Sun are not in apposition). 27. seen? the] seen, the Nbk 7; seen? The 1820, 1839. calm] Nbk 7; calm; 1820, 1839. 28. Shadow] ‘Image, copy’ (GM). 31. Cp. John xix 34. 32. moon-freezing] ‘Freezing in the moonlight’ (Locock 1911). 34–5. ‘More venomous by contact with Jupiter than by its own nature’ (GM). Cp. Prometheus Bound 1016–25: πρῶτα μὲν γάρ ὀκρίδα ϕάραγγα βροντῆι καὶ κεραυνίαι ϕλογὶ πατὴρ σπαράζει τήνδε καὶ κρύψει δέμας τò σόν, πετραία δ’ ἀγκάλη σε βαστάσει. μακρòν δὲ μῆκος ἐκτελεντήσας χρόνου ἄψορρον ἥζεις εἰς ϕάος˙·Διòσ δέ τοι πτηνòς κύων, δαϕοινòς αἰετός, λάβρως διαρταμήσει σώματος μέγα ῥάκος, ἅκλητος ἕρπων δαιταλεὺς πανήμερος, κελαινόβρωτον δ’ ἧπαρ ἐκθοινήσεται.

(‘First, the Father will shatter this jagged cliff with thunder and lightning-flame, and will entomb thy frame, while the rock shall still hold thee clasped in its embrace. But when thou hast completed a long stretch of time, thou shalt come back again to the light. Then verily the winged hound of Zeus, the ravening eagle, coming an unbidden banqueter the whole day long, with savage appetite shall tear thy body piecemeal into great rents and feast his fill upon thy liver till it be black with gnawing.’). Heaven’s wingèd hound] S. echoes the Aeschylean πτηνὸς κύων; this is the only mention in PU of the eagle (or vulture) that in the myth comes every day to consume Prometheus’s liver, which then grows again (though III ii 11–17 ironically associate the fallen Jupiter with an eagle, and may themselves recall the Aeschylean lines).

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His beak in poison not its own, tears up My heart; and shapeless sights come wandering by, The ghastly people of the realm of dream, Mocking me: and the Earthquake-fiends are charged To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds When the rocks split and close again behind; While from their loud abysses howling throng The genii of the storm, urging the rage Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail. And yet to me welcome is day and night, Whether one breaks the hoar frost of the morn, Or starry, dim, and slow, the other climbs The leaden-coloured East; for then they lead Their wingless, crawling Hours, one among whom — As some dark Priest hales the reluctant victim — Shall drag thee, cruel King, to kiss the blood From these pale feet, which then might trample thee If they disdained not such a prostrate slave. Disdain? ah no, I pity thee. What ruin

35. its] it’s Nbk 7; his 1820, 1829, 1839 (presumably a transcription error, as the sense is obscured by a personal pronoun at this point, although its is clear in the MS). 40. behind;] Nbk 7; behind: 1820, 1839. 42. genii of the storm] ‘Genii’ is the term in Darwin for ‘the symbols or personifications of the physical and chemical activities in the various realms of nature’ (Grabo (1930) 121; see Economy of Vegetation, note to i 73, and headnote). Nbk 7 at first read spirits, which is canc. with genii written in above. 44–7. Cp. Prometheus Bound 23–5: ἀσμένωι δέ σοι ἡ ποικιλείμων νὺζ ἀποκρύψει ϕάος πάχνην θ’ ἑωιαν ἣλιος σκεδᾶι πάλιν

(‘And glad shalt thou be when spangled-robed night shall veil his brightness and when the sun shall scatter again the rime of morn.’) 44. day and night,] Day and Night Nbk 7. 47. East;] Nbk 7; east; 1820, 1839. 48. Their] Nbk 7; The 1820, 1829, 1839. The image (wingless, crawling) is of a caterpillar; cp. II i 16. Hours] Nbk 7; hours 1820, 1839. 49. hales] I.e. ‘pulls along with violence’ (OED; now superseded by hauls). 53–9. Generally recognised as a crucial turning-point in the poem; Prometheus’s changed attitude to Jupiter is a necessary condition for the subsequent action, although there has been much debate about the nature of Prometheus’s change. The dominant view is that Prometheus originates the change autonomously (see e.g. I. A. Richards, Beyond (New York 1973) 195–9), and that his conversion either takes place at this moment, or has already happened before — probably just before — the action commences (see e.g. Baker 97, Milton Wilson, Shelley’s Later Poetry (New York 1959) 57, Curran (1975) 96, and M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (1971) 304). But Stuart M. Sperry (‘Necessity and the Role of the Hero in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound’, PMLA 96 (1981) 242–54) offers an important alternative view: ‘S.’s presentation leaves open the view of his hero as the necessary medium and earliest expression of universal change, as distinct from the primary cause of that change’ (246; see also Philip Drew, The Meaning of Freedom (Aberdeen 1982) 178). 53. Disdain? ah] Nbk 7; Disdain! Ah 1820, 1839.

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shelley: selected poems Will hunt thee undefended through wide Heaven! How will thy soul, cloven to its depth with terror, Gape like a Hell within! I speak in grief Not exultation, for I hate no more As then, ere misery made me wise. The Curse Once breathed on thee I would recall. Ye Mountains, Whose many-voicèd Echoes, through the mist Of cataracts, flung the thunder of that spell; Ye icy Springs, stagnant with wrinkling frost, Which vibrated to hear me, and then crept Shuddering through India; thou serenest Air, Through which the Sun walks burning without beams, And ye swift Whirlwinds, who on poised wings Hung mute and moveless o’er yon hushed abyss, As thunder louder than your own made rock The orbèd world — if then my words had power, Though I am changed so that aught evil wish Is dead within; although no memory be Of what is hate — let them not lose it now! What was that curse? for ye all heard me speak.

54. through] Nbk 7; through the 1820, 1829, 1839; possibly an alteration to the press transcript, but the ametrical effect makes it unlikely. 56. Hell] Nbk 7; hell 1820, 1839. grief] Nbk 7; grief, 1820, 1839. 57. exultation,] Exultation, Nbk 7. more] Nbk 7; more, 1820, 1839. 58. then,] Nbk 7; then 1820, 1839. Curse] Nbk 7; curse 1820, 1839. 59–69. Curran (1975) 71 points out that this invocation of the elements imitates the Zoroastrian formula of prayer (cp. e.g. Herodotus, History i 131, read by S. in the summer of 1818). 59. recall] The ambiguity (‘remember’ or ‘revoke’) has occasioned much discussion. S.’s usual sense for the word is ‘remember’, which best fits this context (Prometheus could presumably revoke the curse unaided if he could remember it). See TLS 16 December 1955 p. 761; 6 January 1956 p. 7; 20 January 1956 p. 37. Mountains,] mountains Nbk 7. 61. spell;] Nbk 7; spell! 1820, 1839. The word recurs at I 184, I 535, II iii 88, II iv 89 (where it seems to mean ‘a natural law’), and IV 555. Cp. the note to line 54 of ‘March’ in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender: ‘Spell) is a kinde of verse or charme, that in elder tymes they used often to say over every thing, that they would have preserved, as the Nightspel for theeves, and the woodspel. And here hence I thinke is named the gospell, as it were Gods spell or worde. And so sayth Chaucer, Listeneth Lordings to my spells.’ 64–5. The upper atmosphere lacks the moisture to refract sunlight into rays; see S.’s note to Q Mab i 242–3, and cp. Paradise Lost i 594–6. 64. India;] Nbk 7; India! 1820, 1839. 65. beams,] Nbk 7; beams! 1820, 1839. 68–9. Cp. Prometheus Bound 1081, χθὼν σεσάλευται (‘the earth rocks’); and Matthew xxvii 51: ‘And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent’. 68. thunder] Nbk 7; thunder, 1820, 1839. own] Nbk 7; own, 1820, 1839. 69. world — if] Nbk 7; world! If 1820, 1839. then] ‘temporal, and emphatic’ (Locock 1911). 72. hate —] Nbk 7; hate, 1820, 1839.

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First Voice, from the Mountains Thrice three hundred thousand years O’er the Earthquake’s couch we stood: Oft, as men convulsed with fears, We trembled in our multitude. Second Voice, from the Springs Thunderbolts had parched our water, We had been stained with bitter blood, And had run mute,’mid shrieks of slaughter, Through a city and a solitude.

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Third Voice, from the Air I had clothed, since Earth uprose, Its wastes in colours not their own; And oft had my serene repose Been cloven by many a rending groan.

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Fourth Voice, from the Whirlwinds We had soared beneath these mountains Unresting ages; nor had thunder, Nor yon Volcano’s flaming fountains, Nor any power above or under Ever made us mute with wonder. First Voice But never bowed our snowy crest As at the voice of thine unrest.

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Second Voice Never such a sound before To the Indian waves we bore. A pilot asleep on the howling sea

74. S. implies around one million years for the age of the earth. The line recalls Coleridge’s ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ 23: ‘thrice three hundred thousand men’. 78. Grabo (1930) 137 quotes Pliny, Natural History ii 52: ‘We have accounts of many different kinds of thunderstorms. Those which are dry do not burn objects, but dissipate them. There is a third kind, which is called bright lightning, of a very wonderful nature, by which casks are emptied, without the vessels themselves being injured, or there being any other trace left of their operation.’ Meteorites were called thunderbolts in the early nineteenth century, though their origins were known not to be connected with lightning or thunder; see GM lxxxviii (1818) 168–9. 80. run] ran Nbk 7; presumably a change to the press transcript. 82–3. Colour is produced by refraction of sunlight in the atmosphere; cp. I 64–5, IV 219–25, and see S.’s note to Q Mab i 242–3. Rognoni cps. Lucretius, De Re. Nat. ii 730–841. 88. Volcano’s] Nbk 7; volcano’s 1820, 1839. 95–8. Cp. Coleridge, ‘Ancient Mariner’ 560–9.

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shelley: selected poems Leaped up from the deck in agony And heard, and cried, ‘Ah, woe is me!’ And died as mad as the wild waves be.

100

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Third Voice By such dread words from Earth to Heaven My still realm was never riven: When its wound was closed, there stood Darkness o’er the day like blood. Fourth Voice And we shrank back: for dreams of ruin To frozen caves our flight pursuing Made us keep silence — thus — and thus — Though silence is as hell to us.

The Earth The tongueless caverns of the craggy hills Cried ‘Misery!’ then the hollow Heaven replied, ‘Misery!’ and the Ocean’s purple waves, 110 Climbing the land, howled to the lashing winds, And the pale nations heard it, — ‘Misery!’

96. agony] Nbk 7; agony, 1820, 1839. 102. Suggesting the ‘darkness at noon’ of the crucifixion; cp. Matthew xxvii 45. See also Q Mab vii 234 and note. day] Day Nbk 7. 105. Cp. Coleridge, ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ 17: ‘Whisper it, sister! so and so!’ 106. as] Nbk 7, 1839; a 1820, 1829. Possibly corrected in 1839 from S.’s errata list; ink blotting obscures the passage in Nbk 7, which could easily have been miscopied. This line is followed in Nbk 7 by a stage direction: ‘they pass with a terrible sound’. 107–11. This speech is entered on the facing page in Nbk 7, together with the draft of lines 113–15, and was probably a later addition made before Act IV was copied into the nbk; see BSM ix 525. Cp. Prometheus Bound 431–5: βοᾶι δὲ πόντιος κλύδων ξυμπίτνων, στένει βυθòς, κελαινòς Ἄιδος ὑποβρέμει μυχòς γᾶς, παγάι θ’ ἁγνορύτων ποταμῶν στένουσιν ἄλγος οἰκτρόν.

(‘And the waves of the sea utter a cry as they fall, the deep laments, the black abyss of Hades rumbles in response, and the streams of pure-flowing rivers lament thy piteous pain.’) 107. caverns] Nbk 7; Caverns 1820, 1839. 108. Cried ‘Misery!’ then] Cried Misery, then Nbk 7; Cried ‘Misery!’ then; 1820, 1839. 109. and] Nbk 7; And 1820, 1839. 111. it, — ‘Misery!’] it, — Misery! Nbk 7; it, ‘Misery!’ 1820, 1839.

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Prometheus I hear a sound of voices: not the voice Which I gave forth. Mother, thy sons and thou Scorn him, without whose all-enduring will Beneath the fierce omnipotence of Jove Both they and thou had vanished like thin mist Unrolled on the morning wind. Know ye not me, The Titan? he who made his agony The barrier to your else all-conquering foe? O rock-embosomed lawns, and snow-fed streams, Now seen athwart frore vapours, deep below, Through whose o’ershadowing woods I wandered once With Asia, drinking life from her loved eyes, Why scorns the spirit which informs ye, now To commune with me? me alone, who checked — As one who checks a fiend-drawn charioteer — The falsehood and the force of Him who reigns Supreme, and with the groans of pining slaves Fills your dim glens and liquid wildernesses? Why answer ye not, still? Brethren!

112ff . The Earth and the elements have two languages, Jupiter and Prometheus only one; see Wasserman 267ff. for searching commentary on this sequence. 113–17. Cp. Prometheus Bound 234–40: καὶ τοῖσιν οὐδεὶς ἀντέβαινε πλὴν ἐμοῦ. ἐγὼ δ’ ἐτόλμησ’˙ ἐξελνσάμην βροτοὺς τὸ μὴ διαρραισθέντας εἰς Ἄιδου μολεῖν. τῶι τοι τοιαῖσδε πημοναῖσι κάμπτομαι, πάσχειν μὲν ἀλγειναῖσιν, οἰκτραῖσιν δ’ ἰδεῖν

(‘Against this purpose none dared make stand save I myself — I only had the courage; I saved mortals so that they did not descend, blasted utterly, unto the house of Death. Therefore am I bent by so grievous tortures, painful to suffer, piteous to behold.’) 115. love] Nbk 7; Jove, 1820, 1839. 116. vanished] Nbk 7; vanished, 1820, 1839. 117. Know ye not me] Cp. Paradise Lost iv 827–9: ‘ “Know ye not then,” said Satan, filled with scorn,/“Know ye not me? Ye knew me once no mate/For you, there sitting where ye durst not soar[.]” ’ 118. he] Nbk 7; He 1820, 1839. 120. O] Nbk 7; Oh, 1820, 1839. rock-embosomed] Cp. Mary S.’s letter to Fanny Imlay from the Alps, 17 May 1816: ‘no river or rock-encircled lawn relieved the eye, by adding the picturesque to the sublime’ (Mary L i 18). lawns] I.e. grassy clearings (still the usual sense in 1815; cp. Alastor 448 and note). snowfed] Cp. Thomson, Liberty iv 357, ‘The snow-fed torrent’, and Winter 995, ‘snow-fed torrents’. 121. frore] Frozen. 122–3. Asia’s eyes are a source of energy; S. assumes an identity of love with electricity. Cp. I 765, III iii 148–52, III iv 17–18. For general comment on the character of Asia, see head-note. eyes,] Nbk 7; there is a semicolon in 1820 and 1839, but this obscures the subject of ye in line 124 (i.e. the lawns and streams of line 120). 125. checked —] Nbk 7; checked 1820; checked, 1839. 126. charioteer —] Nbk 7; charioteer, 1820, 1839. 127. Him] Nbk 7; him 1820, 1839. 129. wildernesses?] Nbk 7; wildernesses: 1820, 1839. 130. Brethren!] brethren! Nbk 7.

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shelley: selected poems The Earth They dare not.

Prometheus Who dares? For I would hear that curse again . . . Ha, what an awful whisper rises up! ’Tis scarce like sound: it tingles through the frame As lightening tingles, hovering ere it strike — 135 Speak, Spirit! from thine inorganic voice I only know that thou art moving near And love. How cursed I him? The Earth How canst thou hear, Who knowest not the language of the dead? Prometheus Thou art a living spirit; speak as they. The Earth 140 I dare not speak like life, lest Heaven’s fell King Should hear, and link me to some wheel of pain More torturing than the one whereon I roll. Subtle thou art and good; and though the Gods Hear not this voice, yet thou art more than God 145 Being wise and kind: earnestly hearken now. Prometheus Obscurely through my brain, like shadows dim, Sweep awful thoughts, rapid and thick — I feel Faint, like one mingled in entwining love. Yet’tis not pleasure. 131. again . . .] Nbk 7; again. 1820, 1839. 132. Ha,] Nbk 7, 1820; Ha! 1839. 134. As lightening tingles] I.e. like electricity; according to Priestley (History and Present State of Electricity, 3rd edn 1775, i 204), lightning and electricity were identical. Strike —] Nbk 7; strike. 1820, 1839. 135. inorganic] ‘Of the dead’; cp. Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1826) ii ch. vii: ‘I leapt up precipitately, and escaped from the hut, before nature could revoke her laws, and inorganic words be breathed in answer from the lips of the departed.’ (MSW iv 203). 137. And love] ‘And that thou lovest me’ (GM). See Zillman Variorum 139–40 for a survey of earlier editorial discussion of this crux. 140ff. Zeus (Jupiter) used a torture-wheel to punish Ixion (Pindar, Pythia 2 21ff.); Wasserman 262ff., in excellent commentary on this passage, suggests that S. is thinking of the obliquity of the earth’s ecliptic, which is responsible for seasonal variation. Cp. also King Lear IV vii 45–8. 145. ‘At this point it seems that the Earth speaks a few words (perhaps a part of the “Curse”) in the “language of the dead,” in order to see if Prometheus can understand it.’ (Locock 1911). 147. thick —] Nbk 7; thick. 1820, 1839.148–51. Cp. III iii 110–12. 148. love.] Nbk 7; love; 1820, 1839.

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The Earth No, thou canst not hear: 150 Thou art immortal, and this tongue is known Only to those who die . . . Prometheus And what art thou, O melancholy Voice? The Earth I am the Earth Thy mother, she within whose stony veins, To the last fibre of the loftiest tree 155 Whose thin leaves trembled in the frozen air, Joy ran, as blood within a living frame, When thou didst from her bosom, like a beam From sunrise, leap — a spirit of keen joy! And at thy voice her pining sons uplifted 160 Their prostrate brows from the polluting dust, And our almighty Tyrant with fierce dread Grew pale — until his thunder chained thee here. Then — see those million worlds which burn and roll Around us: their inhabitants beheld 165 My sphered light wane in wide heaven; the sea

151–2. In Nbk 7, S. at first wrote Only to those who die . . . I am the Earth, then subsequently placed a caret after die and wrote in Prometheus’s lines in pencil on the facing page. 151. die . . .] Nbk 7; die. 1820, 1839. 152. Earth] Nbk 7; Earth, 1820, 1839. 153. mother,] Nbk 7; mother; 1820, 1839. stony veins] Cp. S.’s journal-letter of July 1816 to Peacock from Chamonix: ‘One would think that Mont Blanc was a living being  & that the frozen blood forever circulated slowly thro’ his stony veins’ (L i 500). See also Pliny, Natural History ii 166, and Virgil (attrib.), Aetna 98–101: ‘.  .  . utque animanti/per tota errantes percurrunt corpora venae/ad vitam sanguis omnis qua commeat eidem,/terra voraginibus conceptas digerit auras’ (‘As in a living creature veins run through the whole body with wandering course, along which passes every drop of blood to feed life for the selfsame organism, so the earth by its chasms draws in and distributes currents of air’). 157–8. like a beam/From sunrise, leap —] written above cloud/Of glory arise canc. in Nbk 7 (S. first substituted burst for arise before cancelling it and settling on leap). The cancelled words are printed in 1820 and 1839, which suggests that S. made this alteration to the fair copy after the despatch of Mary’s press transcript (see headnote, and cp. BSM ix 528). These lines refer not to Prometheus’s birth but to the period of his rebellion. 162. pale —] Nbk 7; pale, 1820, 1839. 163–5. The reference is to life on other planets; cp. I 1–2. 163. Then —] Nbk 7; Then, 1820, 1839. 165. S. wrote moonlike in faint pencil above sphered in Nbk 7; neither word is cancelled. heaven;] Heaven, Nbk 7; Heaven; 1820, 1839. 165–8. Prometheus’s enslavement was accompanied by earthquake and volcanic fire; cp. I 68–9, II i 196–206, Matthew xxvii 51, and also Prometheus Bound 1043–50, quoted in the note to lines 266–70

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shelley: selected poems Was lifted by strange tempest, and new fire From earthquake-rifted mountains of bright snow Shook its portentous hair beneath Heaven’s frown; Lightning and Inundation vexed the plains; Blue thistles bloomed in cities; foodless toads Within voluptuous chambers panting crawled; When Plague had fallen on man and beast and worm, And Famine, and black blight on herb and tree; And in the corn, and vines, and meadow-grass, Teemed ineradicable poisonous weeds Draining their growth, for my wan breast was dry With grief; and the thin air, my breath, was stained With the contagion of a mother’s hate Breathed on her child’s destroyer — aye, I heard Thy curse, the which, if thou rememberest not, Yet my innumerable seas and streams, Mountains, and caves, and winds, and yon wide air, And the inarticulate people of the dead, Preserve, a treasured spell. We meditate In secret joy and hope those dreadful words, But dare not speak them.

below, and 1080–90. new fire . . . Shook its portentous hair] Cp. Paradise Lost ii 710, ‘horrid hair’. The derivation of ‘comet’ is from Gk κομήτὴς, ‘long-haired’. Comets are traditionally portents of violent change; cp. II iv 139 and note, IV 317 and note. Rognoni suggests cp. with the decriptions of ominous portents in Julius Caesar I iii 3–28, II ii 13–24, and Virgil’s Georgics i 466–88, iii 478–566. 166. lifted by] In Nbk 7 S. first wrote shaken with, then canc. shaken and wrote lifted above; the change from with to by in 1820 was presumably made by S. to the fair copy, but he omitted to complete the alteration to Nbk 7. 169ff. Suggesting the Biblical flood, and the plagues of Egypt; cp. Exodus viii 3: ‘And the river shall bring forth frogs abundantly, which shall go up and come into thine house, and into thy bedchamber, and upon thy bed, and into the house of thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thine ovens, and into thy kneadingtroughs’. 170–1. Recalls Paradise Lost xi 750–2: ‘. . . in their palaces/Where luxury late reigned, sea-monsters whelped/And stabled’. See also Psalms cv 30, ‘Their land brought forth frogs in abundance, in the chambers of their kings’ (referring to the passage cited from Exodus in preceding note); and Isaiah xxxiv 11–13, paraphrased by T. J. Hogg in ‘The Fall of Idumea’: ‘The toad and the adder shall come from the forest,/And dragons pant o’er it [Idumea] when thirst’s at the sorest’. 170. Blue thistles] Blue often implies sickness or the unearthly, and has associations with evil; cp. Blair’s The Grave (1743) 628, ‘bluest plague’, and Coleridge has ‘blue plague’ in ‘Fears in Solitude’ 91. 172. man and beast] Nbk 7; man, and beast, 1820, 1839. 173. Famine,] Nbk 7; Famine; 1820, 1839. 176. Cp. III iii 94–5. 178. contagion] See note to II iii 10. 179. destroyer —] Nbk 7; destroyer; 1820, 1839. 185. words,] words Nbk 7, 1820, 1829, 1839. The comma was introduced in Foster’s first American edition of the Poetical Works (Philadelphia 1845) and retained by Rossetti, Forman, and subsequent eds. 186. Mother!] Nbk 7; mother! 1820, 1839.

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Prometheus Venerable Mother! All else who live and suffer take from thee Some comfort; flowers, and fruits, and happy sounds, And love, though fleeting; these may not be mine. 190 But mine own words, I pray, deny me not. The Earth They shall be told. Ere Babylon was dust, The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden. That apparition, sole of men, he saw. 195 For know there are two worlds of life and death: One that which thou beholdest; but the other Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit The shadows of all forms that think and live 191–218. Zoroaster was the Gk name for the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra. No single specific source for this passage has been identified; cp. J. Duchesne-Guillemin: ‘I have searched in vain for a definite source for this particular episode: unless I  am mistaken, it is of Shelley’s own invention. He appears to have freely combined the account of Zoroaster’s visions with that of the faithful soul’s encounter with the Daena after death. In order to convey what he thought essential in the Zoroastrian message, namely, a secret correspondence and attraction between visible and spiritual realities, he fashioned a new Zoroaster, thus . . . anticipating Nietzsche’s Unwertung of Zoroaster’ (The Western Response to Zoroaster (Oxford 1958) 16). Here as elsewhere in PU, S. draws on various accounts of Zoroastrian belief and practice, transmitted through Gk sources such as Plutarch and Herodotus, and newly familiar in the general and particular culture in which S. developed, with its imperial interests in the religions of the East. Peacock’s Gk interests were no doubt a primary influence. See Curran (1975) 68 ff. for detailed discussion of Zoroastrian elements and parallels for these lines. Magus] Wise man or priest. 193–4. For discussion of ‘doubles’ in S.’s work and experience, see K. Everest, ‘Shelley’s Doubles: An Approach to “Julian and Maddalo” ’, in Shelley Revalued. 194. sole of men] I.e. the vision was imaginary. 195ff. These lines have attracted extensive commentary. S.’s ‘two worlds’ conception implies that life and death exist as opposite poles of one unity; according to conventional wisdom in S.’s view, ‘life’ is experience as known to the senses, ‘death’ the realm of abstraction (such that dying out of ‘life’ is co-instantaneous with birth into the abstract). Cp. the exposition in Barthelemy iv 352 of the myth of the cave in Plato’s Republic: ‘Two worlds exist, the one visible and the other ideal. The first, formed on the model of the other, is that which we inhabit. In it every thing, being subject to generation and corruption, changes and passes away incessantly, while we only behold the images and fugitive portions of being. The second contains the essences and prototypes of all visible objects, and these essences are real beings, since they are immutable. Two kings, one of whom is the servant and slave of the other, diffuse their splendour in these two worlds. In the expance of heaven the sun discloses and perpetuates the objects which he renders visible to our eyes. From the most exalted part of the intellectual world, the supreme good produces and preserves the essences which he renders intelligible to our souls.’ See also Thomas Taylor’s note on Orphic Theology (‘. . . there are two worlds, the intelligible and the sensible, the former of which is the source of the latter . . .’), The Mystical Initiations; or, Hymns of Orpheus, trans. Thomas Taylor (1787) 134. But S.’s conception does not match the Platonic contrast between the shadow-world in which we live and the reality we may (if we live as philosophers) see when we die; it more closely resembles the Homeric Hades, inhabited by bloodless shadows of those who have lived on earth. of life and death] I.e. of life, and of death. 198. shadows] I.e. images.

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Till death unite them and they part no more; 200 Dreams and the light imaginings of men, And all that faith creates or love desires, Terrible, strange, sublime and beauteous shapes. There thou art, and dost hang, a writhing shade ’Mid whirlwind-shaken mountains; all the Gods 205 Are there, and all the Powers of nameless worlds, Vast, sceptred Phantoms; heroes, men, and beasts; And Demogorgon, a tremendous Gloom; And he, the Supreme Tyrant, throned On burning Gold. Son, one of these shall utter 210 The curse which all remember. Call at will Thine own ghost, or the ghost of Jupiter, Hades, or Typhon, or what mightier Gods From all-prolific evil, since thy ruin Have sprung, and trampled on my prostrate sons — 215 Ask, and they must reply: so the revenge Of the Supreme may sweep through vacant shades, As rainy wind through the abandoned gate Of a fallen palace.

203. shade] Nbk 7; shade, 1820, 1839. 204. whirlwind-shaken] Nbk 7; whirlwind-peopled 1820, 1829, 1839. shaken is written above peopled canc. in Nbk 7; perhaps changed in the fair copy after Mary S.’s transcription, but the alteration of shaken to lifted in line 166 may have followed S.’s change here, which would have prompted him to avoid repetition by removing the earlier use of the word. Gods] Nbk 7; gods 1820, 1839. 205. Powers] Nbk 7; powers 1829, 1839. 206. Phantoms;] Nbk 7; phantoms; 1820, 1839. 207. Gloom;] Gloom Nbk 7; gloom; 1820, 1839. For Demogorgon, see headnote. 208–9. Supreme . . . Gold.] Nbk 7; supreme Tyrant, on his throne/Of burning gold. 1820, 1839; on his throne/Of is canc. in Nbk 7 with the later version written above. 1820, and most eds opt for the straightforwardly metrical reading; but the effect of S.’s powerful cluster of strong stresses, Ánd hé, the Supréme Týrant, thróned, is very striking in context. 212. Hades,] Nbk 7; Hades 1820, 1839. Hades (Gk name for Pluto, god of the underworld) was the brother of Zeus. The Titan Typhon was a hundred-headed dragon who was overthrown by Zeus; according to Virgil (Aeneid ix 715–6), he was buried under one of the volcanic islands in the Bay of Naples (Inarime; Aetna in other accounts). Prometheus in Prometheus Bound (353ff.) identifies with Typhon’s rebellion, which had volcanic associations (see also Wasserman 334–6). 213. evil,] Evil, Nbk 7. 214. sons —] Nbk 7; sons. 1820, 1839. 216. Supreme] supreme Nbk 7. 217–18. The draft of these lines is in Nbk 11, p. 23.

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Prometheus Mother, let not aught Of that which may be evil, pass again 220 My lips, or those of aught resembling me — Phantasm of Jupiter, arise, appear!

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Ione My wings are folded o’er mine ears: My wings are crossed over mine eyes: Yet through their silver shade appears, And through their lulling plumes arise, A Shape, a throng of sounds; May it be no ill to thee O thou of many wounds! Near whom, for our sweet sister’s sake, Ever thus we watch and wake. Panthea The sound is of whirlwind underground, Earthquake, and fire, and mountains cloven; The Shape is awful like the sound, Clothed in dark purple, star-inwoven. A sceptre of pale gold To stay steps proud o’er the slow cloud His veinèd hand doth hold. Cruel he looks, but calm and strong, Like one who does, not suffers, wrong.

220. me —] Nbk 7; me. 1820, 1839. 221. At this point in Nbk 7 (f. 29v), there is a cancelled stage direction: ‘The sound beneath as of earthquake & the driving of whirlwinds — The Ravine is split, & the Phantasm of Jupiter [appears canc.] rises, surrounded by heavy clouds which dart forth lightning’. Panthea’s speech at lines 231–2 below includes these descriptive details. 222–3. Cp. Paradise Lost iii 380–2: ‘Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear,/Yet dazzle Heaven, that brightest Seraphim/Approach not, but with both wings veil their eyes.’ 223. over] Nbk 7; o’er 1820, 1839. 224–6. I.e. ‘A Shape . . . appears, a throng of sounds . . . arise[s]’ (attracted into the plural by sounds). 229. sweet sister] Asia. 233. Shape] Nbk 7; shape 1820, 1839. 236. stay] I.e. support. proud] proud, Nbk 7, 1820, 1839 (various eds omit the comma, e.g. Rossetti 1870, Locock 1911). S.’s practice was sometimes to mark an internal rhyme by a comma, but this now appears mannered and can produce grammatical confusion. 237–8. His . . . he] S. was uncertain about the human status of the phantasm; in Nbk 7, Its and it are uncancelled alternatives to these pronouns. 239. suffers,] suffers Nbk 7, 1820, eds. A comma (introduced by Foster in the first American edition, Philadelphia 1845) clarifies the transitive force of does (see also Rossetti 1870).

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Phantasm of Jupiter 240 Why have the secret powers of this strange world Driven me, a frail and empty phantom, hither On direst storms? What unaccustomed sounds Are hovering on my lips, unlike the voice With which our pallid race hold ghastly talk 245 In darkness? And, proud Sufferer, who art thou? Prometheus Tremendous Image, as thou art must be He whom thou shadowest forth. I am his foe, The Titan. Speak the words which I would hear, Although no thought inform thine empty voice. The Earth 250 Listen! And though your echoes must be mute, Grey mountains, and old woods, and haunted springs, Prophetic caves, and isle-surrounding streams, Rejoice to hear what yet ye cannot speak. Phantasm A spirit seizes me and speaks within: 255 It tears me as fire tears a thunder-cloud. Panthea See, how he lifts his mighty looks, the heaven Darkens above. Ione He speaks! O shelter me!

245. Sufferer,] Sufferer Nbk 7; sufferer, 1820, 1839. 246. Image,] 1820; image, Nbk 7; Image! 1839. 247. He] Him Nbk 7. 253. ye cannot speak.] 1820, 1839; after line 252 S.’s fair copy in Nbk 7 at first read ‘Listen, and though ye weep, rejoicing know/That our strong curse cannot be unfulfilled’ (f. 31v); these lines were then cancelled and an alternative line drafted on the blank facing page: ‘Rejoice to hear what yet [must be fulfilled canc.] ye dare not speak’. The substantive change in 1820 may suggest a correction to the press transcript, which was not subsequently copied to Nbk 7 (see headnote). 256–7. The repetition of Prometheus’s curse by the Phantasm of Jupiter (lines 262–301 below) is here preceded by portents similar to those that accompanied the original curse; cp. I 101–2. 256. heaven] Heaven Nbk 7, 1820, 1839.

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Prometheus I see the curse on gestures proud and cold, And looks of firm defiance, and calm hate, 260 And such despair as mocks itself with smiles, Written as on a scroll . . . yet speak — O speak!

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Phantasm Fiend, I defy thee! with a calm, fixed mind, All that thou canst inflict I bid thee do; Foul Tyrant both of Gods and Humankind, One only being shalt thou not subdue. Rain then thy plagues upon me here, Ghastly disease, and frenzying fear; And let alternate frost and fire Eat into me, and be thine ire Lightning, and cutting hail, and legioned forms Of furies, driving by upon the wounding storms. Aye, do thy worst. Thou art Omnipotent. O’er all things but thyself I gave thee power, And my own will. Be thy swift mischiefs sent To blast mankind, from yon etherial tower. Let thy malignant spirit move Its darkness over those I love: On me and mine I imprecate

258–61. These lines were added later on the facing page in Nbk 7. Prometheus appears to recognise not just his own words but his own face and expression in the original act of cursing (cp. line 262). 261. Written as on a scroll . . . yet speak — o speak. Nbk 7; Written as on a scroll: yet speak: Oh, speak! 1820, 1839. 262. fixed mind] Cp. Paradise Lost i 97, and S. perhaps also recalls Prometheus Bound 992–7. 266–70. Echoing P.’s defiance of Zeus in Prometheus Bound 1043–50: πρὸς ταῦτ’ ἐπ’ ἐμοὶ ῥιπτέσθω μὲν πυρὸς ἀμϕήκης βόστρυχος, αἰθὴρ δ’ ἐρεθιζέσθω βροντῆι σϕακέλωι τ’ ἀγρίων ἀνέμων χθόνα δ’ ἐκ πυθμένων αὐταῖς ῤιζαις πνεῦμα κραδαίνοι, κῦμα δὲ πόντου τραχεῖ ῥοθἰωι συγχώσειεν τῶν οὐρανίων ἄστρων διόδους

(‘Therefore let the lightning’s forked curl be cast upon my head and let the sky be convulsed with thunder and the wrack of savage winds; let the hurricane shake the earth from its rooted base, and let the waves of the sea mingle with their savage surge the courses of the stars in heaven’.) 272. Omnipotent.] Nbk 7; omnipotent. 1820, 1839. 273. I gave thee power] On Prometheus’s responsibility for Jupiter’s tyranny, see headnote; in terms of the Gk source myth, Prometheus had helped Zeus (i.e. Jupiter) against his fellow-Titans. 276–7. Cp. Genesis i 2: ‘. . . darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’ 277. Its] Nbk 7; In 1820, 1839 (probably a mistranscription in the press transcript). 278. imprecate] ‘To . . . call down (evil or calamity) upon’ (OED la).

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shelley: selected poems The utmost torture of thy hate; And thus devote to sleepless agony This undeclining head while thou must reign on high. But thou who art the God and Lord — O thou Who fillest with thy soul this world of woe, To whom all things of Earth and Heaven do bow In fear and worship — all-prevailing foe! I curse thee! let a sufferer’s curse Clasp thee, his torturer, like remorse, Till thine Infinity shall be A robe of envenomed agony, And thine Omnipotence a crown of pain To cling like burning gold round thy dissolving brain. Heap on thy soul by virtue of this Curse Ill deeds, then be thou damned, beholding good; Both infinite as is this Universe,

280. agony] Nbk 7; agony, 1820, 1839. 282. God] Altered from [King canc.] in Nbk 7; presumably a correction which preceded despatch of the press transcript, as God is the reading in 1820. Lord —] Nbk 7; Lord: O, 1820, 1839. 285. worship —] Nbk 7; worship: 1820, 1839. 287. remorse,] Nbk 7; remorse; 1820; remorse! 1839. 289. Recalling the robe poisoned by the centaur Nessus which killed Hercules (Sophocles, Trachiniae), and the poisoned robe used by Medea to murder Creusa (Euripides, Medea), but there are also associations with Christ’s crown of thorns and the robes with which he was mocked (see e.g. Luke xxiii 11, and Matthew xxvii 28–9). agony,] agony Nbk 7; agony; 1820, 1839. 290. pain] Nbk 7; pain, 1820, 1839. 292–4. Cp. Paradise Lost i 209–20: So stretched out huge in length the Arch-Fiend lay Chained on the burning lake; nor ever thence Had risen or heaved his head, but that the will And high permission of all-ruling Heaven Left him at large to his own dark designs, That with reiterated crimes he might Heap on himself damnation, while he sought Evil to others, and enraged might see How all his malice served but to bring forth Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shown On man by him seduced, but on himself Treble confusion, wrath and vengeance poured. Prometheus’s curse includes the wish that Jupiter might make his eventual punishment worse by committing more crimes. 292. soul] Nbk 7; soul, 1820, 1839. Curse] Nbk 7; Curse, 1820; curse, 1839. 294–5. Rossetti argued that S.’s grammar is radically incoherent in this passage (Rossetti 1870 496–7), and prompted a ferocious reply from Swinburne in defence of S. (see Zillman Variorum 148–9). S.’s construction is latinate (‘Et . . . et’); GM glosses the passage ‘May both be infinite — yourself (doing evil), and your agonising isolation (seeing good in others)’. 294. This] Nbk 7; the 1820, 1839, eds. Universe,] Universe Nbk 7; universe, 1820, 1839.

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And thou, and thy self-torturing solitude. An awful Image of calm power Though now thou sittest, let the hour Come, when thou must appear to be That which thou art internally, And after many a false and fruitless crime Scorn track thy lagging fall through boundless space and time. Prometheus Were these my words, O Parent? The Earth They were thine.

305

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Prometheus It doth repent me: words are quick and vain; Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine. I wish no living thing to suffer pain. The Earth Misery, O misery to me That Jove at length should vanquish thee. Wail, howl aloud, Land and Sea, The Earth’s rent heart shall answer ye. Howl, Spirits of the living and the dead, Your refuge, your defence lies fallen and vanquished. First Echo Lies fallen and vanquished? Second Echo Fallen and vanquished!

296. Image] Nbk 7; image 1820, 1839. 299. internally,] internally Nbk 7; internally. 1820, 1839. 300. crime] Nbk 7, 1820; crime, 1839. 301. At this point in Nbk 7, a stage direction (not cancelled but underlined) reads ‘the Phantasm vanishes’. 302–11. Prometheus’s renunciation, and Earth’s response, sustain the stanza form of the curse. 305. At this point in Nbk 7, a cancelled stage direction reads: ‘he bends his head as in pain’. 310. Spirits] spirits Nbk 7. 312. fallen] Fallen Nbk 7.

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shelley: selected poems Ione Fear not:’tis but some passing spasm, The Titan is unvanquished still. But see, where through the azure chasm Of yon forked and snowy hill Trampling the slant winds on high With golden-sandalled feet, that glow Under plumes of purple dye, Like rose-ensanguined ivory, A Shape comes now, Stretching on high from his right hand A serpent-cinctured wand.

Panthea 325 ’Tis Jove’s world-wandering herald, Mercury.

330

Ione And who are those with hydra tresses And iron wings that climb the wind, Whom the frowning God represses Like vapours steaming up behind, Clanging loud, an endless crowd —

324. serpent-cinctured wand] Cp. Prometheus Bound 799, δρακοντόμαλλοι (‘serpent-haired’, said of the Gorgons). A staff twined with snakes was the emblem of Mercury, messenger of the gods (see next note). Peacock uses ‘forest-cinctured’ (see The Philosophy of Melancholy (1812) i 119–20; Melincourt (1817) ch. xli). 325. world-wandering] Altered from heaven-walking canc. in Nbk 7; S. perhaps wished to avoid the repetition with tempest-walking at line 331 below, which is cancelled in Nbk 7 but without alternatives (tempest-walking is the reading in 1820). Mercury] Latin name for Hermes, messenger of the gods (especially Zeus) and son of Zeus and Maia (see line 342). S.’s Mercury merges elements from Hephaestus, Oceanus and Hermes in Prometheus Bound. In dramatic terms, Mercury’s appearance at this point is presumably motivated by Jupiter’s assumption that Prometheus’s renunciation of his curse means that he is now defeated and ready to reveal his secret (note that in III i Jupiter assumes Prometheus’s resistance is over). Mercury is sent to strike a deal. He is akin to Prometheus in the source myth, and here too he has affinities with the hero; but he is an intellectual who uses his powers of intelligence and articulate persuasion in the service of the tyrant with whom he has thrown in his lot. S.’s general conception of the exchanges between Mercury and Prometheus suggests Satan’s temptation of Christ in the desert (Matthew iv 8–10). herald] Herald Nbk 7. 326. hydra tresses] ‘Hair’ consisting of many heads; the Hydra was a many-headed water-snake killed by Hercules. The Erinyes (see below, note to line 331) have snake-hair (e.g. in Aeschylus, Eumenides). 330. clanging] A conventional poetic word for the sound of birds’ wings, but also used for the harsh scream or screech of a bird (from Gk κεκλάγξομαι). Aeschylus’s Furies are wingless.

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Panthea These are Jove’s tempest-walking hounds, Whom he gluts with groans and blood, When charioted on sulphurous cloud He bursts Heaven’s bounds. Ione Are they now led from the thin dead On new pangs to be fed?

335

Panthea The Titan looks as ever, firm, not proud. First Fury Ha! I scent life! Second Fury Let me but look into his eyes! Third Fury The hope of torturing him smells like a heap 340 Of corpses to a death-bird after battle. First Fury Darest thou delay, O Herald? take cheer, Hounds Of Hell — what if the Son of Maia soon Should make us food and sport? Who can please long The Omnipotent?

331. Jove’s tempest-walking hounds] The Furies. S.’s Furies derive from the Erinyes of Gk myth, avenging spirits of punishment which worked by disturbing the mind (they are embodiments of mental states, and sometimes more specifically of curses). There are six Furies in PU I, balancing the six spirits who speak from line 672 below; Paul Dawson, The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (1980) 116 cps. Aeschylus, Eumenides, in which Erinyes (Furies) are transformed to Eumenides (Kindly Ones); in Eumenides, the Furies support the rule of law, and the pre-Olympian gods whose traditions they support are denounced by Apollo as tyrants. Wasserman suggests a contrasting ‘Christian ancestry’ for the Spirits (see note to 658–61 below). For tempest-walking, see note to line 325 above. 332. with] on Nbk 7 (the change is unlikely to be a mistranscription; presumably a correction by S. to the press transcript). 335. led] Nbk 7; led, 1820, 1839. 338. into] in Nbk 7 (presumably a change to the press transcript). 340. corpses] Nbk 7; corpses, 1820, 1839. 341. Herald?] Nbk 7; Herald! 1820, 1839. 342. Hell —] Nbk 7; Hell: 1820, 1839. Son of Maia] Mercury. 343. sport? Who] Nbk 7; sport — who 1820, 1839. 343–4. Cp. Paradise Lost ix 948–50: ‘Fickle their state whom God/Most favours, who can please him long? Me first/He ruined, now mankind; whom will he next?’

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Back to your towers of iron, 345 And gnash, beside the streams of fire and wail, Your foodless teeth! . . . Geryon, arise! and Gorgon, Chimæra, and thou Sphinx, subtlest of fiends, Who ministered to Thebes Heaven’s poisoned wine, Unnatural love, and more unnatural hate: 350 These shall perform your task. First Fury O mercy! mercy! We die with our desire — drive us not back! Mercury Crouch then in silence. — Awful Sufferer, To thee unwilling, most unwillingly 345–6. the streams of fire and wail,] Two of the rivers of Hades were Phlegethon, a river of fire, and Cocytus, a river of tears (Cp. Paradise Lost ii 579–81, and see also Aeneid vi 265ff., a passage to which S.’s whole conception and introduction of the Furies appears indebted). S.’s syntax can be made ambiguous with adjustments to the punctuation; there is no comma after fire in Nbk 7 and 1820, but a comma is introduced in 1839, and omitted after wail. E. B. Murray (KSJ xxiv (1975) 17–20) has argued that gnash and wail are both verbs governing foodless teeth, i.e. that the adverbial phrase qualifying gnash is not ‘beside the streams of fire and wail’ but ‘beside the streams of fire’. This contention is proposed partly on the grounds that ink marks after fire in Nbk 7 could be read as suspension points. But this is not likely (see BSM ix 152 for a photograph of the MS), and the construction ‘wail your foodless teeth’ seems odd and indeed almost meaningless. Murray’s reading is adopted in Reiman (1977). 346. teeth! . . .] Nbk 7; teeth. 1820, 1839. 346–9. Geryon . . . Gorgon,/Chimæra . . . Sphinx] A mainly female group of multiform classical monsters, recalling Aeneid vi 286–9. Geryon was a three-headed monster slain by Hercules; Dante associates him with Fraud (Inferno xvii). The Gorgon was Medusa, a snake-haired monster whose gaze transformed people to stone; unlike her two sisters, she was mortal and eventually killed by Perseus. Chimæra was a triple-bodied monster (part lion, part serpent, part goat; see Iliad vi 181); S. may have seen the famous bronze Chimæra at Florence en route from Bagni di Lucca to Venice in July 1818. Sphinx was part human, part lion. Oedipus’s liberation of Thebes from the Sphinx (see Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus) led him into unwitting marriage with his own mother (unnatural love), and into cursing his two sons to make them kill one another (more unnatural hate). 351. We die with our desire] ‘We are nothing but embodied lust for cruelty, and die if it is thwarted’ (GM). desire —] Nbk 7; desire: 1820, 1839. 352. silence. —] Nbk 7; silence. 1820, 1839. Sufferer,] Sufferer Nbk 7, 1820; Sufferer! 1839. In 1820 and 1839, this line is broken after silence into two half-lines. 353–7. Cp. Prometheus Bound 14–20: ἐγὼ δ’ ἄτολμός εἰμι συγγενῆ θεὸν δῆσαι βίαι ϕάραγγι πρὸς δυσχειμέρωι. πάντως δ’ ἀνάγκη τῶνδέ μοι τόλμαν σχεθεῖν˙ εὐωριάζειν γὰρ πατρὸς λόγους βαρύ. τῆς ὀρθοβούλου Θέμιδος αἰπυμῆτα παῖ, ἄκοντά σ’ ἄκων δυσλύτοις χαλκεύμασι προσπασσαλεύσω τῶιδ’ ἀπανθρώπωι πάγωι

(‘But for me — I cannot nerve myself to bind amain a kindred god upon this rocky cleft assailed by cruel winter. Yet, come what may, I am constrained to summon courage to this deed; for’tis perilous to disregard the commandments of the Father. Lofty-minded son of Themis who counselleth aright, against my will, no less than thine, I must rivet thee with brazen bonds no hand can loose to this desolate crag’.)

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I come, by the great Father’s will driven down 355 To execute a doom of new revenge. Alas, I pity thee, and hate myself That I can do no more — aye from thy sight Returning, for a season Heaven seems Hell, So thy worn form pursues me night and day, 360 Smiling reproach. Wise art thou, firm and good, But vainly wouldst stand forth alone in strife Against the Omnipotent; as yon clear lamps That measure and divide the weary years From which there is no refuge, long have taught 365 And long must teach. Even now thy Torturer arms With the strange might of unimagined pains The powers who scheme slow agonies in Hell, And my commission is to lead them here, Or what more subtle, foul, and savage fiends 370 People the abyss, and leave them to their task. Be it not so . . . there is a secret known To thee and to none else of living things Which may transfer the sceptre of wide Heaven, The fear of which perplexes the Supreme: 375 Clothe it in words, and bid it clasp his throne In intercession; bend thy soul in prayer, And like a suppliant in some gorgeous fane

354. down] Nbk 7; down, 1820, 1839. 356. Alas,] Nbk 7; Alas! 1820, 1839. 357–8. Cp. Paradise Lost i 254–5: ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven’; and iv 75, ‘Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell’. 357. can do no more —] can do more Nbk 7 (an obvious mistake, corrected in the press transcript.) more: 1820, 1839. 358. season] season, Nbk 7, 1820, 1839. Heaven seems Hell,] heaven seems hell Nbk 7; heaven seems hell, 1820, 1839. 359. So] I.e. ‘to such a degree’. 364. taught] Nbk 7, 1820; taught, 1839. 367. Hell,] hell, Nbk 7. 369. and] Nbk 7; or 1820, 1839 (perhaps a mistranscription; the repetition of ‘Or . . . or’ seems awkward and unlikely). 371. so . . .] Nbk 7; so! 1820, 1839. a secret] In Aeschylus, the secret known to Prometheus is that the offspring of Thetis will be greater than his father. The union of Jupiter with Thetis will therefore lead to his overthrow by his son, as Jupiter had overthrown his own father. But S. is never explicit in PU concerning the secret of his Prometheus; the forces leading to Jupiter’s downfall in PU cannot be contained at the level of individual actions. 372. thee] Nbk 7; thee, 1820, 1839. things] Nbk 7; things, 1820, 1839. 377. fane] Nbk 7; fane, 1820, 1839.

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Let the will kneel within thy haughty heart: For benefits and meek submission tame 380 The fiercest and the mightiest. Prometheus Evil minds Change good to their own nature. I gave all He has; and in return he chains me here Years, ages, night and day: whether the Sun Split my parched skin, or in the moony night 385 The crystal-wingèd snow cling round my hair — Whilst my beloved race is trodden down By his thought-executing ministers. Such is the tyrant’s recompense — ’tis just: He who is evil can receive no good; 390 And for a world bestowed, or a friend lost, He can feel hate, fear, shame — not gratitude: He but requites me for his own misdeed. Kindness to such is keen reproach, which breaks With bitter stings the light sleep of Revenge. 395 Submission, thou dost know, I cannot try: For what submission but that fatal word, The death-seal of mankind’s captivity,

380–98. Cp. Prometheus Bound 221–5: τοιάδ’ ἐξ ἐμοῦ ὁ τῶν θεων τὺραννος ὠϕελημένος κακαῖσι τιμαῖς ταῖσδέ μ’ ἐξμηείψατο˙ ἔνεστι γάρ πως τοῦτο τη τυραννίδι νόσημα, τοῖς ϕίλοισι μὴ πεποιθέναι.

(‘Such profit did the tyrant of Heaven have of me and with such foul return as this did he make requital; for it is the disease that somehow inheres in tyranny to have no faith in friends.’) Lines 380–1 recall Paradise Lost ix 122–3: ‘all good to me becomes/Bane’. 385. crystal-wingèd] Cp. Prometheus Bound 993: λενκοπτέρωι . . . νιϕάδι (‘white-winged snow’). hair —] Nbk 7; hair: 1820, 1839. 386. trodden] In Nbk 7, trodden is written over trampled, which is the reading in 1820. It is possible that S. reinstated trampled in the press transcript (see BSM ix 548), but a correction to the fair copy after despatch of the press transcript, introducing a pun on ‘downtrodden’, is also plausible. 387. thought-executing] Cp. King Lear III ii 4; S. perhaps intends a pun: ‘carrying out orders (as fast as thought itself)’, and ‘killing (i.e. suppressing or penalising) free thought’. 388. recompense —] Nbk 7; recompense: 1820, 1839. 391. shame —] Nbk 7; shame; 1820, 1839. 395. know,] Nbk 7; know 1820, 1839. try:] Nbk 7, 1820; try; 1839. 396. that fatal word] The secret of line 371 (cp. note above, and III i 19 and note); the fatal word is never specified in S.’s version, but is made rather to carry an abstract symbolic import (see Wasserman 287–8).

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Like the Sicilian’s hair-suspended sword Which trembles o’er his crown, would he accept 400 Or could I yield? — which yet I will not yield. Let others flatter Crime where it sits throned In brief Omnipotence; secure are they: For Justice when triumphant will weep down Pity, not punishment, on her own wrongs, 405 Too much avenged by those who err. I wait, Enduring thus the retributive hour Which since we spake is even nearer now — But hark, the hell-hounds clamour: fear delay: Behold! Heaven lowers under thy Father’s frown. Mercury 410 O that we might be spared — I to inflict, And thou to suffer! Once more answer me: Thou knowest not the period of Jove’s power? Prometheus I know but this, that it must come. Mercury Alas, Thou canst not count thy years to come of pain?

398–9. The Sicilian was Damocles, who praised to excess the happiness and wealth of the tyrant Dionysius I, and was rewarded by being feasted beneath a sword hanging above his head by a single hair to symbolise the fear in which rulers live (see Cicero, Tusculan Disputations V xxi 61–2). 398. sword] Nbk 7; sword, 1820, 1839. 399. accept] Nbk 7; accept, 1820, 1839. 400. yield? — which] Nbk 7; yield? Which 1820, 1839. 401. Crime] Nbk 7; Crime, 1820, 1839. 402–5. S. held throughout his life to the belief that wrong-doers are made miserable by their own actions, and that this constitutes their worst punishment. Cp. Plato, Gorgias sect 508–9: ‘. . . wrong-doing is the worst harm that can befall a wrong-doer’. See note to II iv 110, and note to Q Mab ix 193–5. 402. Omnipotence;] Nbk 7, 1840; Omnipotence: 1820, 1839. 403. Justice when triumphant] Nbk 7; Justice, when triumphant, 1820, 1839. 406. thus] Nbk 7; thus, 1820, 1839. 407. now —] Nbk 7; now. 1820, 1839. 408. clamour: fear delay:] 1820; clamour, fear delay Nbk 7; clamour. Fear delay! 1839. 409. lowers] The sky appears dark and threatening (one of a sequence of references to a storm — probably volcanic — gathering in the background of the dramatic action); ‘lours’ is presumably intended. 410. O] Nbk 7; Oh, 1820, 1839. spared —] Nbk 7; spared: 1820, 1839. 413. Alas,] Nbk 7; Alas! 1820, 1839. 414. Cp. Prometheus Bound 257, οὐδ’ ἐστὶν ἄθλου τέρμα σοι προκείμενον (‘And is there no end assigned thee of thine ordeal?’).

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Prometheus 415 They last while Jove must reign: nor more, nor less Do I desire or fear. Mercury Yet pause, and plunge Into Eternity, where recorded time, Even all that we imagine, age on age, Seems but a point, and the reluctant mind 420 Flags wearily in its unending flight Till it sink, dizzy, blind, lost, shelterless; Perchance it has not numbered the slow years Which thou must spend in torture, unreprieved. Prometheus Perchance no thought can count them — yet they pass. Mercury 425 If thou might’st dwell among the Gods the while, Lapped in voluptuous joy? Prometheus I would not quit This bleak ravine, these unrepentant pains. Mercury Alas! I wonder at, yet pity thee. Prometheus Pity the self-despising slaves of Heaven, 430 Not me, within whose mind sits peace serene As light in the sun, throned . . . How vain is talk! Call up the fiends. 415. reigns] 1820; reign, Nbk 7; reign; 1839. 420. flight] Nbk 7, 1840; flight, 1820, 1839. 423. unreprieved.] Nbk 7; unreprieved? 1820, 1839. 424. them —] Nbk 7; them, 1820, 1839. 429–31.Perhaps recalling Portia’s famous speech in the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice: ‘But mercy is above this sceptred sway,/It is enthroned in the heart of kings,/It is an attribute to God himself ’ (IV i 188–90). In line 429, Prometheus implies that Mercury should save his pity for himself. Cp. also Prometheus Bound 966–7: τῆς σῆς λατρείας τὴν ἐμὴν δυσπραξίαν/σαϕῶς ἐπίστας’, οὐκ ἄν ἀλλάξαιμ’ ἐγώ (‘For thy servitude, rest thee sure, I’d not barter my hard lot, not I’). 430. serene] Nbk 7; serene, 1820, 1839. 431. throned . . . How] throned . . . how Nbk 7; throned: how 1820, 1839. How vain is talk!] Cp. Job vi 25: ‘How forcible are right words!’; and also J&M 472–3, ‘How vain/Are words!’ 432–4. The storm may at this point suggest Jupiter’s angry impatience with Prometheus’s continuing resistance (see Stuart Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse (1988) 85); but the forces involved will prove greater than Jupiter’s power to control. In Nbk 7, a partially canc. stage direction at line 432 after Prometheus’s speech reads ‘(thunder & lightning)’. 432. O] Nbk 7; O, 1820, 1839.

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Ione O sister, look! White fire Has cloven to the roots yon huge snow-loaded cedar; How fearfully God’s thunder howls behind! Mercury 435 I must obey his words and thine — alas! Most heavily remorse hangs at my heart! Panthea See where the child of Heaven with wingèd feet Runs down the slanted sunlight of the dawn. Ione Dear sister, close thy plumes over thine eyes 440 Lest thou behold and die — they come, they come Blackening the birth of day with countless wings, And hollow underneath, like death. First Fury Prometheus! Second Fury Immortal Titan! Third Fury Champion of Heaven’s slaves! Prometheus He whom some dreadful voice invokes is here, 445 Prometheus, the chained Titan. Horrible forms, What and who are ye? Never yet there came Phantasms so foul through monster-teeming Hell From the all-miscreative brain of Jove;

433. cedar;] Cedar Nbk 7. 435. thine —] Nbk 7; thine: 1820, 1839. 437. Heaven] Nbk 7; Heaven, 1820, 1839. feet] Nbk 7; feet, 1820, 1839. Cp. Paradise Lost iv 555–6, ‘Thither came Uriel, gliding through the even/On a sunbeam, swift as a shooting star’, and iv 589–91: ‘Uriel to his charge/Returned on that bright beam, whose point now raised/Bore him slope downward to the sun.’ 440. die —] Nbk 7; die: 1820, 1839. come,] come Nbk 7; come: 1820, 1839. 442. hollow underneath] I.e. the Furies have no form apart from specific forms of human anguish; cp. lines 470–2 below. S. recalls Aeneid vi 293. 448. all-miscreative] Byron uses ‘miscreator’ in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage iv (1818) st. 125.

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Whilst I behold such execrable shapes 450 Methinks I grow like what I contemplate, And laugh and stare in loathsome sympathy. First Fury We are the ministers of pain and fear, And disappointment, and mistrust, and hate, And clinging crime; and as lean dogs pursue 455 Through wood and lake some struck and sobbing fawn, We track all things that weep, and bleed, and live, When the great King betrays them to our will. Prometheus O many fearful natures in one name, I know ye, and these lakes and echoes know 460 The darkness and the clangour of your wings. But why more hideous than your loathèd selves Gather ye up in legions from the deep? 449. shapes] Nbk 7; shapes, 1820, 1839. 450. Cp. Athanase (Longman ii 311–28, no. 146), cancelled sequence 10: ‘The mind becomes that which it contemplates’, and see note. The line was adapted by S. in many contexts: see e.g. Mazenghi, (Longman ii 352–60, no. 166) 144, ‘Till his mind grew like that it contemplated’; Defence of Poetry (of Petrarch’s verses), ‘It is impossible to feel them without becoming a portion of that beauty which we contemplate’ (Reiman (1977) 497). Notopoulos 227 points out that the line is adapted from Paine’s Rights of Man: ‘It is the faculty of the human mind to become what it contemplates, and to act in unison with its object’ (Paine Writings ii 350). Claire Jnl 123 notes the sentence in the entry for 9 February 1820; Godwin quotes it in Political Justice, and his Enquirer 33 would also have been well known to S.: ‘When I read Thomson, I become Thomson; When I read Milton, I become Milton. I find myself a sort of intellectual chameleon, assuming the colour of the substances on which I rest.’ S. noted in the Athanase draft that the line had been ‘said of Shakespeare’, presumably with Hazlitt in mind (see note to Athanase cancelled sequence 10). The doctrine (obviously, ironically inverted in this context; cp. IV 573–4) is Platonic; see Republic vi 500 quoted in Athanase note, and also e.g. Republic iii 401: ‘we must seek out those craftsmen who have the happy gift of tracing out the nature of the fair and graceful, that our young men may dwell as in a health-giving region where all that surrounds them is beneficent, whencesoever from fair works of art there smite upon their eyes and ears an affluence like a wind bringing health from happy regions, which, though they know it not, leads them from their earliest years into likeness and friendship and harmony with the principle of beauty’ (trans. A. D. Lindsay; cp. also Timaeus 90d). 452–4. The First Fury represents personal and domestic forms of mental suffering and anguish. 454–7. Cp. Aeschylus, Eumenides 246: τετραυματισμένον γὰρ ώσ κύων νεβρὸν/πρὸς αἷμα καὶ σταλαγμὸν ἐκματεύομεν (‘we track as a dog tracks a wounded fawn, following the dripping blood’); and Twelfth Night I i 21–3: ‘That instant was I turn’d into a hart,/And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,/E’er since pursue me’. S.’s lines, like Shakespeare’s, evoke the myth of Actaeon, the hunter who was turned into a deer by the goddess Artemis and hunted down by his own hounds in punishment for having seen her naked while bathing. S. also alludes to the story in Epipsychidion 272–4, and Adonais 274–9. 455. GM noted that lake seems a curious word in this context, and that brake would make much better sense; but lake is clear in Nbk 7. 458. O] Nbk 7; Oh! 1820, 1839. 459. ye,] Nbk 7; ye; 1820, 1839.

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Second Fury We knew not that: Sisters, rejoice, rejoice! Prometheus Can aught exult in its deformity? Second Fury 465 The beauty of delight makes lovers glad, Gazing on one another: so are we. As from the rose which the pale priestess kneels To gather for her festal crown of flowers The aerial crimson falls, flushing her cheek, 470 So from our victim’s destined agony The shade which is our form invests us round, Else are we shapeless as our mother Night. Prometheus I laugh your power, and his who sent you here, To lowest scorn. — Pour forth the cup of pain. First Fury 475 Thou thinkest we will rend thee bone from bone, And nerve from nerve, working like fire within? Prometheus Pain is my element, as hate is thine; Ye rend me now: I care not. Second Fury Dost imagine We will but laugh into thy lidless eyes? Prometheus 480 I weigh not what ye do, but what ye suffer, Being evil. Cruel was the Power which called 466. so are we] I.e. glad. 470–2. I.e. these Furies take their form from specific human anxieties; cp. line 442 above. 471. form] Written above shape canc. in Nbk 7; presumably altered before transcription for the press, and in order to avoid the similarity with shade four words earlier. 472. are we] Nbk 7; we are 1820, 1839. The Furies are called ‘children of the night’ in Aeschylus’s Eumenides 791. mother Night.] Mother night Nbk 7. 474. scorn. — Pour] scorn. — pour Nbk 7; scorn. Pour 1820, 1839. 477. Pain is my element] Cp. Southey’s Curse of Kehama XIII ix 7–9: ‘The pious soul hath framed unto itself/A second nature, to exist in pain/As in its own allotted element’. See also A Tale of Society as it is (Longman i 193–8, no. 68) 86 and note. 479. lidless] Unclosed (i.e. unsleeping). 480. Cp. J&M 482–3: ‘Those who inflict must suffer, for they see/The work of their own hearts’. 481. Power] Nbk 7; power 1820, 1839.

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shelley: selected poems You, or aught else so wretched, into light.

Third Fury Thou think’st we will live through thee, one by one, Like animal life, and though we can obscure not 485 The soul which burns within, that we will dwell Beside it, like a vain loud multitude Vexing the self-content of wisest men: That we will be dread thought beneath thy brain, And foul desire round thine astonished heart, 490 And blood within thy labyrinthine veins Crawling like agony? Prometheus Why, ye are thus now; Yet am I king over myself, and rule The torturing and conflicting throngs within, As Jove rules you when Hell grows mutinous. Chorus of Furies 495 From the ends of the Earth, from the ends of the Earth, Where the night has its grave and the morning its birth, 484. animal life] I.e. ‘nervous feeling’; the sensibility that animate creatures possess (Lat. animalis, ‘of the nerves’). S. uses the phrase in Q Mab (see i 142 and note) and R&H (825, 1208). ‘Animal life’ was distinct from ‘Brute life’ (which informed inanimate Nature), ‘Vegetable life’ (which moved vegetables), and ‘Intellectual life’ (Imagination). ‘The Animal life, by which [man] has Sensations, Appetites, and Desires, and feels Pleasure and Pain’, ‘The Animal Principle operates by nerves’ (James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, Ancient Metaphysics; or, the Science of Universals (Edinburgh 1779) iii 6, 18). See also Grabo (1930) 70–1, and Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford 1989) ch. 2, esp. p. 50. 485–6. Perhaps recalling Coleridge, Religious Musings (1794) 371–5: Lo! Priestley there, patriot, and saint, and sage, Him, full of years, from his loved native land Statesmen blood stained and priests idolatrous By dark lies maddening the blind multitude Drove with vain hate. 491. agony?] agony Nbk 7; agony. 1820, 1839. 492. king over myself] These words are recalled at III iv 196–7. With lines 492–4, cp. J&M 183–5: ‘We are assured/Much may be conquered, much may be endured/Of what degrades and crushes us.’ 495ff. From the ends of the Earth] A Homeric phrase; cp. Iliad xiv 200 (it is recalled at IV 130 below). At this point, Prometheus has conquered those Furies embodying merely personal tortures; consequently, they call up reinforcements in the shape of Furies embodying larger-scale, external sources of human anguish. The Furies which now arrive (and speak from line 525) suggest S.’s earlier evocation of successive forms of social disaster — war, famine, tyranny, torture and so on — in L&C X iv, v, and viii. Note that in both L&C and in PU I, the arrival of a first group is followed by a larger and more inclusive second group (perhaps influenced by the escalation of the French wars in Europe following the British declaration of war in February 1793). Earth, . . . Earth] Nbk 7; earth, . . . earth, 1820, 1839.

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505

510

515

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Come, come, come! O ye who shake hills with the scream of your mirth When cities sink howling in ruin; and ye Who with wingless footsteps trample the sea, And close upon Shipwreck and Famine’s track Sit chattering with joy on the foodless wreck; Come, come, come! Leave the bed, low, cold, and red, Strewed beneath a nation dead; Leave the hatred — as in ashes Fire is left for future burning, It will burst in bloodier flashes When ye stir it, soon returning; Leave the self-contempt implanted In young spirits sense-enchanted, Misery’s yet unkindled fuel; Leave Hell’s secrets half-unchanted To the maniac dreamer: cruel More than ye can be with hate Is he with fear. Come, come, come! We are steaming up from Hell’s wide gate,

497. come, come!) Come, Come Nbk 7. 498. O] Nbk 7; Oh, 1820, 1839. mirth] Nbk 7; mirth, 1820, 1839. The last line of S.’s fair copy of Act I in Nbk 7; the fair copy continues in Nbk 8 (f. 1v). 500. sea,] Sea Nbk 8. 501. track] Nbk 8; track, 1820, 1839. 503. come, come!] Come, Come Nbk 8. 504ff. The verse style of the Furies from this point obviously recalls the Witches in Macbeth, and is also generally reminiscent of Coleridge’s ‘Fire, Famine and Slaughter’ (1798); but the sustained complexity of S.’s versification to line 577 is distinctive. For further discussion of S.’s development of versification in this style, see headnotes to Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, Stanzas written in Dejection, and Misery — A Fragment (Longman ii 701–5, no. 202). 506–9. This passage inverts the closing metaphor of OWW, which was first published in 1820 (i.e. with PU). 506. hatred —] Nbk 8; hatred, 1820, 1839. 507. burning,] burning, — Nbk 8; burning: 1820, 1839. 509. returning;] Nbk 8; returning: 1820, 1839. 511. spirits] Nbk 8; spirits, 1820, 1839. 512. fuel;] Nbk 8; fuel: 1820, 1839. 513. half-unchanted] Nbk 8; half unchanted 1820; half unchanted, 1839; half-unchanted is S.’s coinage (according to OED). 514. dreamer:] Nbk 8; dreamer; 1820, 1839. 515. ye] I.e. the newly-arriving Furies. 517. come, come!] Come come Nbk 8.

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shelley: selected poems And we burthen the blasts of the atmosphere, But vainly we toil till ye come here. Ione Sister, I hear the thunder of new wings. Panthea These solid mountains quiver with the sound Even as the tremulous air: their shadows make The space within my plumes more black than night.

525

First Fury Your call was as a wingèd car Driven on whirlwinds fast and far; It rapt us from red gulfs of war. Second Fury From wide cities famine-wasted — Third Fury Groans half heard, and blood untasted —

530

Fourth Fury Kingly conclaves stern and cold Where blood with gold is bought and sold;

520. In Nbk 8, this line is followed by a canc. stage direction: ‘Enter rushing by groupes of horrible forms; they speak as they [rush by canc.] pass in chorus’. The speeches by Ione and Panthea at lines 521– 4, which replace and incorporate this stage direction, were added later by S. on the facing page in Nbk 8. 525–31. The four Furies who speak here resume various effects, causes and consequences of war. The socio-historical phenomena they embody echo S.’s more discursive treatments in L&C: cp. line 527 with L&C VI iv ff., X iv–xi; 528 with L&C V iv, X xi ff.; 529 with L&C X xxi ff.; and 530–1 with L&C X xxxii ff. 525. car] Nbk 8, 1820; car, 1839. 527. rapt us] ‘Carried us away’. 528. cities famine-wasted —] Nbk 8; cities, famine-wasted; 1820, 1839. 529. untasted —] Nbk 8; untasted; 1820, 1839. 530. Kingly conclaves] Nbk 8, 1820; Kingly conclaves, 1839. Often taken as a reference to the Congress of Vienna, where in 1815 the victorious European monarchies parcelled out the defeated Napoleonic empire and sought to create a system of ‘buffer’ states to contain any future threat of revolutionary insurgence in western Europe. However, conclave may suggest a more exclusive and secretive exertion of influence and control. cold] Nbk 7; cold, 1820, 1839. 531. blood with gold] A recurring collocation in S.’s poetry; see e.g. Q Mab iv 195, L&C V xiv, MA xvi, lxxii, Sonnet: England in 1819, WA 190, Hellas 1095, TL 287. Cp. Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte (1817): ‘Kings and their ministers have in every age been distinguished from other men by a thirst for expenditure and bloodshed’ (Prose Works i 235); and S.’s letter to Peacock, 17 July 1816: ‘Leave Mammon and Jehovah to those who delight in wickedness and slavery — their altars are stained with blood or polluted with gold, the price of blood’ (L i 490). is] was Nbk 8 (presumably an alteration to the press transcript).

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Fifth Fury From the furnace white and hot In which — A Fury 535

Speak not — whisper not: I know all that ye would tell, But to speak might break the spell Which must bend the Invincible, The stern of thought; He yet defies the deepest power of Hell. A Fury Tear the veil! Another Fury It is torn!

Chorus The pale stars of the morn 540 Shine on a misery dire to be borne. Dost thou faint, mighty Titan? We laugh thee to scorn. Dost thou boast the clear knowledge thou waken’dst for man? Then was kindled within him a thirst which outran Those perishing waters; a thirst of fierce fever, 545 Hope, love, doubt, desire — which consume him for ever. One came forth of gentle worth Smiling on the sanguine earth; His words outlived him, like swift poison

532. furnace] Nbk 8; furnace, 1820, 1839. hot] Nbk 8; hot, 1820, 1839. 533. not —] Nbk 8; not; 1820; not; 1839. 538. This line is followed in Nbk 8 by a stage direction: ‘[Another canc.] a Fury rushing from the crowd’. 539–40. These lines imply that morning is beginning to break. 539. Tear the veil! is followed in Nbk 8 by a stage direction: ‘The Furies having mingled in a strange dance divide, & in the background is seen a plain covered with burning cities’. S.’s layout in Nbk 8 confirms that 539 is a single line, distributed across three speakers, in anapaestic tetrameter. Cp. J&M 382–3: ‘I must remove/A veil from my pent mind! ’Tis torn aside!’ torn!] Nbk 8; torn. 1820, 1839. 540. misery] Nbk 8; misery, 1820, 1839. 545. desire —] Nbk 8; desire, 1820, 1839. 546–77. The Furies offer a mocking vision of Christ (cp. PVR, SC 546 SC vi 963–4), whose words and deeds have been turned against themselves by the perversions of institutional Christianity (546–65), which is followed by a similarly mocking vision of the failure of the French Revolution (566–77). Neither example is explicitly identified; they stand as types of experience: cp. S.’s political-historical analyses in OL (Longman iii, no. 322) and Lines Written among the Euganean Hills. 546. worth] Nbk 8; worth, 1820, 1839.

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Withering up truth, peace, and pity. Look where round the wide horizon Many a million-peopled city Vomits smoke in the bright air — Hark that outcry of despair! ’Tis his mild and gentle ghost 555 Wailing for the faith he kindled: Look again, the flames almost To a glow-worm’s lamp have dwindled: The survivors round the embers Gather in dread. 560 Joy, joy, joy! Past ages crowd on thee, but each one remembers; And the future is dark, and the present is spread Like a pillow of thorns for thy slumberless head. 550

565

570

Semichorus I Drops of bloody agony flow From his white and quivering brow. Grant a little respite now — See, a disenchanted Nation Springs like day from desolation; To Truth its state is dedicate, And Freedom leads it forth, her mate; A legioned band of linkèd brothers Whom Love calls children —

550–2. ‘Cities burning in the flames of crusades and persecutions’ (GM). Cp. Q Mab vii 38–42: ‘the smoke/Of burning towns, the cries of female helplessness,/Unarmed old age, and youth, and infancy,/ Horribly massacred, ascend to heaven/In honour of his name’. There is a canc. stage direction after line 552 in Nbk 8: ‘a shadow passes over the scene & a piercing shriek is heard’. 550. Look] Nbk 8; Look! 1820, 1839. 552. air —] Nbk 8; air. 1820, 1839. 553. Hark] Nbk 8; Mark 1820, 1829, 1839; perhaps a printer’s error, but more probably a mistranscription in the press transcript. 556. again,] Nbk 8, 1820; again! 1839. 559–65. Past, present and future alike torture Prometheus. The Furies identify Prometheus’s suffering with Christ’s; their image of the present as a pillow of thorns for Prometheus recurs at line 598 as Prometheus contemplates the Furies’ vision of Christ. With 564–5 Cp. Luke xx ii 44: ‘And being in agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground’. 560. joy, joy!] Joy, Joy, Nbk 8. 566. now —] Nbk 8; now: 1820, 1839. 567. See,] See Nbk 8, 1820; See! 1839. a disenchanted Nation] Nbk 8; nation 1820, 1839. Cp. Coleridge, ‘France: an Ode’ (1798) 28–30: ‘when to whelm the disenchanted nation/Like fiends embattled by a wizard’s wand,/The Monarchs marched in evil day’. For S.’s use of disenchanted in a positive sense — ‘released from an evil spell’ — see also Mazenghi (Longman ii, no. 166) 33 and note to lines 30–5. 569. Truth] truth Nbk 8, 1820. 571. brothers] Nbk 8, 1820; brothers, 1839.

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Semichorus II ’Tis another’s — See how kindred murder kin! ’Tis the vintage-time for Death and Sin: Blood, like new wine, bubbles within; Till Despair smothers The struggling World — which slaves and tyrants win. [All the Furies vanish, except one

575

Ione Hark, sister! what a low yet dreadful groan Quite unsuppressed is tearing up the heart 580 Of the good Titan, as storms tear the deep, And beasts hear the sea moan in inland caves. Darest thou observe how the fiends torture him? Panthea Alas, I looked forth twice, but will no more. Ione What didst thou see? Panthea A woeful sight — a youth 585 With patient looks nailed to a crucifix. Ione What next?

572. another’s —] Nbk 8; another’s: 1820; another’s 1839. I.e. hatred’s; ‘the ideals of the Revolution are lost in the bloodshed of internal struggles’ (GM). 573–7. Cp. Coleridge, ‘France: an Ode’ 45–6: ‘all the fierce and drunken passions wove/A dance more wild than e’er was maniac’s dream!’ Cp. also Isaiah xliii 2–3: ‘Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth in the winefat? I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me: for I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury; and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment’; and Revelation xiv 18: ‘And another angel came out from the altar, which had power over fire; and cried with a loud cry to him that had the sharp sickle, saying, Thrust in thy sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth; for her grapes are fully ripe’. 574. Death] Nbk 8; death 1820, 1839. Sin:] Sin Nbk 8; sin: 1820; sin. 1839. 575. within;] within Nbk 8; within: 1820, 1839. 577. World —] Nbk 8; world, 1820, 1839. In Nbk 8, the stage direction after this line reads ‘depart but’ for ‘vanish, except’; cp. note to line 634 below. 583. Alas,] Nbk 8; Alas! 1820, 1839. 584–654. Panthea recapitulates and meditates on the Furies’ visions of Christ (584–5) and the French Revolution (586–93). Prometheus does likewise, 598–615 (Christ), 648–54 (Revolution). 584. sight —] Nbk 8; sight: 1820, 1839. 586. heaven] Heaven Nbk 8. earth] Earth Nbk 8.

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The heaven around, the earth below Was peopled with thick shapes of human death, All horrible, and wrought by human hands, Though some appeared the work of human hearts, 590 For men were slowly killed by frowns and smiles: And other sights too foul to speak and live Were wandering by — let us not tempt worse fear By looking forth: those groans are grief enough. Fury Behold, an emblem: those who do endure 595 Deep wrongs for man, and scorn, and chains, but heap Thousandfold torment on themselves and him. Prometheus Remit the anguish of that lighted stare; Close those wan lips; let that thorn-wounded brow Stream not with blood — it mingles with thy tears! 600 Fix, fix those tortured orbs in peace and death, So thy sick throes shake not that crucifix, So those pale fingers play not with thy gore. O, horrible! Thy name I will not speak, It hath become a curse. I see, I see 605 The wise, the mild, the lofty, and the just, Whom thy slaves hate for being like to thee, Some hunted by foul lies from their heart’s home, An early-chosen, late-lamented home, As hooded ounces cling to the driven hind; 610 Some linked to corpses in unwholesome cells:

589. Though] Nbk 8; And 1820, 1829, 1839; perhaps S.’s change to the press transcript, but the sense seems to require Though. 590. Cp. Henry V III iv 17–18: ‘On whom, as in despite, the sun looks pale,/Killing their fruit with frowns’. 592. by — let] Nbk 8; by. Let 1820, 1839. 594–6. Cp. Paradise Lost i 209–20. 594. Behold,] Nbk 8; Behold 1820, 1839. an emblem] Christ crucified. 596. This line is followed in Nbk 8 by a stage direction: ‘a darkness [above shadow canc.] floats slowly across the scene’. 599. blood —] Nbk 8; blood; 1820, 1839. 601ff. Prometheus’s vision of the crucifixion may owe something to S.’s recent first exposure to fifteenthand sixteenth-century Italian paintings; see his letter from Bologna to Peacock, 9 November 1818 (L ii 49–53). 608. home,] Nbk 8; home; 1820, 1839. 609. hooded ounces] Hunting leopards, kept hooded until released at their prey.

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Some — hear I not the multitude laugh loud? — Impaled in lingering fire: and mighty realms Float by my feet like sea-uprooted isles, Whose sons are kneaded down in common blood 615 By the red light of their own burning homes — Fury Blood thou canst see, and fire; and canst hear groans; Worse things unheard, unseen, remain behind. Prometheus Worse? Fury In each human heart terror survives The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear 620 All that they would disdain to think were true: Hypocrisy and custom make their minds The fanes of many a worship, now outworn. They dare not devise good for man’s estate, And yet they know not that they do not dare. 625 The good want power, but to weep barren tears. The powerful goodness want: worse need for them. The wise want love, and those who love want wisdom; And all best things are thus confused to ill. Many are strong and rich, — and would be just — 630 But live among their suffering fellow men As if none felt: they know not what they do. 611. hear] Nbk 8; Hear 1820, 1839. 612. Impaled in lingering fire] S. appears to conflate two barbaric methods of execution, impalement, and burning at the stake. 613. feet] Nbk 8; feet, 1820, 1839. 615. homes —] Nbk 8; homes. 1820, 1839. 618–19. ‘Superstitious fear lingers in every man’s mind after he has stopped believing in the causes of it’ (GM). 619. ravin] Prey, spoil. The reading in 1820 and 1829 is ruin, perhaps a printer’s error, or a mistaken proof correction (ravin, with a canc. terminal e, is clear in Nbk 8); Mary S. corrected the reading in 1839, suggesting that the Nbk 8 reading was on S.’s list of errata. 622. fanes] Temples. 627. love,] Nbk 8; love; 1820, 1839. 628. Cp. Paradise Lost iv 201–4: So little knows Any, but God alone, to value right The good before him, but perverts best things To worst abuse, or to their meanest use. 629. rich, —] Nbk 8; rich, 1820, 1839. just —] Nbk 8; just, 1820, 1839. 630. fellow men] Nbk 8; fellow-men 1820, 1839.

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shelley: selected poems Prometheus Thy words are like a cloud of wingèd snakes; And yet, I pity those they torture not. Fury Thou pitiest them? I speak no more! [Vanishes Prometheus

Ah woe! 635 Ah woe! Alas! pain, pain ever, forever? I close my tearless eyes, but see more clear Thy works within my woe-illumèd mind, Thou subtle tyrant . . . Peace is in the grave — The grave hides all things beautiful and good: 640 I am a God and cannot find it there — Nor would I seek it. For, though dread revenge, This is defeat, fierce King, not victory! The sights with which thou torturest gird my soul With new endurance, till the hour arrives 645 When they shall be no types of things which are. Panthea Alas! what sawest thou more?

631. The last and subtlest Fury exactly echoes, with cruel irony, Christ’s words on the cross (see Luke xxiii 34). 633. yet,] Nbk 8; yet 1820, 1839. 634. In Nbk 8, the stage direction ‘Vanishes’ reads ‘Exit’; as Zillman Text notes, the change accords with the earlier alteration at line 577 above. 635. forever?] Nbk 8; for ever! 1820, 1839. 637. woe-illumèd] Nbk 8 1820; woe-illumined 1829, 1839 (an error introduced by Galignani and thereafter perpetuated). ‘His mind is not illumined, but woe-lit’ (GM). 638–40. Cp. Prometheus Bound 752–4: ἦ δνσπετῶς ἂν τοὺς εμοὺς ἂθλους ϕέροις, ὅτωι θανεῖν μέν ἐστιν οὐ πεπρωμένον˙ αὕτη γὰρ ἦν ἂν πημάτων ἀπαλλαγή

(‘Ah, hardly would’st thou bear my agonies to whom it is not foredoomed to die; for death had freed me from my sufferings’.) 638. tyrant . . .] Nbk 8; tyrant! 1820, 1839. grave —] Nbk 8; grave. 1820, 1839. 640. there —] Nbk 8; there, 1820, 1839. 641. it. For,] Nbk 8; it: for, 1820, 1839. 642. defeat, fierce King,] defeat Fierce King Nbk 8; defeat, fierce king, 1820; defeat, fierce king! 1839. 646. thou more?] Nbk 8; thou? 1820, 1839; obviously an error, creating an ametrical line.

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Prometheus There are two woes: To speak, and to behold; thou spare me one. Names are there, Nature’s sacred watchwords — they Were borne aloft in bright emblazonry; 650 The nations thronged around, and cried aloud As with one voice, ‘Truth, Liberty, and Love!’ Suddenly fierce confusion fell from Heaven Among them — there was strife, deceit, and fear; Tyrants rushed in, and did divide the spoil. 655 This was the shadow of the truth I saw. The Earth I felt thy torture, Son, with such mixed joy As pain and Virtue give. To cheer thy state I bid ascend those subtle and fair spirits 647. ‘Don’t make me suffer the same pain twice by describing what I saw’ (GM). speak,] 1820; speak Nbk 8, 1839. 648–54. This account of the failure of the French Revolution echoes a number of similar analyses by S.: see for example Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists (1812), Prose Works i 51–2; Preface to L&C; and PVR (SC vi 978–81). S. claimed in a letter to Elizabeth Hitchener that he had ‘done about 200 pages’ of a ‘tale’, to be entitled Hubert Cauvin, ‘in which I design to exhibit the cause of the failure of the French revolution’ (2 January 1812, L i 218, 229; he repeated the claim in a letter to Godwin, 10 January 1812); no further reference to the project is known after January 1812. 648. watchwords —] Nbk 8; watch-words, 1820, 1839. 650. The nations] And nations Nbk 8; presumably S.’s change to the press transcript. aloud] Nbk 8; aloud, 1820, 1839. 651. voice, ‘Truth, Liberty, and Love!’] voice, truth liberty and love — Nbk 8; voice, Truth, liberty, and love! 1820, 1839. Echoing the Revolutionary slogan, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité! 652. Heaven] Nbk 8; heaven 1820, 1839. 653. them —] Nbk 8; them: 1820, 1839. fear;] Nbk 8; fear: 1820, 1839. 656. torture, Son,] torture Son, Nbk 8; torture, son, 1820, 1839. 657. Virtue] Nbk 8; virtue 1820, 1839. 658. spirits] Nbk 8; spirits, 1820, 1839. 658–61. The Spirits like birds ‘Whose homes are the dim caves of human thought’ appear to derive from S.’s reading of Alexandre de Humboldt and Bonpland, Personal Narrative of travels to the equinoctial regions of the New Continent during the years 1799–1804, trans. H. M. Williams iii (1818) 119–20, 126. The Spirits represent sources of hope and mental support, in contrast to the mental tortures of the Furies (see note to line 331 above). Wasserman 300 suggests a ‘Christian ancestry’ for the Spirits, contrasting with the Hellenic character of the Furies and deriving from the New Testament angels who minister to Christ (see Matthew iv 11, Mark i 13, Luke xxii 43). The individual Spirits have been variously identified (see notes to 694–800 below). GM glosses the first four as representing ‘qualities that derive only from human minds (whose homes are the dim caves of human thought), but that have free access to all humanity throughout the world (thought is an atmosphere that covers the earth as the air does, and these qualities fly in it like birds)’. See W. Hildebrand, ‘A Look at the Third and Fourth Spirit Songs’ (K-SJ xx (1971) 87–99) for interesting detailed commentary. The versification of the Spirits’ Songs recalls the manner employed for the Furies, but is worked out with a complexity of pattern and variation singular even by S.’s standard in PU (e.g. the alternating 14 and 15 line stanzas of the first four Spirits’ Songs, with rhymes based on triplets but varied by couplets and an unrhymed line 10, except for the Fourth Spirit whose line 10 is picked up in the closing couplet).

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Whose homes are the dim caves of human thought, 660 And who inhabit, as birds wing the wind, Its world-surrounding ether: they behold Beyond that twilight realm, as in a glass, The future: may they speak comfort to thee! Panthea Look, Sister, where a troop of spirits gather, 665 Like flocks of clouds in spring’s delightful weather, Thronging in the blue air! Ione And see! more come, Like fountain-vapours when the winds are dumb, That climb up the ravine in scattered lines. And hark! is it the music of the pines? 670 Is it the lake? Is it the waterfall? Panthea ’Tis something sadder, sweeter far than all.

675

680

Chorus of Spirits From unremembered ages we Gentle guides and guardians be Of Heaven-oppressed mortality; And we breathe, and sicken not, The atmosphere of human thought: Be it dim and dank and grey Like a storm-extinguished day Travelled o’er by dying gleams; Be it bright as all between Cloudless skies and windless streams, Silent, liquid, and serene —

661. world-surrounding] Cp. To Constantia Singing 13 and note. they behold] and they see Nbk 8; presumably S.’s alteration to the press transcript. 664. Look, Sister,] Look Sister Nbk 8; Look, sister, 1820, 1839. 669. hark!] Nbk 8, 1839; hark? 1820, 1829; possibly an error in the press transcript (the punctuation is cramped and obscure at this point in Nbk 8). The correction in 1839 may derive from S.’s errata list. 671. The Spirits’ songs, whose music (669) anticipates the sounds that will draw Asia and Panthea towards their destiny in Act 11, are both sweet and sad (cp. 756); Vida Scudder (PU, ed. V. Scudder, 1892, 150) notes that ‘Like the Furies, [the Spirits] fully recognise the evil in the world; unlike the Furies, they do not gloat over it, but lament it’. 672–91. Kathleen Raine (‘Thomas Taylor, Plato, and the English Romantic Movement’, Sewanee Review lxxvi (1968) 230–57, 254–5) cites Apuleius as a source for this Song (253–7). 674. Heaven-oppressed] Nbk 8; heaven-oppressed 1820, 1839. 677. Dim and dank and grey] Nbk 8; dim, and dank, and grey, 1820, 1839. 678. day] Nbk 8; day, 1820, 1839. 682. serene —] Nbk 8; serene; 1820, 1839.

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690

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As the birds within the wind, As the fish within the wave, As the thoughts of man’s own mind Float through all above the grave, We make there our liquid lair, Voyaging cloudlike and unpent Through the boundless element — Thence we bear the prophecy Which begins and ends in thee! Ione More yet come, one by one: the air around them Looks radiant, like the air around a star.

695

700

705

First Spirit On a battle-trumpet’s blast I fled hither, fast, fast, fast, ’Mid the darkness upward cast — From the dust of creeds outworn, From the tyrant’s banner torn, Gathering round me, onward borne, There was mingled many a cry — Freedom! Hope! Death! Victory! Till they faded through the sky And one sound above, around, One sound beneath, around, above, Was moving;’twas the soul of love; ’Twas the hope, the prophecy

686. grave,] grave Nbk 8; grave; 1820, 1839. 687. there] Nbk 8 1839; these 1820, 1829; probably corrected by Mary S. in 1839 from S.’s errata list; there is undoubtedly the correct reading. S. marks the internal rhyme (on lair) with a comma in Nbk 8; and these misunderstands the sense, as the reference of there is to the atmosphere of line 676. liquid] Clear, transparent. 689. element —] Nbk 8; element: 1820, 1839. 690. prophecy] Looking forward to the oracular/prophetic elements which come to prominence in the action of Act II (cp. 706, 799); but also presumably here a reference to the hope embodied in Prometheus’s ‘secret’ and in the power of his recall of the curse. 693. radiant, like] radiant like Nbk 8; radiant as 1820, 1839. Perhaps S.’s alteration to the transcript; but as BSM ix 566 notes, ‘this is the sort of grammatical correction Peacock might have felt licensed to make as proofreader’. The fair copy reading is here preferred. 694–707. The First Spirit, like the Furies and other Spirits, is not explicitly identified. The First Spirit is associated with peace, liberty, ‘courage and steadfastness in opposing tyranny’ (Butter (1954) 179). 696. cast —] Nbk 8; cast. 1820, 1839. 702. sky] Nbk 8; sky; 1820, 1839. 706. prophecy] Nbk 8; prophecy, 1820, 1839.

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shelley: selected poems Which begins and ends in thee.

710

715

720

Second Spirit A rainbow’s arch stood on the sea Which rocked beneath, immoveably; And the triumphant Storm did flee Like a conqueror swift and proud, Between, with many a captive cloud, A shapeless, dark and rapid crowd, Each by lightning riven in half: I heard the thunder hoarsely laugh: Mighty fleets were strewn like chaff And spread beneath a hell of death O’er the white waters. I alit On a great ship lightning-split, And speeded hither on the sigh Of one who gave an enemy His plank — then plunged aside to die. Third Spirit I sate beside a sage’s bed, And the lamp was burning red

707. After this line in Nbk 8 is a 14-line song for the second spirit, all of which is canc. by two vertical lines: I leaped on the wings of the Earth-star damp As it rose on the steam of a slaughtered camp — The sleeping newt heard not our tramp As swift [and silent we did pass canc.] as the wing of fire may pass [Among canc.] We threaded the points of long thick grass Which hide the green pools of the morass But shook a water-serpents couch In a cleft skull, of many such The widest; at the meteors touch The snake did seem to see in dream Thrones & dungeons overthrown Visions how unlike his own . . . ’Twas the hope the prophecy Which begins & ends in thee 708–22. The Second Spirit is associated with justice (i.e. mercy), and ‘the capacity for self-sacrifice’ (Butter (1954) 179). Cp. Cicero, De Re Publica III xx: ‘What then would your just man do, if, in a case of shipwreck, he saw a weaker man than himself get possession of a plank? . . . If . . . he prefers death to inflicting unjustifiable injury on his neighbour, he will be an eminently honourable and just man, but not the less a fool, because he saved another’s life at the expense of his own’. 708. sea] Nbk 8; sea, 1820, 1839; it is the rainbow’s arch that is immovable. 710. Storm] Nbk 8; storm 1820, 1839. flee] Nbk 8; flee, 1820, 1839. 711. conqueror] Nbk 8; conqueror, 1820, 1839. proud] proud, Nbk 8, 1820, 1839. 712. between,] Nbk 8; Between 1820, 1839. cloud,] 1840; cloud Nbk 8, 1820, 1839. 722. plank —] Nbk 8; plank, 1820, 1839. 723–36. The Third Spirit is associated with wisdom and philosophy.

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Near the book where he had fed, When a Dream with plumes of flame To his pillow hovering came, And I knew it was the same Which had kindled long ago Pity, eloquence, and woe; And the world awhile below Wore the shade its lustre made. It has borne me here as fleet As Desire’s lightning feet: I must ride it back ere morrow, Or the sage will wake in sorrow. Fourth Spirit On a Poet’s lips I slept Dreaming like a love-adept In the sound his breathing kept; Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses, But feeds on the aërial kisses Of shapes that haunt thought’s wildernesses. He will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reflected sun illume The yellow bees i’ the ivy-bloom, Nor heed nor see what things they be; But from these create he can Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality! —

726. Dream] dream Nbk 8. flame] Nbk 8; flame, 1820, 1839. 733. borne] Nbk 8; born 1820; first corrected in 1829. 737–51. The Fourth Spirit is associated with poetry and the imagination. ‘S. sets out . . . from a scientifically-observed piece of reality (the insects and flowers are identified; the source and angle of the lighting defined), but he is not interested in physical details as details (like Clare), nor in bees as bees (like Keats): what he perceives in the natural world gives only a physical basis for what concerns him as a poet — the essence of the human situation reflected in art (“Forms more real than living man”). The bees are on a mission of renewal amid forms of life that spring irrepressibly . . . over the ruins of . . . greatness and oppression’ (GM). 737. Poet’s] Poets Nbk 8; poet’s 1820, 1839. 738. love-adept] I.e. one deeply versed in love (adept was originally used for a skilled alchemist). 745. i’ the] In Nbk 8 S. first wrote in the and then deleted the n. 1820, 1839 and many subsequent eds (e.g. Hutchinson) read in the. 746. see] see, Nbk 8, 1820, 1839. 747–9. Cp. Byron, ‘The Dream’ (1816) 19–22: ‘The mind can make/Substance, and people planets of its own/With beings brighter than have been, and give/A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.’ 749. immortality! —] Nbk 8; immortality! 1820, 1839. Cp. Hymn to Venus (Longman ii 345–7, no. 161) 48–51: ‘In Venus Jove did soft desire awaken,/That by her own enchantments overtaken/She might, no more from human union free,/Burn for a nursling of mortality.’

152 750

shelley: selected poems One of these awakened me, And I sped to succour thee.

Ione Behold’st thou not two shapes from the east and west Come, as two doves to one belovèd nest, Twin nurslings of the all-sustaining air 755 On swift still wings glide down the atmosphere? And hark! their sweet sad voices;’tis despair Mingled with love, and then dissolved in sound. Panthea Canst thou speak, sister? all my words are drowned. Ione Their beauty gives me voice. See how they float 760 On their sustaining wings of skiey grain, Orange and azure deepening into gold: Their soft smiles light the air like a star’s fire. Chorus of Spirits Hast thou beheld the form of Love? Fifth Spirit As over wide dominions I sped, like some swift cloud that wings the wide air’s wildernesses, 765 That planet-crested Shape swept by on lightning-braided pinions, Scattering the liquid joy of life from his ambrosial tresses: His footsteps paved the world with light — but as I passed ’twas fading, 752–800. See headnotes to Behold, sweet Sister mine (Longman ii 423–4, no. 181) and The Two Spirits. 753–4. Echoing the description of Paolo and Francesca (whose story, like the Fifth and Sixth Spirits here imaged, mingles love and despair; cp. 756–7) in Inferno v 82–4: ‘As doves/By fond desire invited, on wide wings/And firm, to their sweet nest returning home,/Cleave the air, wafted by their will along’ (trans. Cary). 756. And hark — their sweet sad voices, tis despair Nbk 8; And hark! their sweet, sad voices!’tis despair 1820, 1839. S.’s punctuation in Nbk 8 is unclear; he first wrote an exclamation mark after voices, then modified it (but without a clarifying cancellation), to either a comma or a semicolon (see BSM ix 568). 757. love,] Nbk 8; love 1820, 1839. 760. skiey grain] I.e. coloured like the sky (as in 761); cp. Paradise Lost v 285: ‘Sky-tinctured grain’. 762. soft] Changed by S. from sad in Nbk 8 f. 16v (not recorded in BSM ix). 763–79. The Fifth and Sixth Spirits are associated with love and despair (cp. 756–7 above), conceived as inseparably linked in pre-revolutionary experience. 765. planet-crested] Love wears the crest or badge of Venus. Shape] Nbk 8; shape 1820, 1839. lightning-braided pinions] Love’s wings are electric; S. was familiar with contemporary scientific thinking which grouped certain phenomena — electricity, magnetism, heat, light — as ‘imponderables’ which were explained by positing the existence of weightless substances which transmitted cause-and-effect relationships as material operations involving a superfine ‘ether’. In the version elaborated by Adam Walker, who taught S. at Eton, the ‘imponderables’ were considered different forms of one substance, which also took physical forms within humans and included the sensation of love (cp. I 122–3, 133–4, III iii 148–52, III iv 17–18, and see Walker 203, and also Grabo (1930) ch. 8). 767. light —] Nbk 8; light; 1820, 1839.

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And hollow Ruin yawned behind: great Sages bound in madness, And headless patriots, and pale youths who perished unupbraiding 770 Gleamed in the Night I wandered o’er — till thou, O King of sadness, Turned by thy smile the worst I saw to recollected gladness. Sixth Spirit Ah sister, Desolation is a delicate thing: It walks not on the Earth, it floats not on the air, But treads with lulling footstep, and fans with silent wing 775 The tender hopes which in their hearts the best and gentlest bear, Who, soothed to false repose by the fanning plumes above, And the music-stirring motion of its soft and busy feet, Dream visions of aërial joy, and call the monster Love, And wake, and find the shadow Pain — as he whom now we greet.

768. Sages] Nbk 8; sages 1820, 1839. 769. perished unupbraiding] Nbk 8; perished, unupbraiding, 1820, 1839. 770. Night] Nbk 8. Here punctuated as in Nbk 8; this line reads Gleamed in the night. I wandered o’er, till thou, O King of sadness, in 1820 and 1839. 772. Ah sister,] Nbk 8; Ah, sister! 1820, 1839. 773. Earth,] Earth Nbk 8; earth, 1820, 1839. 772–9. Cp. S.’s trans. of Plato, Symposium 195: ‘There were need of some poet like Homer to celebrate the delicacy and tenderness of Love. For Homer says, that the goddess Calamity is delicate, and that her feet are tender. “Her feet are soft,” he says, “for she treads not upon the ground, but makes her path upon the heads of men.” He gives as an evidence of her tenderness, that she walks not upon that which is hard, but that which is soft. The same evidence is sufficient to make manifest the tenderness of Love. For Love walks not upon the earth, nor over the heads of men, which are not indeed very soft; but he dwells within, and treads on the softest of existing things, having established his habitation within the souls and inmost nature of Gods and men; not indeed in all souls — for wherever he chances to find a hard and rugged disposition, there he will not inhabit, but only where it is most soft and tender. Of needs must he be the most delicate of all things, who touches lightly with his feet, only the softest parts of those things which are the softest of all’. Cp. also William Godwin, Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft (1798): ‘we not unfrequently meet with persons, endowed with the most exquisite and refined sensibility, whose minds seem almost of too delicate a texture to encounter the vicissitudes of human affairs, to whom pleasure is transport, and disappointment is agony indescribable. This character is finely pourtrayed by the author of the Sorrows of Werter. Mary was in this respect a female Werter’ (Godwin Novels i 117). 774. lulling] Nbk 8; silent 1820, 1839. Presumably an error in transcription or printing, probably caused by the occurrence of silent later in the line. Mathilde Blind misread the MS lulling as killing, a reading subsequently adopted by Forman, and by eds deriving from him, until corrected in Locock Ex (see BSM ix 570). 775. bear,] bear Nbk 8; bear; 1820, 1839. 778–9. The sense is difficult: the monster is presumably Desolation (from line 772), misrecognised as Love by those, the best and gentlest, whose intense idealism drives them when it is disappointed to a special intensity of despair. 778. monster] monster, Nbk 8, 1820, 1839. 779. the shadow] their shadow Nbk 8; perhaps S.’s alteration to the transcript. Pain —] Nbk 8; Pain, 1820, 1839. 779. As BSM ix 569–71 notes, the Fifth and Sixth Spirits’ Songs appear in early fragmentary draft form in Nbk 11. Among these drafts is a possible ninth line for the Sixth Spirit’s Song (recorded in Zillman Variorum 177), i.e. to follow line 779, which if included would complete the formal matching of stanzaic pattern with the Fifth Spirit’s Song: And wake & die, like early flowers when the winds that waked them, fleet (Nbk 11 25).

154

shelley: selected poems Chorus Though Ruin now Love’s shadow be, Following him destroyingly On Death’s white and wingèd steed Which the fleetest cannot flee — Trampling down both flower and weed, Man and beast, and foul and fair, Like a tempest through the air; Thou shalt quell this Horseman grim, Woundless though in heart or limb.

780

785

Prometheus Spirits! how know ye this shall be? Chorus In the atmosphere we breathe, As buds grow red when snow-storms flee From spring gathering up beneath, Whose mild winds shake the elder brake, And the wandering herdsmen know That the white-thorn soon will blow: Wisdom, Justice, Love, and Peace, When they struggle to increase, Are to us as soft winds be To shepherd-boys — the prophecy Which begins and ends in thee.

790

795

800

Ione Where are the Spirits fled? Panthea Only a sense Remains of them, like the omnipotence Of music, when the inspired voice and lute

781. him destroyingly] Nbk 8; him, destroyingly, 1820, 1839. 782. steed] Nbk 8; steed, 1820, 1839. Cp. Revelation vi 8: ‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death’. 783. flee —] Nbk 8; flee, 1820, 1839. 787. Horseman] Nbk 8; horseman 1820, 1839. 789. Prometheus’s line here is integrated metrically and by rhyme with the Chorus of Spirits’ stanza 789–800. 790. I.e. thought. 791. snow-storms] Nbk 8; the snow-storms 1820, 1839; probably a mistake in transcription, though the 1820 reading is not ametrical. 799. shepherd-boys —] Nbk 8; shepherd boys, 1820, 1839. 800. This line is followed in Nbk 8 by a stage direction in very light ink: ‘They vanish’. 801. Spirits] spirits Nbk 8. 802. omnipotence] Omnipotence Nbk 8.

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Languish, ere yet the responses are mute 805 Which through the deep and labyrinthine soul, Like echoes through long caverns, wind and roll. Prometheus How fair these air-born shapes! and yet I feel Most vain all hope but love; and thou art far, Asia! who, when my being overflowed, 810 Wert like a golden chalice to bright wine Which else had sunk into the thirsty dust. All things are still: alas! how heavily This quiet morning weighs upon my heart; Though I should dream, I could even sleep with grief 815 If slumber were denied not . . . I would fain Be what it is my destiny to be, The saviour and the strength of suffering man, Or sink into the original gulf of things . . . There is no agony, and no solace left; 820 Earth can console, Heaven can torment no more. Panthea Hast thou forgotten one who watches thee The cold dark night, and never sleeps but when The shadow of thy spirit falls on her? Prometheus I said all hope was vain but love: thou lovest. Panthea 825 Deeply in truth; but the Eastern star looks white, And Asia waits in that far Indian vale The scene of her sad exile — rugged once

804. responses] ‘Echoes in the mind’ (here, as usually in S., stressed on the first syllable). mute] Nbk 8; mute, 1820, 1839. 807–9. Apparently encouraging an identification of Asia with love; but note that in 765–7, love is clearly male (as he is in S.’s trans. of the Symposium). 807. air-born] Born of air (i.e. created by the mind). 809–11. ‘An unusually open, and openly sexual simile, reminding us that Prometheus and Asia are in fact man and wife, and that among other things Asia represents the fecundity of the earth, including human fecundity’ (GM). 814. Though I should dream,] ‘Even at the cost of dreaming’. dream,] Nbk 8; dream 1820, 1839. grief] Nbk 8, 1820; grief, 1839. 815. not . . .] Nbk 8; not. 1820, 1839. 818. things . . .] Nbk 8; things: 1820, 1839. 819. agony, and no] agony — no Nbk 8; presumably an alteration to the press transcript. 825. Eastern] Nbk 8; eastern 1820, 1839. white] wan Nbk 8; probably an alteration by S. to the transcript of a detail about which he remained uncertain, as Nbk 8 has looks wan written above is pale canc. 827. exile —] Nbk 8; exile; 1820, 1839.

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And desolate and frozen like this ravine; But now invested with fair flowers and herbs, 830 And haunted by sweet airs and sounds, which flow Among the woods and waters, from the ether Of her transforming presence — which would fade If it were mingled not with thine. Farewell! End of the First Act

ACT II

Scene i Morning. A lovely vale in the Indian Caucasus. Asia, alone.

5

Asia From all the blasts of heaven thou hast descended: Yes, like a spirit, like a thought, which makes Unwonted tears throng to the horny eyes, And beatings haunt the desolated heart, Which should have learnt repose: thou hast descended Cradled in tempests; thou dost wake, O Spring! O child of many winds! As suddenly Thou comest as the memory of a dream, Which now is sad because it hath been sweet;

828–30. Cp. Hesiod’s account of creation, in which Venus Aphrodite is born on Cythera: ‘And out stepped a beautiful goddess, and the grass began to grow all round beneath her slender feet’ (Theogony 191); also Iliad xiv 347–9: ‘the son of Cronos took his wife in his arms; and the gracious earth sent up fresh grass beneath them, dewy lotus and crocuses, and a soft and crowded bed of hyacinths, to lift them off the ground’. 828. frozen] Nbk 8; frozen, 1820, 1839. 831. ether] See note to line 765 above. 832. presence —] Nbk 8; presence, 1820, 1839. II. i. SD. lovely] Nbk 8, 1820, 1829; lonely 1839, 1840 (an uncorrected printer’s error). With the setting of this scene cp. the opening Stage Direction for Act I, and note, and see Alastor 140–9 and notes. 1–9. No indication is given of the time which has elapsed since the end of Act I; but the implication in Asia’s opening lines is that considerable time has elapsed, and that the action is not to be considered as immediately sequential (let alone as simultaneous between the first three acts). See notes to lines 27, 35–8, 92, and 107–8 below. With the opening of Act II cp. Guarini, 11 Pastor fido (1590) III i 1–6: Spring, the yeers youth, fair mother of new flowrs, New leaves, new loves, drawn by the winged hours, Thou art return’d; but the felicity Thou brought’st me last is not return’d with thee. Thou art return’d, but nought returns with thee Save my lost joyes regretful memory. (trans. Sir Richard Fanshawe, 1647). S. read Il Pastor fido with Claire in early April 1815 (Mary Jnl i 74); he had more recently seen an MS of the work in the public library in Ferrara on his journey from Venice to Naples in November 1818 (L ii 47). 1. blasts] Cp. Cratylus 410 B, where poets call the winds ἀήτας, ‘blasts’. heaven] Heaven Nbk 8. 3. horny] S. twice uses this word in L&C (III xxvi 5, VI xlvii 3), where the Concordance gloss ‘dull, lustreless’ might fit the later, but not the earlier occurrence. Here S. may intend ‘semi-opaque like horn’ as suggested in Reiman (1977), but there is also a possible play on cornea; and S. may imply an Oriental appearance for Asia’s eyes (i.e. crescent-shaped as in a horned moon). Cp. the illustrations of Indian goddesses in, e.g., Edward Moor, Hindu Pantheon (1810). Asia’s opening reference here to eyes initiates a recurring motif in this scene. 7–9. Anticipating the exchange of dreams later in the scene.

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20

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Like genius, or like joy which riseth up As from the earth, clothing with golden clouds The desert of our life . . . This is the season, this the day, the hour; At sunrise thou shouldst come, sweet sister mine . . . Too long desired, too long delaying, come! How like death-worms the wingless moments crawl! The point of one white star is quivering still Deep in the orange light of widening morn Beyond the purple mountains; through a chasm Of wind-divided mist the darker lake Reflects it — now it wanes — it gleams again As the waves fade, and as the burning threads Of woven cloud unravel in pale air . . . ’Tis lost! and through yon peaks of cloud-like snow The roseate sunlight quivers: hear I not The Æolian music of her sea-green plumes Winnowing the crimson dawn? Panthea enters. I feel, I see Those eyes which burn through smiles that fade in tears, Like stars half quenched in mists of silver dew.

11. earth,] Earth Nbk 8. 12. life . . .] Nbk 8; life. 1820, 1839. 14. mine . . .] Nbk 8; mine, 1820, 1839. 16. This line, echoing line 48 of Act I, was inserted on the blank facing page in Nbk 8. 17–24. I.e. the ideal fades in intensity as it is transcended by achieved beauty. ‘The suggestion could be that what has been aspired to as a distant ideal is now to be brought close, made actual in the light of day’ (Butter (1970)). Butter cps. TL 412–31. 19. mountains;] Nbk 8; mountains: 1820, 1839. 21. it — now it wanes —] Nbk 8; it: now it wanes 1820; it; now it wanes; 1839. 23. air . . .] Nbk 8; air: 1820, 1839. 25. sunlight] sunrise Nbk 8 (presumably altered in the press transcript). 26–7. Perhaps recalling Prometheus Bound 125, πέλας οἰωνῶν; αἰθὴρ δ’ ἐλαϕραἰς (‘The air whirs with the light rush of pinions’); cp. also III iv 107 and note, and Paradise Lost: Down thither prone in flight He speeds, and through the vast ethereal sky Sails between worlds and worlds, with steady wing Now on the polar winds, then with quick fan Winnows the buxom air. (v 266–70) 26. Æolian] eolian Nbk 8. 27. I feel, I see] Asia’s formulation introduces a further new motif; cp. e.g. 109–10 below, II iv 31, and IV 363. On Panthea’s entrance in the stage direction at this point, see Susan Hawk Brisman, SiR 16 (1977) 81: ‘Though critics have stressed the simultaneity of the action in the first three acts, perhaps no other evidence makes a stronger case for sequential action in I and II than the presence of Panthea in both’. 29. half quenched] Nbk 8, 1820; half-quenched 1839.

158 30

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shelley: selected poems Belovèd and most beautiful, who wearest The shadow of that soul by which I live, How late thou art! the spherèd sun had climbed The sea, my heart was sick with hope, before The printless air felt thy belated plumes. Panthea Pardon, great Sister! but my wings were faint With the delight of a remembered dream, As are the noontide plumes of summer winds Satiate with sweet flowers. I was wont to sleep Peacefully, and awake refreshed and calm Before the sacred Titan’s fall, and thy Unhappy love, had made, through use and pity, Both love and woe familiar to my heart As they had grown to thine. Erewhile I slept Under the glaucous caverns of old Ocean Within dim bowers of green and purple moss, Our young Ione’s soft and milky arms Locked then, as now, behind my dark, moist hair, While my shut eyes and cheek were pressed within The folded depth of her life-breathing bosom . . .

31. As Butter (1970) notes, for Asia, Panthea is the shadow of Prometheus, and for Prometheus, she is the shadow of Asia (cp. line 70). 33. sea,] Nbk 8; sea; 1820, 1839. 35–8. Panthea mentions nothing about Prometheus’s night of torture in Act I, presumably implying that it happened some time ago. Panthea is awake during the action of Act I  and so cannot have been dreaming (see also note to line 92 below), although commentators have tended to disregard the inconsistency (see e.g. Butter (1970) 281; Prometheus Unbound, ed. Vida Scudder (1892) 150; and see James Thomson’s discussion of the ‘interior time of the poem’, ‘Notes on the Structure of Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound” ’, in Shelley, a Poem: with other Writing relating to Shelley (1884) 48–70). 38–43. In Nbk 8, this passage originally read ‘satiate with sweet flowers. I slept peacefully/Before thine exile & his grievous woe/Within the glaucous caverns of old Ocean’. S. subsequently cancelled ‘I slept . . . grievous woe’, and drafted the final version on the blank facing page (f. 24r; see BSM ix 260–1, 575). S.’s pencil alterations to this insert represent very late revisions (the lines are not included in S.’s running line count in Nbk 8); and there were further alterations to the press transcript, where the thy of line 40 was altered from ‘thine’, presumably because S. also altered the thine of line 43 from ‘yours’. 42. Both love and woe recalls the Songs of the Fifth and Sixth Spirits in Act 1 763–79. 43. thine. Erewhile] The stop after thine has been adopted by various eds including Rossetti 1870, Zillman Text, and Butter (1970). S.’s insert (see note to lines 38–43) ends with the line ‘as they had grown to yours . . . erewhile I slept’. But S.’s ‘yours’ (subsequently altered to thine) ends an insertion which then picks up at what had been a new sentence; the suspension points introduce a grammatical confusion which is not resolved by the punctuation ‘thine: erewhile’ introduced in 1820 and 1839. Erewhile] I.e. some time ago; Panthea recalls in lines 43–9 a period of innocence with Ione before P.’s fall, now supplanted (lines 50–5) by a more troubled and erotically charged consciousness which is reflected in the first of the remembered dreams (lines 62–91). 44. Under] Alt. from within canc., as a result of S.’s insert (see preceding notes). 49. bosom . . .] Nbk 8; bosom: 1820, 1839.

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But not as now, since I am made the wind Which fails beneath the music that I bear Of thy most wordless converse; since dissolved Into the sense with which love talks, my rest Was troubled and yet sweet — my waking hours Too full of care and pain. Asia Lift up thine eyes And let me read thy dream. Panthea

60

65

70

As I have said, With our sea-sister at his feet I slept. The mountain mists, condensing at our voice Under the moon, had spread their snowy flakes, From the keen ice shielding our linkèd sleep . . . Then two dreams came. One, I remember not. But in the other, his pale, wound-worn limbs Fell from Prometheus, and the azure night Grew radiant with the glory of that form Which lives unchanged within, and his voice fell Like music which makes giddy the dim brain, Faint with intoxication of keen joy: ‘Sister of her whose footsteps pave the world With loveliness — more fair than aught but her Whose shadow thou art — lift thine eyes on me!’ I lifted them: the overpowering light Of that immortal shape was shadowed o’er

50–2. Panthea appears to have become a regular messenger between Asia and Prometheus, although wordless converse suggests non-verbal communication (possibly by dreams, or by eye-reading). 54. sweet —] Nbk 8; sweet; 1820, 1839. 55. eyes] Nbk 8; eyes, 1820, 1839. 56. said,] The comma was first introduced in 1840. 60. sleep . . .] Nbk 8; sleep. 1820, 1839. 62–92. For searching commentary on the affinities between the account of Panthea’s first dream, and Shelley’s earlier lyric To Constantia see Chernaik 53–8. 62–5. The Prometheus of Panthea’s dream evokes Christ transfigured; cp. Matthew xvii 1–6, Mark ix 1–8, Luke ix 28–36. 62. other, his pale,] Nbk 8; other his pale 1820, 1839. 66. giddy] dizzy Nbk 8 (clearly a change to the press transcript). 69. her] Nbk 8; her, 1820, 1839. 70. See note to line 31.

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shelley: selected poems By love; which, from his soft and flowing limbs, And passion-parted lips, and keen, faint eyes, Steamed forth like vaporous fire; an atmosphere Which wrapped me in its all-dissolving power, As the warm ether of the morning sun Wraps ere it drinks some cloud of wandering dew. I saw not, heard not, moved not, only felt His presence flow and mingle through my blood Till it became his life, and his grew mine, And I was thus absorbed — until it passed, And like the vapours when the sun sinks down, Gathering again in drops upon the pines, And tremulous as they, in the deep night My being was condensed; and as the rays Of thought were slowly gathered, I could hear His voice, whose accents lingered ere they died Like footsteps of far melody: thy name Among the many sounds alone I heard Of what might be articulate; though still I listened through the night when sound was none. Ione wakened then, and said to me: ‘Canst thou divine what troubles me to-night? I always knew what I desired before, Nor ever found delight to wish in vain. But now I cannot tell thee what I seek;

73–4. Cp. S.’s letter to Peacock from Bologna, 9 November 1818, describing a ‘Christ Beatified’ by Correggio which S. had seen in the picture gallery of a Palazzo: ‘It is a half figure rising from a mass of clouds tinged with an ethereal rose-like lustre, the arms are expanded, the whole figure seems dilated with expression, the countenance is heavy as it were with the weight of the rapture of the spirit, the lips parted but scarcely parted with the breath of intense but regulated passion, the eyes are calm and benignant, the whole features harmonized in majesty & sweetness.’ (L ii 49–50). 75–88. ‘Panthea in her dream felt as if she were a drop of dew vaporizing under the warmth of Prometheus’s sun-like beams and being somehow absorbed into him. This confused sense of well-being gave way to clarity as she condensed again and focused his light, i.e. heard his words’. (Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work (2nd edn 1971) 177.) 80. mingle] One of S.’s habitual terms for sexual intercourse. 82. absorbed —] Nbk 8; absorbed, 1820, 1839. 84. Gathering] Written in pencil above Which hang canc. in pencil; a change to the fair copy before transcription for the press. For gathering in the sense of ‘condensing’, see R&H (Longman ii, no. 144) 1045 and note, and cp. III iii 53 below. 88. ere] as Nbk 8 (presumably a change to the press transcript). 89–92. S. at first wrote ‘Like footsteps of lost music . . . but I heard/Among the many sounds, one word, thy name’; he then cancelled lost music and substituted far melody, but formed far by superimposing it on weak; Mary S. presumably misread the word as weak in her press transcript, because weak is the reading in 1820 and 1839. The final version of lines 89–92 was written on the blank facing page in Nbk 8 (f. 26r). 92. This does not seem to refer to the night represented in Act I, which is, of course, scarcely silent. 93–106. With Panthea’s dream of the transformed Prometheus, Ione has begun to move beyond the parameters established for her experience in Act I, and to develop intimate affinity with Panthea’s kind of experience; innocent love now approaches a natural maturity.

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I know not — something sweet, since it is sweet Even to desire; it is thy sport, false sister! 100 Thou hast discovered some enchantment old, Whose spells have stolen my spirit as I slept And mingled it with thine; — for when just now We kissed, I felt within thy parted lips The sweet air that sustained me, and the warmth 105 Of the life-blood, for loss of which I faint, Quivered between our intertwining arms.’ I answered not, for the Eastern star grew pale, But fled to thee. Asia Thou speakest, but thy words Are as the air. I feel them not . . . Oh, lift 110 Thine eyes, that I may read his written soul! Panthea I lift them, though they droop beneath the load Of that they would express: what canst thou see But thine own fairest shadow imaged there? 98. not —] Nbk 8; not; 1820, 1839. 99. sister!] Nbk 8; sister; 1820, 1839. 102. thine; —] Nbk 8; thine: 1820, 1839. 107–8. These lines appear to confirm that the morning after Panthea’s night of dreams is a different morning from that which breaks at the end of Act I. 108–10. Cp. S.’s ‘On Love’: ‘if we feel, we would that another’s nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own’ (Prose 170). 109. air.] Nbk 8; air: 1820, 1839. not . . .] Nbk 8; not: 1820, 1839. 110. soul] Written above spirit canc. Nbk 8. This line is followed by a cancelled line, ‘Lift up thine eyes Panthea — they pierce — they burn!’ There then follows a cancelled passage, probably continued in the two following leaves which have been torn from the notebook, which as Locock first noted may represent the origin of the ‘Life of Life’ lyric in 2 v (though BSM ix 577 notes that S. included the cancelled passage in his line count for this scene): Panthea Alas I am consumed — I melt away The fire is in my heart — Asia Thine eyes burn burn! — [the second burn, required by the metre, is omitted in BSM ix 269] Hide them within thine hair Panthea O quench thy lips I sink I perish Asia Shelter me now — they burn It is his spirit in thier orbs . . . my life Is ebbing fast — I cannot speak — Panthea Rest, rest! Sleep death annihilation pain! aught else

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Asia Thine eyes are like the deep, blue, boundless heaven 115 Contracted to two circles underneath Their long, fine lashes; dark, far, measureless, — Orb within orb, and line through line inwoven. Panthea Why lookest thou as if a spirit passed? Asia There is a change; beyond their inmost depth 120 I see a shade, a shape: ’tis He, arrayed In the soft light of his own smiles, which spread 114–17. Cp L&C XI v: Her lips were parted, and the measured breath Was now heard there; — her dark and intricate eyes Orb within orb, deeper than sleep or death, Absorbed the glories of the burning skies, Which, mingling with her heart’s deep ecstasies, Burst from her looks and gestures; — and a light Of liquid tenderness like love, did rise From her whole frame, an atmosphere which quite Arrayed her in its beams, tremulous and soft and bright. See also DMAA (written in 1818 probably as a prefatory essay to the translation of the Symposium), on the limits placed upon women’s experience by Greek culture: ‘Their eyes could not have been deep and intricate from the workings of the mind, and could have entangled no heart in soul-enwoven labyrinths’ (Prose 220; for the importance of this essay to S.’s general conception of Asia and Panthea, see headnote). S. adapted the passage in his letter to Peacock from Rome, 6 April 1819, on his impressions of Italian women: ‘The only inferior part are the eyes, which though good & gentle, want the mazy depth of colour behind colour with which the intellectual females of England & Germany entangle the heart in soul-inwoven labyrinths’ (L ii 93). Cp. also Tasso, Aminta (1573) I ii 94–5: ‘E bevea da’ suoi lumi/Un estranea dolcezza’ (‘and drank from her eyes a strange sweetness’); Mary S. records reading Aminta with S. in April 1818 (Mary Jnl i 203). 115.  to] in Nbk 8. Perhaps S.’s alteration to the press transcript; but to two introduces a slight verbal awkwardness. 116.  measureless, —] Nbk 8; measureless, 1820, 1839. 120–6. Asia sees Panthea’s dream (previously described in lines 62–9) in her eyes, and her recapitulation again suggests Christ transfigured (see note to lines 62–5). As Butter (1970) notes, Asia is able to interpret Panthea’s dream; she then sees Panthea’s other dream (lines 127–31), which Panthea herself has been unable to recall (cp. line 61), but which she now recognises in Asia’s description (line 132). Panthea’s second dream in its turn prompts a recollection by Asia of a prophetic dream (lines 141–62). Such complex interchange of private experience suggests the growing interdependence of Asia and Panthea, or rather the absorption of Panthea into Asia, as their symbolic values begin to merge. Cp. DMAA: ‘[sexual love] soon becomes a very small part of that profound and complicated sentiment which we call love, which is rather the universal thirst for a communion not merely of the senses but of our whole nature, intellectual, imaginative, and sensitive, and which, when individualized, becomes an imperious necessity, only to be satisfied by the complete or partial, actual or supposed fulfilment of its claims . . . The sexual impulse, which is only one and often a small part of these claims, serves from its obvious and external nature as a kind of type or expression of the rest, as common basis, an acknowledged and visible link’ (Prose 221). 121. S. plays on the ambiguity of Lat. ridere (both ‘laugh’ and ‘shine’).

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Like radiance from the cloud-surrounded moon. Prometheus, it is thine! depart not yet! Say not those smiles that we shall meet again 125 Within that bright pavilion which their beams Shall build o’er the waste world? The dream is told. What shape is that between us? Its rude hair Roughens the wind that lifts it, its regard Is wild and quick, yet’tis a thing of air 130 For through its grey robe gleams the golden dew Whose stars the noon has quenched not. Dream Follow, follow! Panthea It is mine other dream — Asia It disappears. Panthea It passes now into my mind. Methought As we sate here, the flower-enfolding buds 135 Burst on yon lightning-blasted almond-tree, 122. moon.] moon Nbk 8; morn. 1820, 1839 (very probably a misreading by Mary S. in her transcript; the second o of moon in Nbk 8 is ill-formed and resembles an r). 123. This line has been added on the blank facing page in Nbk 8. It is very difficult to determine whether the reading is thine or thou; BSM ix 578 is probably right in preferring thou, which could easily have been miscopied in the transcript, but the evidence is not conclusive, and thine may coherently refer to the shade . . . shape of line 120. 125. pavilion] Pavilion Nbk 8. 126. o’er] Nbk 8; on 1820, 1839. Probably a mistranscription; o’er has no apostrophe in Nbk 8. 127–31. Perhaps recalling the closing lines of Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’. Panthea’s second dream appears to spur to action, in contrast with the reassuring prophetic rapture of the first dream. The dream has been interpreted as a vision of the Spirit of the Hour which will arrive to mark the arrival of revolutionary change and the downfall of Jupiter (see e.g. Reiman (1969) 76; Cameron (1974) 516; Stuart Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse (1988) 98). The rude hair/Roughens may imply Demogorgon himself, but there is also a suggestion of maenad-like possession anticipating the more explicit allusions to oracular prophecy in succeeding scenes. 131. I.e. it is not yet noon; ‘the noon has not yet arrived so as to quench them’ (rather than ‘even the noon has not quenched the stars’). The time-scheme here is therefore not inconsistent with II ii 89. Follow, follow!] Nbk 8; Follow! Follow! 1820, 1839. 132. dream —] Nbk 8; dream. 1820, 1839. 135. almond-tree] Traditionally a symbol of hope and anticipation; cp. Jeremiah i 11–12: ‘Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Jeremiah, what seest thou? And I said, I see a rod of an almond tree. Then said the Lord unto me, Thou halt well seen: for I will hasten my word to perform it’ (exegesis understood a Hebrew pun on ‘almond’ and ‘hasten’, and interpreted the ‘hastening’ tree as an anticipatory type of Spring). The almond blossoms in January in Italy, the earliest anticipation of spring (as Pliny notes, Nat. Hist. xvi 42); but S.’s lightning-blasted almond suggests premature or blasted hope, here redeemed by prophecy.

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When swift from the white Scythian wilderness A wind swept forth wrinkling the Earth with frost . . . I looked, and all the blossoms were blown down; But on each leaf was stamped — as the blue bells 140 Of Hyacinth tell Apollo’s written grief — O, follow, follow! Asia As you speak, your words Fill, pause by pause, my own forgotten sleep With shapes . . . methought among these lawns together We wandered, underneath the young grey dawn, 145 And multitudes of dense white fleecy clouds Were wandering in thick flocks along the mountains,

136. The Scythian wilderness provides the setting for Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. 137. frost . . .] Nbk 8; frost: 1820, 1839. 139–40. Hyacinthus was a beautiful boy loved by Apollo, pre-eminently the god of oracular prophecy (see note to line 141). He was killed by Zephyrus, and as Apollo mourned, a flower sprang from the boy’s blood marked with αἰαῖ (Gk ‘alas’). 139. stamped —] Nbk 8; stamped, 1820, 1839. 140. grief —] Nbk 8; grief, 1820, 1839. 141. follow, follow!] Nbk 8; FOLLOW, FOLLOW! 1820, 1839. The injunction to Follow, first announced by the Dream at line 131, is stamped on leaves, and then (lines 151–62) written in nature and humanity (on cloud-shadows, lines 151–3; on herbs, lines 154–5; in the music of the pines, lines 156–9; and in human eyes, lines 161–2). S. borrows the idea from the ancient oracles; the prophetic sybil sometimes wrote her prophecies on leaves to be collected and deciphered. Mary S.’s Preface to The Last Man (1826) gives a presumably imaginary account of the accidental discovery by Mary and her ‘companion’ of the cave of the Cumaean sybil, during a visit to Naples in 1818: ‘At length my friend, who had taken up some of the leaves strewed about, exclaimed, “This is the Sibyl’s cave; these are Sibylline leaves.” On examination, we found that all the leaves, bark, and other substances, were traced with written characters. What appeared to us more astonishing, was that these writings were expressed in various languages: some unknown to my companion, ancient Chaldee, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, old as the Pyramids. Stranger still, some were in modern dialects, English and Italian. We could make out little by the dim light, but they seemed to contain prophecies, detailed relations of events but lately passed; names, now well known, but of modern date; and often exclamations of exultation or woe, of victory or defeat, were traced on their thin scant pages. This was certainly the Sibyl’s Cave; not indeed exactly as Virgil describes it; but the whole of this land had been so convulsed by earthquake and volcano, that the change was not wonderful, though the traces of ruin were effaced by time; and we probably owed the preservation of these leaves, to the accident which had closed the mouth of the cavern, and the swift-growing vegetation which had rendered its sole opening impervious to the storm. We made a hasty selection of such of the leaves, whose writing one at least of us could understand; and then, laden with our treasure, we bade adieu to the dim hypaethric cavern, and after much difficulty succeeded in rejoining our guides.’ (MSW iv 7–8). 142. my] mine Nbk 8 (probably altered in the press transcript). 143. shapes . . . methought] Nbk 8; shapes. Methought 1820, 1839. these] Nbk 8; the 1820, 1839. Perhaps miscopied in the transcript; these is slightly obscure in Nbk 8 and has possibly been altered from this. 146. mountains,] mountains Nbk 8, 1820, 1839.

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Shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind; And the white dew on the new-bladed grass, Just piercing the dark earth, hung silently — 150 And there was more which I remember not; But on the shadows of the moving clouds Athwart the purple mountain slope, was written Follow, O follow! as they vanished by; And on each herb, from which Heaven’s dew had fallen, 155 The like was stamped as with a withering fire. A wind arose among the pines; it shook The clinging music from their boughs, and then Low, sweet, faint sounds, like the farewell of ghosts, Were heard: O, follow, follow, follow me! 160 And then I said: ‘Panthea, look on me.’ But in the depth of those beloved eyes Still I saw, follow, follow! Echo Follow, follow! Panthea The crags, this clear spring morning, mock our voices, As they were spirit-tongued. Asia It is some being 165 Around the crags. What fine clear sounds! O list!

149. silently —] Nbk 8; silently; 1820, 1839. 150. not;] Nbk 8; not: 1820, 1839. 151. moving] Nbk 8; morning 1820, 1839. Moving is clear in Nbk 8, so morning could well be an alteration to the transcript rather than a miscopying, and both moving and morning fit the context (Reiman (1977) reads morning); moving is preferred here because it appears to fit better with the immediate context of lines 151–3. clouds] Nbk 8; clouds, 1820, 1839. 153. Follow, O follow! as] Follow, o follow! as Nbk 8; FOLLOW, O, FOLLOW! As 1820, 1839. by;] by, Nbk 8, 1820, 1839. 155. stamped] Nbk 8; stamped, 1820, 1839. Locock 1911 and Butter (1970) introduce a stop after fire. The comma after fire in Nbk 8, 1820 and 1839 seems definitely too weak for the sense, and a new sentence at this point is judged appropriately to mark a new sequence of thought following the long sentence beginning at line 143. 159. Were heard — Oh, follow, follow, follow me Nbk 8; Were heard: OH, FOLLOW, FOLLOW, FOLLOW ME! 1820, 1839. 160. said:] 1820; said Nbk 8; said, 1839. 162. saw, follow, follow!] saw follow, follow. Nbk 8; saw, FOLLOW, FOLLOW! 1820, 1839. S. initially intended to call the Echoes ‘Voices’; their first line here was inserted on the blank facing page in Nbk 8, with the speaker identification ‘Voice’ altered to Echo (see note to line 166). 165. O] o Nbk 8; O, 1820, 1839.

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170

Echoes (unseen). Echoes we: listen! We cannot stay: As dew-stars glisten Then fade away — Child of Ocean! Asia Hark! Spirits speak! The liquid responses Of their aërial tongues yet sound. Panthea I hear.

175

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Echoes O follow, follow, As our voice recedeth Through the caverns hollow, Where the forest spreadeth; [More distant.] O follow, follow Through the caverns hollow; As the song floats, thou pursue, Where the wild bee never flew, Through the noon-tide darkness deep, By the odour-breathing sleep Of faint night-flowers, and the waves At the fountain-lighted caves, While our music, wild and sweet, Mocks thy gently-falling feet, Child of Ocean!

166ff. . The single Echo at line 162 does indeed echo the last words spoken; but from this point to the end of the scene, the Echoes articulate on their own account, implying an external agency which draws Asia and Panthea towards their destined meeting with Demogorgon, notwithstanding their assumption that they act under their own desires. See notes to II ii 41–63. As Wasserman notes, echoes traditionally inhabit caves (see e.g. Ovid, Met. iii 394); but the mysteriously subterranean hollow caverns to which the Echoes invite Asia and Panthea are specifically volcanic (lines 202–3). 166. In Nbk 8, S. first wrote V for the speaker identification, then cancelled it and wrote Echoes, probably then returning to the insert discussed in the preceding note to alter Voice there to Echo. 171. Spirits speak!] spirits speak! Nbk 8; Spirits speak. 1820; Spirits, speak. 1829, 1839; strong evidence that Mary used 1829 as copy text for 1839 (cp. II v 47 and note; see headnote, and Taylor 41). 175. hollow] Nbk 8; hollow, 1820, 1839. 176. The stage direction after line 176 is not in Nbk 8 and was presumably added in the press transcript. 177. follow] Nbk 8; follow, 1820; follow! 1839. 178. hollow;] hollow Nbk 8; hollow, 1820, 1839. 179. floats,] floats Nbk 8, 1820, 1839. 183. faint] Written in pencil above sweet canc. in pencil; a change to the fair copy before transcription for the press. 186. gently-falling] Nbk 8; gently falling 1820, 1839.

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Asia Shall we pursue the sound? It grows more faint And distant. Panthea List! the strain floats nearer now. 190

Echoes In the world unknown Sleeps a voice unspoken; By thy step alone Can its rest be broken, Child of Ocean!

Asia 195 How the notes sink upon the ebbing wind!

200

205

Echoes O follow, follow Through the caverns hollow; As the song floats, thou pursue, By the woodland noon-tide dew, By the forests, lakes and fountains, Through the many-folded mountains, To the rents, and gulfs, and chasms, Where the Earth reposed from spasms On the day when He and thou Parted — to commingle now, Child of Ocean! Asia Come, sweet Panthea, link thy hand in mine, And follow, ere the voices fade away.

190. Here and at line 196, the choral Echoes are altered, presumably in the press transcript, from the singular Echo of Nbk 8. 193. broken,] broken Nbk 8; broken; 1820, 1839. 196. follow] Nbk 8; follow! 1820, 1839. 197. hollow;] hollow Nbk 8; hollow, 1820, 1839. 198. floats,] Nbk 8; floats 1820, 1839. 199. dew,] dew Nbk 8; dew; 1820, 1839. 201. many-folded] Cp. J&M 76, Hymn to Venus 63; and S.’s letter to Peacock from Bologna, 9 November  1818, ‘the many folded Apennines’ (L ii 53). mountains,] mountains Nbk 8; mountains; 1820, 1839. 202–5. This summons refers to the earthquake and eruption when Prometheus was chained and Asia exiled (cp. Act I 165–8); see note above to lines 166ff. 203. spasms] Nbk 8; spasms, 1820, 1839. 205. Parted —] Nbk 8; Parted, 1820, 1839. now,] now Nbk 8; now; 1820, 1839.

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Scene ii

A forest, intermingled with rocks and caverns. Asia and Panthea pass into it. Two young Fauns are sitting on a rock, listening.

5

Semichorus I of Spirits The path through which that lovely twain Have passed, by cedar, pine, and yew, And each dark tree that ever grew, Is curtained out from Heaven’s wide blue; Nor sun, nor moon, nor wind, nor rain Can pierce its interwoven bowers, Nor aught, save where some cloud of dew,

II. ii. SD. Two young fauns . . . listening] This sentence was added later in Nbk 8; see note to lines 64–97. 1–23. As Asia and Panthea approach the mountains to which the echoes have beckoned them (II i 196–206), they enter ‘A forest, intermingled with rocks and caverns’ (see stage direction) where ‘the lush exuberance of the flora and fauna . . . is neither fanciful nor gratuitous. Asia and her companion have reached an area of volcanic fall-out, long famous for extreme fertility’ (GM; see his ‘A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley’ ELH 24 (1957) for detailed commentary on the geophysical and especially volcanic symbolism underpinning the action of Act II). S.’s description of the volcanic tract through which Asia and Panthea pass corresponds broadly to the countryside around Naples; cp. his letter to Peacock from Naples, 25 February 1819: ‘We are on the point of quitting Naples for Rome. The scenery which surrounds this city is more delightful than any within the reach of civilized man. I dont think I have mentioned to you the lago d’Agnoni & the Caccia d’Astroni . . . They are both the craters of extinguished volcanos, & nature has thrown forth forests of oak & ilex, & spread mossy lawns, & clear lakes over the dead or sleeping fire. The first is a scene of a wider & wilder character with soft sloping wooded hills, & grassy declivities declining to the lake, & cultivated plains of vines woven upon poplar trees bounded by the theatre of hills . . . The other is a royal chase, it is surrounded by steep & lofty hills & only accessible thro a wide gate of massy oak from the vestibule of which the spectacle of precipitous hills hemming in a narrow & circular vale is suddenly disclosed. The hills are covered with thick woods of ilex, myrtle & laurustinus; the polished leaves of the ilex as they move in their multitudes under the partial blasts which rush thro the chasms of the vale glitter above the dark masses of foliage below like the white foam of waves upon a dark blue sea. The plain so surrounded is at most three miles in circumference. It is occupied partly by a lake with bold shores wooded by evergreens, & interrupted by a sylvan promontory of the wild forest whose mossy boughs overhang its expanse of a silent & purple darkness like an Italian midnight; & partly by the forest itself of all gigantic trees, but the oak especially whose jagged boughs now leafless are hoary with thick lichens and loaded with the massy & deep foliage of the ivy. The effect of the dark eminences that surrounded this plain, seen through the boughs is of an enchanting solemnity.’ (L ii 77) S. was well aware of the special associations of this scenery with Virgil, whose Eclogue vi and Aeneid vi are pervasive influences on this scene in particular (see note to line 90 below). See Wasserman 320ff. for searching commentary on the Virgilian elements in Act II. 2–3. Recalling the wood of error in Faerie Queene I i 7–9; and cp. also Paradise Lost iv 137–42: overhead up grew Insuperable highth of loftiest shade, Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm, A sylvan scene, and as the ranks ascend Shade above shade, a woody theater Of stateliest view. 5. rain] Nbk 8; rain, 1820, 1839. 7. where] 1820, 1839 (see also Butter (1970), Locock 1911); when Zillman Text, Reiman (1977). It is impossible to decide the reading in Nbk 8, which here as at line 14 could be read as either where or when (see BSM ix 294–5, 584). The dominant editorial approach is here adopted on the assumption

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Drifted along the earth-creeping breeze Between the trunks of the great hoar trees, Hangs each a pearl in the pale flowers Of the green laurel, blown anew; And bends, and then fades silently, One frail and fair anenome: Or when some star of many a one That climb and wander through steep night, Has found the cleft through which alone Beams fall from high those depths upon, Ere it is borne away, away, By the swift Heavens that cannot stay — It scatters drops of golden light, Like lines of rain that ne’er unite: And the gloom divine is all around; And underneath is the mossy ground. Semichorus II There the voluptuous nightingales

that S. intends a place/time contrast, but where/where and when/when are both defensible. The formula save where, introducing a series of parallel clauses (cp. Or when, line 14), is a stock convention in English natural descriptive poetry; cp. Gray, ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ 7–12, Collins, ‘Ode to Evening’ 9–14. 8. Drifted] A participle; ‘wafted’, ‘made to drift’. breeze] Nbk 8; breeze, 1820, 1839. 10. I.e. ‘hangs a pearl in each flower’; cp. Midsummer Night’s Dream II i 14–15: ‘I must go seek some dewdrops here/And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear’. 11. The laurel was sacred to Apollo and traditionally associated with poets; see e.g. Faerie Queene I i 9: ‘The Laurell, meed of mightie Conquerours/And Poets sage’. 12–13. Inverted syntax; ‘save where one anemone bends and fades . . .’ 14. when] See note to line 7. 15. climb and wander] Nbk 8; climbs and wanders 1820, 1839; many a one (line 14) is the plural subject (S.’s verbs are also plural in an earlier draft in Nbk 11 f. 28). 17. upon,] Nbk 8; upon 1820, 1839. 19. stay —] Nbk 8; stay, 1820, 1839. This line completes an adjectival clause of time qualifying star (line 14). Cp. Seneca, de Brevitate Vitae: ‘Praesens tempus . . . nec magis moram patitur quam mundus aut sidera, quorum inrequieta semper agitatio numquam in eodem vestigio manet’ (‘Present time . . . can no more brook delay than the firmament or the stars, whose ever unresting movement never lets them abide in the same track.’ Moral Essays X x 6, Loeb trans.) 20. It] I.e. the star. 22. gloom divine] Cp. III iii 169. 24. nightingales] Nbk 8; nightingales, 1820, 1839. 24–40. S. appears in these lines to suggest a special agency for the poetic tradition in the movement towards revolutionary change, thus explaining the music and sweet sounds which draw Asia and Panthea on towards Demogorgon. Nightingales are associated in S.’s thought with the poet (see note to line 35); cp. DP: ‘A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why’ (Prose 283). The idea of successive schools of poetry hinted in this passage may recall Gray’s ‘Progress of Poesy’, which articulates a similar notion; and there is a series of understated puns on terms relating to poetry and music: catch, close, strain, melody.

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shelley: selected poems Are awake through all the broad noonday; When one with bliss or sadness fails, And through the windless ivy-boughs, Sick with sweet love, droops dying away On its mate’s music-panting bosom — Another from the swinging blossom, Watching to catch the languid close Of the last strain, then lifts on high The wings of the weak melody, Till some new stream of feeling bear The song, and all the woods are mute; When there is heard through the dim air The rush of wings, and rising there Like many a lake-surrounded flute, Sounds overflow the listener’s brain So sweet, that joy is almost pain.

25. noonday;] noonday Nbk 8; noon-day, 1820, 1839. When in the following line is not in apposition with noonday. 26–35. Perhaps recalling Orsino’s opening speech in Twelfth Night: If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die. That strain again! It had a dying fall; O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour! Enough, no more; Tis not so sweet now as it was before. 27. Ivy was sacred to Bacchus (see Ovid, Fasti iii 767–70), and by the renaissance was associated with erotic desire; cp. e.g. Faerie Queene II v 29: And ouer him, art striuing to compair With nature, did an Arber greene dispred, Framed of wanton Yuie, flouring faire, Through which the fragrant Eglantine did spred His pricking armes, entrayled with roses red, Which daintie odours round about them threw, And all within with flowres was garnished, That when mild Zephyrus emongst them blew, Did breathe out bounteous smels, and painted colors shew. See also Faerie Queene III vi 44. 29. bosom —] Nbk 8; bosom; 1820, 1839. 34. stream] Apparently written over strain in Nbk 8, perhaps to avoid repetition from line 32; the alteration is not very clear and could have been misread, or S. may have made the alteration after completion of the press transcript. 1820 and 1839 read strain. Cp. Q Mab viii 27–8: ‘the pure stream of feeling/That sprung from these sweet notes’. 35. Cp. Milton’s Sonnet I (‘To the Nightingale’) 1–2: ‘O nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray/ Warbl’st at eve, when all the woods are still’. 38. lake-surrounded] Nbk 8, 1839; lake-surrounding 1820, 1829. Mary S.’s correction of Galignani suggests that this may have come from S.’s errata list (see headnote). The image is of flute-music heard over encircling water, and refers to a common practice in visiting lakes on picturesque tours.

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Semichorus I There those enchanted eddies play Of echoes music-tongued, which draw, By Demogorgon’s mighty law, With melting rapture, or sweet awe, All spirits on that secret way, As inland boats are driven to Ocean Down streams made strong with mountain-thaw; And first there comes a gentle sound To those in talk or slumber bound, And wakes the destined: soft emotion

45

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41–63. ‘This extended image expresses the way in which historical change and its human agents (reformers, poets) interact. These agents (the destined) are roused from their empty chatter or apathy (talk or slumber) by delightful intimations (echoes music-tongued) of the task they must accomplish. Destiny inspires them and lures them on, as mountains attract clouds. But they are driven as well as attracted; in following their own wishes they are obeying the dictate of historical necessity’ (GM). 41–7. Cp. Written on a Beautiful Day in Spring (Longman i 416–7, no. 77) 12–13 and note. 42. Recalling the closing stanzas of Act II scene i. echoes] Nbk 8; echoes, 1820, 1839. 44. sweet] deep Nbk 8. Presumably S.’s change to the press transcript. 45. way,) Nbk 8; way; 1820, 1839. 46. Anticipating the closing lines of Act II scene v. 48–9. S. repeatedly associates sleep with an unconsciousness of, or unconcern for, pressing social and political realities. Cp. OWW 29–36: Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lulled by the coil of his chrystalline streams, Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ’s bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave’s intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! See also MA 1–4: As I lay asleep in Italy There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me To walk in the Visions of Poesy. 50–1. An important crux, affecting the meaning of the scene, and bearing on the poem’s larger thematic preoccupation with human agency in revolutionary change. The lines are mispunctuated in 1820 (and 1829), and various eds (notably Rossetti 1870 and Hutchinson) have compounded the resulting confusion. Nbk 8 reads: And wakes the destined — soft emotion Attracts, impels them: those who saw In 1820 this appeared as: And wakes the destinied [sic] soft emotion, Attracts, impels them: those who saw

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shelley: selected poems Attracts, impels them; those who saw Say from the breathing Earth behind There steams a plume-uplifting wind Which drives them on their path, while they Believe their own swift wings and feet The sweet desires within obey: And so they float upon their way Until, still sweet, but loud and strong, The storm of sound is driven along, Sucked up and hurrying: as they fleet Behind, its gathering billows meet And to the fatal mountain bear Like clouds amid the yielding air.

Galignani in 1829 perpetuated this reading (while correcting destinied to destined), but it was corrected in 1839 (presumably following S.’s errata list) to the reading adopted here. Rossetti 1870 returned to the reading of 1820, while Hutchinson emended the punctuation to: And wakes the destined soft emotion, — Attracts, impels them; those who saw Other eds have tinkered in various ways, including Forman 1876–7, which introduces a stop after destined (deriving it, erroneously, from Nbk 8). 51. those who saw] Perhaps referring to those (such as Godwin) who understand historical causes. 52. breathing Earth] Nbk 8; earth 1820, 1839. S.’s phrase conflates classical and contemporary accounts of volcanic activity, and what it was considered to imply of the earth’s interior, with classical ideas concerning the sources of oracular possession and prophecy. Asia and Panthea are descending into Demogorgon’s subterranean realm, which itself gives further substance to S.’s distinctive oracular-volcanic conception of the action in the second Act. For classical sources of the connection between oracles and earthly exhalation, see Aeneid vi, and e.g. Plutarch, Moralia, ‘de Defectu Oraculorum’ l–li; Silius Italicus, Punica xii 113–51 (which also associates volcanic activity with the breathing of the buried Titans under the volcanic islands around Naples, which seems to have contributed to S.’s conception of Demogorgon; see headnote). 53. S. is thinking of a fumarole, a hole through which vapour issues from the slopes of a volcano. The associations here include: rising hot vapour which lifts wings; a plume of steam; possibly the plumes characteristically worn on the hats of the French revolutionaries (and as frequently depicted, for example, in Gillray’s cartoons). See GM, ‘Shelley’s Grasp upon the Actual’, EC iv (1954) 328–31. Fumaroles were commonly described as emitting ‘plumes’; e.g. Philosophical Transactions cii (1812) 154, where the birth of Sabrina Island in 1811 caused the sea to erupt jets of vapour like ‘innumerable plumes of black and white ostrich feathers’. 56. desires] This is the reading in 1820 and 1839, and also in S.’s draft in Nbk 11; Nbk 8 is unclear but apparently reads desire. 57. way] Nbk 8; way, 1820, 1839. 60–3. ‘It was observed of volcanoes that they not only generated their own “clouds of fire”, but attracted more orthodox clouds from elsewhere’ (GM); cp. e.g. an account in the Edinburgh Review iii (1804) of a volcanic eruption observed from Naples during which ‘every cloud that appeared on the horizon was attracted to Vesuvius’. 60. hurrying:] hurrying — Nbk 8; hurrying 1820 (perhaps corrected in 1839 from S.’s errata list). 61. Behind,] 1820, 1839. There is no comma in Nbk 8 or in e.g. Reiman (1977), but the punctuation is necessary to clarify that the echoes draw (line 42), not drive, the destined spirits.

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First Faun Canst thou imagine where those spirits live Which make such delicate music in the woods? We haunt within the least frequented caves And closest coverts, and we know these wilds, Yet never meet them, though we hear them oft: Where may they hide themselves? Second Faun

70

‘Tis hard to tell: I have heard those more skilled in spirits say, The bubbles, which the enchantment of the sun

64–97. This passage was added later on the blank ff. 37r and 38r in Nbk 8. The lines are not included in S.’s running line-count, and ‘Fawns’ was probably the last addition to the list of ‘Dramatis Personae’ in Nbk 7 (f. 18r). A stage direction at this point in Nbk 8 reads ‘enter [two young female canc.] Fauns [alt. from Fawns]’. BSM ix 589 is doubtless correct in surmising that the lines may have been added as late as December 1819. This interlude, ‘interpolated so as to give Asia and Panthea time to reach their destination’ (GM), derives principally from the speeches of the shepherds in Leigh Hunt’s Descent of Liberty scene ii (1815). The Descent of Liberty was included in volume i of Hunt’s Poetical Works (3 vols 1819), which S. appears to have asked Hunt to send him in August 1819 (L ii 113), and which had apparently been read by S. by December 1819 (L ii 164). Cp. Cicero, de Divinatione I xlv 101: ‘We are told that fauns have often been heard in battle and that during turbulent times truly prophetic messages have been sent from mysterious places.’ (Loeb trans.). 64–9. Recalling Ferdinand in The Tempest I ii 385–93: Where should this music be? I’ th’ air or th’ earth? It sounds no more; and sure it waits upon Some god o’ th’ island. Sitting on a bank, Weeping again the King my father’s wreck, This music crept by me upon the waters, Allaying both their fury and my passion With its sweet air; thence I have follow’d it Or it hath drawn me rather. But’tis gone. No, it begins again. 67. closest] ‘Most secret’. 70. those more skilled in spirits] I.e. scientists (such as Erasmus Darwin, or Sir Humphrey Davy). 71. which the enchantment] Nbk 8, 1820; which enchantment 1829, 1839 (Mary S.’s perpetuation of Galignani’s error is evidence for 1829 as copy text for 1839; see Taylor 41). 71–82. Commentators have accepted the explanation of these lines in Grabo (1930) 172–4 that they portray the hydrogen cycle as described in Darwin’s Botanic Garden (Darwin i, Additional Note xxxii). But Butter (1954) 149–50 and Butter (1970) 284–5 offer a more persuasive source in Walker 231–2. Butter (1970) notes Walker’s explanation that ‘much “inflammable air” (hydrogen) is released from plants in ponds in hot weather. When the bubbles which the sun sucks from the plants come out of the water they burst and the hydrogen which they contain, being very light, ascends to the upper air, which is heavily charged with electricity, and there ignites and appears as meteors or falling stars’. There are however problems even with this explanation, as according to Darwin and to Joseph Priestley, what the sun raised from live conferva in clear water (see lines 72–3) was not hydrogen but oxygen (see Darwin i, Additional Note xxxiii). The fauns’ science in fact seems deliberately old-fashioned; Humphrey Davy had proved by 1817 (see Philosophical Transactions cvii (1817) 75–6) that hydrogen raised from the earth and ignited could not be the cause of meteors. Cp. L i 201 (?10 December 1811, to Elizabeth Hitchener): ‘Yet are we, are these souls which measure in their circumscribed domain the distances of yon orbs, are we but the bubbles which arise from the filth of a stagnant pool, merely to be again reabsorbed into the mass of corruption?’

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shelley: selected poems Sucks from the pale faint water-flowers that pave The oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools, Are the pavilions where such dwell and float Under the green and golden atmosphere Which noontide kindles through the woven leaves; And when these burst, and the thin fiery air, The which they breathed within those lucent domes, Ascends to flow like meteors through the night, They ride on it, and rein their headlong speed, And bow their burning crests, and glide in fire Under the waters of the Earth again. First Faun If such live thus, have others other lives, Under pink blossoms or within the bells Of meadow flowers, or folded violets deep, Or on their dying odours, when they die, Or in the sunlight of the sphered dew?

76. Which noontide] In Nbk 8, S. first wrote Which the noon kindles then inserted tide with a caret after noon, but omitted to cancel the, thus creating an ametrical line (which was presumably corrected in the press transcript; BSM ix detects a faint cancel-line over part of the in Nbk 8). 78. lucent domes] S. at first wrote lucid homes in Nbk 8, with lucent domes as an alternative written above later, and presumably preferred in the press transcript. 80. it] 1820, 1839 and most eds read them, presumably assuming meteors (line 79) as the plural referent of the pronoun. The fair copy in Nbk 8 is tangled at this point, but it seems to confirm that S. in fact assumes the singular fiery air as the referent of what was originally it in the fair copy. S. first wrote They rein its headlong speed & glide with it Into the waters of the Earth again He then altered the lines by inserting ride on it & between They and rein, and altered the original pronoun its to their, thus changing the implied referent from fiery air to spirits (line 70). S. then created a new line by adding And bow their burning crests as the first half of a line completed by & glide with it, to give: They ride on it & rein their headlong speed And bow their burning crests & glide in fire Under the waters of the Earth again S.’s alteration of its to their is however so placed on the page (and with the extra confusion of another their messily cancelled) as to suggest that it could easily have been miscopied in the press transcript as a them, replacing the it in They ride on it. See BSM ix 306–7 for a facsimile and transcript of Nbk 8 f. 37r, and 589–90 for commentary. Confusion is further compounded by the plausible possibility that S. might have considered fiery air to mean ‘meteors’, and therefore to require a plural pronoun. 82. Earth] Nbk 8; earth 1820, 1839. 85. folded violets deep] Written in pencil (and later inked in) above in the violets heart canc.; an example of a pencil correction by S. to the fair copy before transcription for the press, as folded violets deep is the reading in 1820. 87. in] Nbk 8; on 1820, 1839; perhaps an alteration to the press transcript, but the sense suggests a mistranscription or printing error (possibly a dittography from the preceding line).

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Second Faun Ay, many more, which we may well divine. But should we stay to speak, noontide would come, And thwart Silenus find his goats undrawn, And grudge to sing those wise and lovely songs Of fate, and chance, and God, and Chaos old, And Love, and the chained Titan’s woeful doom, And how he shall be loosed, and make the Earth One brotherhood: delightful strains which cheer Our solitary twilights, and which charm To silence the unenvying nightingales.

Scene iii

A pinnacle of rock among mountains. Asia and Panthea.

5

Panthea Hither the sound has borne us — to the realm Of Demogorgon, and the mighty portal, Like a volcano’s meteor-breathing chasm, Whence the oracular vapour is hurled up Which lonely men drink wandering in their youth, And call truth, virtue, love, genius, or joy,

88. more,] Nbk 8; more 1820, 1839. 90. Silenus, who was tutor to Dionysus, is the subject of Virgil’s Eclogue vi, where in lines 31–42 he is celebrated for his ‘wise and lovely songs’ (see lines 91–5). His mention here suggests further volcanic associations, as Silenus is also a principal character in Euripides’ Cyclops (for S’s translation, see Longman ii 371–412, no. 172), which is set on Mount Etna in Sicily. undrawn] unmilked. 92–5. These lines are added underneath S.’s original version in Nbk 8, where the last two lines followed line 91; line 96 at that stage read ‘Which cheer our lonesome twilights, & which charm’. 93. Love,] love Nbk 8. doom,] doom Nbk 8; dooms, 1820, 1829; doom. 1839; Forman 1876–7 suggests that the stop in 1839 was accidentally inserted by the printer in correcting dooms,. 94. Earth] Nbk 8; earth 1820, 1839. II. iii. SD. See note to lines 24–33 below. 3. In early nineteenth-century usage, ‘meteor’ usually meant ‘any atmospheric phenomenon’; S. here follows the common ascription of meteoric activity to exhalations of the earth, volcanic in this context (see note to lines 24–33 below). Cp. Alastor 651 and note. volcano’s] Volcano’s Nbk 8. 4. oracular vapour] S. draws in this scene on various classical and contemporary accounts of oracles, particularly the oracle at Delphi; Panthea and, more importantly, Asia, are inspired to prophesy in the manner of a priestess intoxicated by vapour from an oracular cavern. S.’s most direct sources are Plutarch, Moralia, ‘De defectu oraculorum’, xl, xliii, l; Diodorus Siculus xvi 26; Lucan, Pharsalia v 82–101 and ix 564–5; and see also Barthelemy ii 391–2 and note xx. For analogues with Virgil’s account of the Cumaean Sybil cp. Aeneid vi 240ff.; S. and Mary visited the landscape of Virgil’s poem during their stay in Naples (see L ii 61). On S.’s conception of the vapour itself, see below, note to line 44. hurled] breathed Nbk 8. The change from Nbk 8 cannot be a mistranscription; S. presumably altered the press transcript, perhaps to avoid a repetition of breathing from the previous line.

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shelley: selected poems That maddening wine of life, whose dregs they drain To deep intoxication, and uplift, Like Mænads who cry loud, Evoe! Evoe! The voice which is contagion to the world. Asia Fit throne for such a Power! Magnificent! How glorious art thou, Earth! and if thou be The shadow of some Spirit lovelier still, Though evil stain its work, and it should be Like its creation, weak yet beautiful, I could fall down and worship that and thee — Even now my heart adoreth — Wonderful! Look Sister — ere the vapour dim thy brain:

7–10. That maddening wine . . . contagion to the world.] S. associates the effects of the oracular vapour with the ambivalent frenzy of Maenads, female followers of the cult of Dionysus whose orgies mingle fertility with destructiveness (see note to lines 43–4 below, and note to III iii 124–47). S.’s Maenads derive from Euripides’ Bacchae; their cry Evoe is the standard transliteration of Gk εὐοῖ, an exclamation used in the cult of Dionysus, which was active at Delphi though the oracle was sacred to Apollo; Dionysus took over in winter, when Apollo visited the Hyperboreans (Apollo inspired to articulate prophecy, Dionysus inspired to ecstasy). See Bacchae 142 and Sophocles, Trachiniae 216–20. Cp. IV 473–5 and note, and for Maenads, see also MA xii, i 20–1, SP 33 and 589, OL (Longman iii, no. 322) 91, 171 and 200, and Orpheus (Longman iv Appendix B) 51–2. 7. wine of life] S. often uses wine imagery in a Dionysian sense; cp. Athanase (Longman ii, no. 146) detached passage c and note. See also II iv 65 and note. 8–10. intoxication . . . contagion] Both these words can have either a good or bad sense in S., depending on context. 8. intoxication,] Nbk 8; intoxication; 1820, 1839. 11. Power!] power! Nbk 8. Cp. Mont Blanc 60ff., 127ff. 12. and] Nbk 8; And 1820, 1839. be] beest Nbk 8 (altered in the press transcript). 12–16. Asia appears to formulate a fundamental Platonic doctrine, that the relation of the phenomenal world to the heavenly world of ideas is as the relation of shadow to reality (see Republic x). But the carefully provisional phrasing (recalling Paradise Lost v 574–6: ‘though what if earth/Be but the shadow of heav’n, and things therein/Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?’) is characteristic of the open-minded scepticism of S.’s mature thought; cp. PVR: ‘Berkeley & Hume . . . have clearly established the certainty of our ignorance with respect to those obscure questions which under the name of religious truths have been the watch-words of con[word incomplete in MS] and the symbols of unjust power ever since they were distorted by the narrow passions of the immediate followers of Jesus from that meaning to which philosophers are even now restoring them’ (SC vi 971). 13. shadow] Reflection. The pattern of rhyme, lines 12–17, is presumably intentional. Spirit] Nbk 8; spirit 1820, 1839. 14. should be] S. first wrote must in Nbk 8, then cancelled it. 15. Like its creation] Above Like all we love canc. Nbk 8. 16–18. Dashes after thee, adoreth, and sister in Nbk 8 were replaced in 1820 by a stop, colon, and comma, and subsequent eds have introduced a stop after adoreth (e.g. Rossetti 1870, Woodberry 1893, Locock 1911). But the dashes in Asia’s speech in this scene appear to come more frequently as she approaches the moment of special insight signalled in lines 43–6. 18. Sister —] Nbk 8; sister, 1820, 1839. Asia anticipates the intoxicating effect of the vapour.

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177

Beneath is a wide plain of billowy mist, As a lake, paving in the morning sky, With azure waves which burst in silver light, Some Indian vale . . . Behold it, rolling on Under the curdling winds, and islanding The peak whereon we stand — midway, around Encinctured by the dark and blooming forests, Dim twilight lawns and stream-illumèd caves, And wind-enchanted shapes of wandering mist; And far on high the keen sky-cleaving mountains

19–27. Cp. Mary Jnl i 15, 18 August 1814: ‘From the summit of one of the hills, we see the whole expanse of the valley, filled with a white undulating mist over which the piny hills p[i]erced like islands. The sun had just risen, & a ray of the red light lay on the waves of this fluctuating vapour.’ This entry was included with slight alterations in 1817 (Prose Works i 193 lines 374–7). See also C. I. Elton, An Account of Shelley’s Visits to France, Switzerland, and Savoy, in the Years 1814 and 1816 (1894) 29–31. curdling winds] Cp. Athanase, detached passage b, 27. 22. vale . . . Behold] vale . . . behold Nbk 8; vale. Behold 1820, 1839. 24–33. ‘. . . the objective setting seems unchallengeable: the nymphs have been attracted (impelled) to the terminal cone of a colossal volcano’. The setting comprises ‘a peak that is naked at the top . . . but belted lower down by the forest through which Asia and Panthea have come. All round them . . . stand mountains, in such a way that “The vale is girdled with their walls” — the idea of a circle being insistently enforced by the vocabulary . . . A familiar picture emerges: a cone of rock in the centre of a luxuriant elevated valley, encircled by a mountainous wall . . . Asia and Panthea are conceived as standing in a gigantic caldera, the bowl-shaped crater of a quiescent volcano with a tall cinder-cone in the middle’ (GM). Cp. S.’s letter to Peacock of 17–20 December 1818 (17 or 18 December by Jones) describing the ‘conical hill’ of Vesuvius (L ii 62–3). 24. stand — midway, around] stand, midway, around, 1820, 1839, Forman 1876–7, Hutchinson, etc. ‘The MS. shows that the line was originally left unfinished, the phrase midway, around being inserted with a different pen — clearly as a makeshift . . . the “dash” shows [as does the absence of a comma after “around”] that both words must go with encinctured’ (Locock 1911). For a photographic reproduction of the passage in Nbk 8, see BSM ix 308. 26. twilight lawns] Nbk 8; twilight-lawns, 1820, 1839. stream-illumèd] Nbk 8 (not accented); stream-illumined 1820, 1829, 1839 (i.e. ‘illuminated by streams’). 28–42. A rough draft of these lines is in Box 1 f. 6; for a photographic reproduction with transcription and commentary, see BSM xxi 2–3, 438–9. Above the draft, S. has written ‘This was suggested by the Xterly Review’, and Timothy Webb (‘ “The Avalanche of Ages”: Shelley’s Defence of Atheism and Prometheus Unbound’, K-SMB 35 (1984) 1–39) has shown that the passage originated in S.’s reaction to the attack on his private life and atheism in the Quarterly’s review of Leigh Hunt’s Foliage (1818) in the issue of May 1818, xviii 328–9: ‘. . . if we were told of a man who, placed on a wild rock among the clouds, yet even in that height surrounded by a loftier amphitheatre of spire-like mountains, hanging over a valley of eternal ice and snow, where the roar of mighty waterfalls was at times unheeded from the hollow and more appalling thunder of the deep and unseen avalanche, — if we were told of a man who, thus witnessing the sublimest assemblage of natural objects, should retire to a cabin near and write atheos after his name in the album, we hope our own feelings would be pity rather than disgust . . . ’ . S. learned of this attack in Peacock’s letter of 14 June 1818 (Peacock Works viii 194–5) but actually read it in Venice (presumably at Byron’s in September or October 1818), when he wrongly but characteristically assumed Southey to be the author (the review was probably by John Taylor Coleridge); see L ii 65–6, and headnotes to Lift not the painted veil and Alas, this is not what I thought life was (Longman ii, no. 174). For S.’s entry of αθεος in the album of a Swiss hotel, see White i 456. S.’s poetic response to the Quarterly’s attack is developed from the terms of the review, and from S.’s own first reactions to Alpine scenery as he recorded them in a letter to Peacock of 22 July 1816 (L i 496–7) which was included in 1817 (Prose Works i 222–3). The passage implicitly opposes the Christian spirit of contemporary responses to mountain scenery such as Coleridge’s ‘Hymn Before Sun-Rise, in the Vale of Chamouni’ (1802).

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shelley: selected poems From icy spires of sunlike radiance fling The dawn, as lifted Ocean’s dazzling spray, From some Atlantic islet scattered up, Spangles the wind with lamp-like water-drops. The vale is girdled with their walls — a howl Of cataracts from their thaw-cloven ravines Satiates the listening wind, continuous, vast, Awful as silence — Hark! the rushing snow! The sun-awakened avalanche! whose mass, Thrice sifted by the storm, had gathered there Flake after flake: in Heaven-defying minds As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth Is loosened, and the nations echo round, Shaken to their roots: as do the mountains now. Panthea Look, how the gusty sea of mist is breaking In crimson foam, even at our feet! — it rises

29. icy spires] Above pyramids canc. Nbk 8; cp. L i 496, ‘the snowy pyramids which shot into the bright blue sky’. 33. walls —] Nbk 8; walls, 1820, 1839. 36–42. Cp. S.’s letter to Peacock from Chamounix, 26 July 1816 (L i 501; included in 1817, Prose Works i 228), describing the collapse of Mont d’Anterne in 1751: ‘. . . the smoke of its fall was seen in Piedmont & people went from Turin to investigate whether a volcano had not burst forth among the Alps. It continued falling for many days spreading with the shock & and the thunder of its ruin consternation thro the neighbouring vales & destroying many persons.’ S. actually saw the fallen mountain on 26 July (Mary Jnl i 119–20). For the political connotations of avalanche (a new word in the early nineteenth century; see Sophie Tucker, Protean Shape (1967) 12) cp. PVR: ‘the government party propose to us the dilemma of submitting to a despotism which is notoriously gathering like an avelanche [sic] year by year; or taking the risk of something which it must be confessed bears the aspect of a revolution’ (SC vi 997). 36. silence —] Nbk 8; silence. 1820, 1839. 39. flake:] Nbk 8; flake, 1820, 1839. S.’s colons here and at line 42 are grammatically irregular, but clarify the structure of the metaphor better than the commas in 1820, 1839, and most subsequent eds. Heavendefying] Nbk 8; heaven-defying 1820, 1839. 40. ‘ “You see”, said Mr Fax to Mr Sarcastic, “the efficacy of associated sympathies. It is but to give an impulse of cooperation to any good and generous feeling, and its progressive accumulation, like that of an alpine avalanche, though but a snowball at the summit, becomes a mountain in the valley” ’ (Peacock, Melincourt (1817) ch. xxvii). 42. roots:] Nbk 8; roots, 1820, 1839. 43–4. crimson foam] Perhaps suggesting that S. identifies the oracular vapour with nitrous oxide (N2O, i.e. laughing gas, and first called nitrous oxide by Sir Humphrey Davy who in Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1811) noted its effect of ‘transient intoxication’). Nitrous oxide is colourless, but early experiments with nitrogen compounds sometimes gave nitrogen peroxide (NO2), a poisonous orange-red gas, which could be present simultaneously with nitrous oxide (see Elements of Chemical Philosophy, and also Darwin i, Economy of Vegetation (1791) note to ii 143). S. was possibly aware from his reading in these and other scientific sources of the mingled presence of beneficial and harmful substances in the red vapour given by experiments with oxides of nitrogen (thus developing the ambivalent connotations of intoxication . . . contagion, lines 8–10 above). See III iii 124–47 and note for a wholly beneficial post-revolutionary crimson air. 43. Look,] Nbk 8; Look 1820, 1839. 44. feet! —] Nbk 8; feet! 1820, 1839.

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As Ocean at the enchantment of the moon Round foodless men wrecked on some oozy isle. Asia The fragments of the cloud are scattered up — The wind that lifts them disentwines my hair — Its billows now sweep o’er mine eyes — my brain Grows dizzy — seest thou shapes within the mist?

46. some] an Nbk 8; presumably a change to the press transcript. 47–50. The unusually frequent dashes in Nbk 8 are expressive of Asia’s heightening excitement as the intoxicating vapour takes effect. Locock 1911 cps. Byron, Manfred (1817) I ii 85–9: The mists boil up around the glaciers; clouds Rise curling fast beneath me, white and sulphury, Like foam from the roused ocean of deep Hell, Whose every wave breaks on a living shore, Heap’d with the damn’d like pebbles. — I am giddy. 47. up —] Nbk 8; up; 1820, 1839. 48. that] which Nbk 8; presumably a change to the press transcript. hair —] Nbk 8; hair; 1820, 1839. 49. mine] my Nbk 8. Presumably a change to the press transcript; S.’s printed texts normally use mine when the pronoun precedes a vowel. eyes —] Nbk 8; eyes; 1820, 1839. 50. This line presents an important textual crux. Nbk 8 at first read: Grows dizzy — I see shapes within the mist S. then cancelled I, altered see shapes by placing a caret after see and writing st thou above, and altered mist to mist?, to give Grows dizzy — seest thou shapes within the mist? In 1820 (and 1829), the line appeared as Grows dizzy; I see thin shapes within the mist. It is difficult to see how S. himself can have produced this reading, as it appears to be a misreading of the altered MS, which produces an awkward and wholly uncharacteristic ametrical line (the strong pause after dizzy makes a possible elision unlikely). The implications are that Mary was not only transcribing the press-copy, but that S. did not always carefully check the transcription, and that he may have entrusted punctuation of the press transcript to Mary (this might help to explain why Mary apparently did not consult the MS fair copy, still then in her possession, when preparing PU for 1839; see headnote). In 1839 Mary altered the line to correct the metre, to give Grows dizzy; I see shapes within the mist. There is a photographic reproduction and transcription of the MS in BSM ix 314–15, with commentary on 593–4. Neil Fraistat in BSM reads S.’s insert as those rather than thou (but this would have produced a slightly awkward reading), and entertains the possibility that mist may at some point have read mists.

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shelley: selected poems Panthea A countenance with beckoning smiles — there burns An azure fire within its golden locks — Another and another — hark! they speak!

55

Song of Spirits To the Deep, to the Deep, Down, down! Through the shade of Sleep, Through the cloudy strife Of Death and of Life;

51–2. Grabo (1930) 145 suggests that S. has electricity in mind in these lines, but the Spirit is ‘more likely to be gaseous oxide of carbon, described by Davy as burning blue at the base of yellow flames, which — together with what the old mineralogists called “the inflammable breath of the pyrites” — was something suggested among the causes of volcanic activity’ (GM). Cp. Edinburgh Review xiii (1809) 478: ‘There are, in fact, according to Mr Davy, three inflammable gases given out in our fires; — the two we have mentioned, and the gaseous oxide of carbon, which is known by its blue flame . . . the gaseous oxide is occasionally seen near the root of the flame, or in contact with the coal . . .’ 51. smiles —] Nbk 8; smiles: 1820, 1839. 52. locks —] Nbk 8; locks! 1820, 1839. 53. another — hark!] another — hark Nbk 8; another: hark! 1820, 1839. 54. Deep . . . Deep,] Nbk 8; deep . . . deep, 1820, 1839. 55. down!] Down! Nbk 8. 54–98. Scene iii originally ended at line 53 in Nbk 8 f. 39v, scene iv following immediately on the same page; but S. wrote on the facing page f. 40r, opposite the gap between scenes iii and iv, desideratur aliquid, and subsequently wrote in the Song of Spirits on the blank pages ff. 40r, 41r, and 42r. S.’s draft of this lyric is in Nbk 10 (see MYR iv for photographic reproductions and transcription of the MS, with commentary) except for the passage that became lines 86–9, which is on a page torn from Nbk 10 and now in the Pforzheimer Library (SC 548, SC vi 1069–71). SC vi 1104 argues that the lyric ‘was certainly’ one of the lyrical insertions sent by S. to Ollier in December 1819 together with Act IV (see SC 554, SC vi 1099, a letter from S. to Ollier dated 23 December 1819). S.’s draft of the Song of Spirits in Nbk 10 is divided by his rough draft of MA, which cannot have been written before 6 September when he received news of Peterloo (see headnote to Mask). There are stylistic and thematic affinities with Act IV which may suggest a date late in 1819, but for arguments that the Song was composed in September, and possibly sent to England on 12 September with the press transcript of Acts I–III, see BSM ix 595, and Curran (1975) 209. The lyric has frequently been interpreted in Platonic terms (see e.g. Grabo (1935) 69–70, and Notopoulos 247) which derive ultimately from Plato’s myth of the cave in Republic vii; but cp. Butter (1970) 287: ‘. . . Shelley’s characters are descending into a cave in order to confront “things that . . . are,” whereas in Plato’s myth it would be the ascent from the cave into the light of the sun which would represent the attainment of knowledge of the intellectual world. So we must be careful to understand the images as they occur in their contexts in Shelley without bringing in more from Plato than is relevant.’ The descent of Asia and Panthea into the realm of Demogorgon is probably modelled primarily on Boccaccio, Genealogie Deorum Gentilium i 14, cited in trans. in Curran (1975): ‘. . . the rustics . . . entered caves in the deepest and most secret recesses of the earth, where in darkness and the grand silence caused by the absence of light, there arose religion and natural fear; and to the ignorant was born the suspicion of a divine presence, a divinity whom they imagined to exist beneath the earth, Demogorgon.’ 56. Sleep,] Nbk 8; sleep, 1820, 1839. 58. Life;] life Nbk 8.

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Through the veil and the bar Of things which seem and are, Even to the steps of the remotest Throne, Down, down! While the sound whirls around, Down, down! As the fawn draws the hound, As the lightning the vapour, As a weak moth the taper; Death, Despair; Love, Sorrow; Time both; to-day, to-morrow; As steel obeys the Spirit of the stone, Down, down! Through the grey void Abysm, Down, down! Where the air is no prism, And the moon and stars are not, And the cavern-crags wear not The radiance of Heaven, Nor the gloom to Earth given; Where there is One pervading, One alone, Down, down!

61. Throne,] Nbk 8; throne, 1820, 1839. 62. down!] Down! Nbk 8. 64. down!] Down! Nbk 8. 65–9. The syntax of line 67 is inverted relative to that of lines 65–6: ‘as a weak moth is drawn by the taper’. This inversion then makes for difficulty in the following lines because the implied verbs can be understood as passive where they have previously been active, creating ambiguity in which form of the verb is intended in lines 68–9. There is room for argument, but the probable sense is ‘as Despair draws Death; as Love draws Sorrow; as Time draws both Death and Sorrow; as today draws tomorrow’. 66. Scientists in S.’s day believed that electricity played a large part in the formation of cloud, and that cloud movement was directed by electrical charge; cp. Walker ii 38: ‘The water rises [as vapour] through the air flying on the wings of elecricity’. See also notes to The Cloud. 68. Death Despair, Love Sorrow Nbk 8; Death, despair; love, sorrow; 1820, 1839. 69. to-day] To-day Nbk 8. 70. Spirit] Nbk 8; spirit 1820, 1839. 72. grey] Nbk 8; grey, 1820, 1839. Abysm,] Abysm Nbk 8; abysm, 1820, 1839. 73. down!] Down! Nbk 8. 74. ‘Where there is no light for the atmosphere to refract into colour’. 78. given;] Nbk 8; given, 1820, 1839. 79. One . . . One] Nbk 8; one . . . one 1820, 1839. 80. down!] Down! Nbk 8.

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shelley: selected poems In the depth of the Deep, Down, down! Like veiled lightning asleep, Like that spark nursed in embers The last look Love remembers, Like a diamond which shines On the dark wealth of mines, A spell is treasured but for thee alone. Down, down! We have bound thee, we guide thee Down, down! With the bright form beside thee — Resist not the weakness: Such strength is in meekness That the Eternal, the Immortal, Must unloose through life’s portal The snake-like Doom coiled underneath his throne By that alone!

81. Deep,] Deep Nbk 8; deep; 1820, 1839. 82. down!] Down! Nbk 8. 83. lightning] Lightning Nbk 8. 84. that] Nbk 8; the 1820, 1839, eds. Possibly a change to the press transcript, but probably a mistranscription; the difficult draft in Nbk 10 also appears to read that (though Mary Quinn’s transcription in MYR iv 26–7 is indeterminate), and the reference is obviously to the following line. embers] Nbk 8; embers, 1820, 1839. 86–7. Diamonds were thought to be phosphorescent; cp. Darwin i, Economy of Vegetation (1791) note to ii 228, and see L&C I 586–90 and note. 86. diamond] Nbk 8; diamond, 1820, 1839. 88. Treasured] hidden above buried canc. Nbk 8. for] from above for canc. Nbk 8; clearly, S. had difficulty with this line, and continued to alter it in the press transcript. 89. down!] Down! Nbk 8. 90–8. ‘The sense may be — “Do not chafe under the helplessness caused by the fetters with which we have bound you; for it is only by your passive obedience now that Demogorgon will be able to send up into the world of life the Doom of Jupiter”.’ (Locock 1911); GM, concurring, adds, ‘i.e. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity’. 90. guide thee] Nbk 8; guide thee; 1820, 1839. 91. down!] Down! Nbk 8. 92. the] over that, itself written over thy Nbk 8. thee —] Nbk 8; thee; 1820, 1839. 93. weakness:] weakness — Nbk 8; weakness, 1820, 1839. Cp. I Corinthians i 25, ‘the weakness of God is stronger than men’; I Corinthians xv 43, ‘it [the resurrection of the dead] is sown in weakness; it is raised in power’. 97. snake-like doom] Cp. IV 567. 98. alone!] Nbk 8; alone. 1820, 1839.

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Scene iv

The Cave of Demogorgon. Asia and Panthea.

Panthea What veilèd form sits on that ebon throne? Asia The veil has fallen! Panthea

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I see a mighty Darkness Filling the seat of power; and rays of gloom Dart round, as light from the meridian sun, Ungazed upon and shapeless — neither limb,

II. iv. SD. The arrival of Asia and Panthea at Demogorgon’s cave is crucial in relation to the poem’s volcanic symbolism: ‘It is clear what was to be expected, scientifically speaking, if children of Ocean were drawn into contact with the magma of a volcanic cavern — a violent eruption, accompanied by the classic symptoms: earthquakes; mephitic vapours; the familiar pine-tree cloud; the bursting of a storm, with ferilli or volcanic lightning; and of course destruction . . .’ (GM). Contemporary scientific opinion entertained the possibility that volcanic eruption was caused by the entry of sea water into magmatic reservoirs, leading to a huge explosion (see e.g. Quarterly Review xv (1816) 382, Edinburgh Review xxvii (1816) 161); and this view echoed classical accounts of volcanic activity, e.g. in Lucretius, De Re. Nat. vi 696–702: ‘From this sea, caverns reach underground right to the lofty throat of the mountain. By these we must admit that [wind mingled with water] passes in, and that the nature of the case compels [it often to rise] and to penetrate completely within from the open sea, and to blow out the flame and so to uplift it on high, and cast up the rocks and raise clouds of sand; for on the topmost summit are craters . . . what we speak of as the throat or the mouth.’ (Loeb trans.). 1–31. The exchange between Asia and Demogorgon is characteristic of dialogue in alternating single lines in Gk drama (stichomythia); cp. e.g. Prometheus Bound 515–25. 2–7. Cp. Paradise Lost ii 666–70: The other shape — If shape it might be called that shape had none Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb Or substance might be called that shadow seemed, For each seemed either — black it stood as Night . . . See also Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman ch. ix: ‘the shapeless void called — eternity. — For shape, can it be called, “that shape hath none?” ’ (MWW v 218). 2 fallen!] Nbk 8 has the exclamation mark introduced into what were originally three suspension points; fallen. 1820, 1839. Darkness] Nbk 8; darkness 1820, 1839. 3–4. As Grabo (1930) 87 has shown, S. attributes to Demogorgon the properties of infra-red rays as discovered by Herschel in 1800; GM argues that Demogorgon emits infra-red rays ‘because he is extremely hot; too hot to be visible. It was known, in Herschel’s own words on the solar spectrum, that “the full red still falls short of the maximum of heat; which perhaps lies even beyond visible refraction”. Demogorgon is, in fact, realised in terms of molten magma, the obscure and terrible volcanic agent hidden in the depths of the earth’. Butter (1954) 154 suggests a source in Davy’s Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1811) II ii. 3. power;] Nbk 8; power, 1820, 1839. 4. sun,] Sun Nbk 8. 5. shapeless —] shapeless — . . . Nbk 8; shapeless; 1820, 1839.

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shelley: selected poems Nor form, nor outline; yet we feel it is A living Spirit. Demogorgon Ask what thou wouldst know. Asia What canst thou tell? Demogorgon All things thou dar’st demand. Asia Who made the living world? Demogorgon God. Asia

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Who made all That it contains — thought, passion, reason, will, Imagination? Demogorgon God: Almighty God.

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Asia Who made that sense which, when the winds of spring In rarest visitation, or the voice Of one beloved heard in youth alone, Fills the faint eyes with falling tears which dim The radiant looks of unbewailing flowers, And leaves this peopled earth a solitude When it returns no more?

10. contains —] Nbk 8; contains? 1820, 1839. 12–18. These lines are ungrammatical, as the second and third sub-clauses in the sentence both imply a verb which is not present; the plural winds and singular voice cannot both govern Fills. There may well be a hiatus in the text, although Nbk 8 does not differ significantly from 1820 or 1839, so there is no basis for emendation in any witness. Presumably, sense governs both Fills and leaves; as for when in line 12 would give a coherent reading. Asia appears to recall here her own words at the beginning of Act II. Cp. S.’s essay ‘On Love’ (1818): ‘There is eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of reeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul awaken the spirits to dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone . . . So soon as this want or power is dead, Man becomes a living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was.’ (SC 488; SC vi 635).

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Demogorgon Merciful God.

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Asia And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse, Which from the links of the great chain of things To every thought within the mind of man Sway and drag heavily — and each one reels Under the load towards the pit of death; Abandoned hope, and love that turns to hate; And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood; Pain, whose unheeded and familiar speech Is howling and keen shrieks, day after day; And Hell, or the sharp fear of Hell?

20. things] Nbk 8; things, 1820, 1839. 20–2. Cp. S.’s letter to Peacock from Rome, 6 April 1819: ‘In the square of St. Peters there are about 300 fettered criminals at work, hoeing out the weeds that grow between the stones of the pavement. Their legs are heavily ironed, & some are chained two by two. They sit in long rows hoeing out the weeds, dressed in party-coloured clothes. Near them sit or saunter, groupes of soldiers armed with loaded muskets. The iron discord of those innumerable chains clanks up into the sonorous air, and produces, contrasted with the musical dashing of the fountains, & the deep azure beauty of the sky & the magnif[ic]ence of the architecture around a conflict of sensations allied to madness. It is the emblem of Italy: moral degradation contrasted with the glory of nature & the arts’ (L ii 93–4). See also Mary L i 66–7 (qu. in note to Mazenghi, Longman ii 352, no. 166 lines 7–11), Q Mab v 51–2 and note, and J&M 300–3: ‘Month after month,’ he cried, ‘to bear this load And as a jade urged by the whip and goad To drag life on, which like a heavy chain Lengthens behind with many a link of pain! — ’ 22. heavily —] Nbk 8; heavily, 1820, 1839. 24–5. These lines were added later in Nbk 8 on f. 42r facing the draft on f. 41v (but before the final stanza of the ‘Song of Spirits’ from II iii, which is also drafted on f. 42r). 27–8. S. has cancelled three lines at this point in Nbk 8: Or looks which tell that while the lips are calm And the eyes cold, the spirit weeps within Tears like the sanguine sweat of agony; As various commentators have noted, these lines also appear, slightly modified, in Athanase (Detached Passage a, lines 1–3) and The Cenci I i 109–13. 27. howling] Nbk 8; howling, 1820, 1839. 28–31. Demogorgon’s answers are in the cryptic manner typical of oracles. ‘Asia’s exasperating “dialogue” with Demogorgon only makes sense . . . if it is realised that she is talking to herself. She is made to interrogate her own soul; and Demogorgon can supply no answer that she cannot supply herself at this moment of supreme prophetic consciousness, or for which she has insufficient knowledge even to frame the question meaningfully’ (GM). With Demogorgon’s repeated He reigns, cp. Asia’s definition of to reign at lines 47–8 below.

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Asia Utter his name: a world pining in pain Asks but his name: curses shall drag him down. Demogorgon He reigns. Asia I feel, I know it: who? Demogorgon He reigns. Asia Who reigns? There was the Heaven and Earth at first, And Light and Love; then Saturn, from whose throne

30. curses] Ironically counterpointing Prometheus’s preoccupation with his curse in Act I. 31. Asia becomes conscious that she is about to be inspired to prophecy (in the long speech which follows). 32–109. Asia’s prophetic insight discerns Prometheus’s historical role in alleviating the self-imposed miseries of existence, but refuses to identify evil with individual human agency (this perception undermines the tyrant’s claim to absolute power and thus paves the way for his downfall). S.’s principal source for this speech is Prometheus Bound 436–506, where Prometheus describes the benefits he has contributed to humanity; Asia’s speech offers a similarity of general outline and some close verbal parallels (although S. omits the Aeschylean account of divination, PB 484–90). There are also marked similarities with the account of Prometheus in Thomas Blackwell, Letters Concerning Mythology (1748) 45–8. A further strong influence is from Peacock’s Zoroastrian poem ‘Ahrimanes’, written around 1814 and not published in Peacock’s lifetime, but well-known to Shelley (see SC iii 211–43). The speech’s overview of human progress has parallels in several of S.’s prose and verse writings, notably OL (published with PU in 1820). Other influences have been noted from Plato’s Statesman (see L. Winstanley, ‘Platonism in Shelley’, in Essays and Studies iv (1913) 72–100, esp. 98–9), and Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. 32–8. Recalling Hesiod’s accounts in Theogony and Works and Days of a lost Saturnian Golden Age, but S.’s primal period is not here idealised: cp. ‘Essay on Christianity’ (1817): ‘The . . . antient Poets . . . represented equality as the reign of Saturn, and taught that mankind had gradually degenerated from the virtue which enabled them to enjoy or maintain this happy state. Their doctrine was philosophically false . . . uncivilized man is the most pernicious and miserable of beings . . .’ (Prose Works i 268). Cp. also the opening of Virgil’s Eclogue iv: Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas; magnus ab integro saeculorum nascitur ordo. iam redit at Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna; iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto. (‘Now is come the last age of the song of Cumae; the great line of the centuries begins anew. Now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn renews; now a new generation descends from heaven on high.’ Loeb trans.) 32–3. Time is Saturn’s shadow; S. perhaps puns on Saturn’s Gk name, Kronos; this was a common Neoplatonic allegory (because it explains why Kronos devours his own children). Cp. ‘The Assassins’ (1814–15): ‘Time was measured and created by the vices and the miseries of men . . .’ (Prose Works i 130).

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Time fell, an envious shadow; such the state Of the earth’s primal spirits beneath his sway, As the calm joy of flowers and living leaves Before the wind or sun has withered them And semi-vital worms; but he refused The birthrights of their being, knowledge, power, The skill which wields the elements, the thought Which pierces this dim universe like light, Self-empire, and the majesty of love; For thirst of which they fainted. Then Prometheus Gave wisdom, which is strength, to Jupiter, And with this law alone: ‘Let man be free’, Clothed him with the dominion of wide Heaven. To know nor faith, nor love, nor law; to be Omnipotent but friendless, is to reign; And Jove now reigned; for on the race of man First famine, and then toil, and then disease, Strife, wounds, and ghastly death unseen before, Fell; and the unseasonable seasons drove, With alternating shafts of frost and fire, Their shelterless, pale tribes to mountain caves;

34. shadow;] Nbk 8; shadow: 1820, 1839. 35. earth’s] Nbk 8 has world’s underlined, with earth as an alternative written on the facing page; S. evidently decided on earth’s in the press transcript. 36–8. Line 37 is written as an insert on the page facing the draft in Nbk 8; its inclusion produces an ambiguous syntax where the phrase And semi-vital worms can be understood either as an instance, with flowers and living leaves, of things possessing calm joy, or as one of the subjects, with wind or sun, of withered in the preceding line. The ambiguity is apt given the transitional and emergent character of Saturnian life in S.’s conception (cp. semi-vital, i.e. a transitional form in evolutionary terms; see note to IV 86–7). 37. has] have Nbk 8. 39. birthrights] Nbk 8; birthright 1820, 1839. In Nbk 8, knowledge is written above wisdom canc. 41. universe] Universe Nbk 8. 43–6. ‘Mankind entrusted the administration and intellectual welfare of society to functionaries who betrayed their office and wielded power in their own interests’ (GM). 45. alone:] Nbk 8 (without quotation marks); alone, 1820, 1839. 48. friendless,] Nbk 8; friendless 1820, 1839. Cp. Prometheus Bound 225, τοῖς ϕίλοισι μὴ πεποιθέναι (‘not to trust in friends’). 49–58. Implying that it is not Prometheus’s curse which has disordered nature, but Jove’s misrule. S. believed that men’s moral state and physical environment are not merely correlated but are linked aspects of the same cosmic harmony, and that adverse physical conditions are a function of humanity’s moral consciousness. See Q Mab viii 145–86 and note, and cp. III iii 115–23. 52. Christian and Classical accounts share the assumption that the golden age enjoyed perpetual spring, and that after the fall the succession of the seasons was produced by the libration of the earth on its axis. See e.g. Paradise Lost x 666–70. 54. caves;] caves Nbk 8; caves: 1820, 1839.

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shelley: selected poems And in their desert hearts fierce wants he sent, And mad disquietudes, and shadows idle Of unreal good, which levied mutual war, So ruining the lair wherein they raged. Prometheus saw, and waked the legioned hopes Which sleep within folded Elysian flowers, Nepenthe, Moly, Amaranth, fadeless blooms, That they might hide with thin and rainbow wings The shape of Death; and Love he sent to bind The disunited tendrils of that vine Which bears the wine of life, the human heart; And he tamed fire which, like some beast of prey, Most terrible, but lovely, played beneath The frown of man; and tortured to his will Iron and gold, the slaves and signs of power, And gems and poisons, and all subtlest forms Hidden beneath the mountains and the waves. He gave man speech, and speech created thought

55–8. ‘Having identified abstract evils amid the data of experience, men began to take arms against their newly-conceived troubles in ways consonant with Jupiter, their primitive self-conception’ (Reiman (1969) 79). 61. Nepenthe was a drug which brought forgetfulness of trouble, used by Helen to dispel Menelaus’s grief (Odyssey iv 219–32; cp. TL 359). Moly was a black-rooted, white-flowered plant of magical properties, given by Hermes to Ulysses as a charm against the sorceries of Circe (Odyssey x 302–6). Both are familiar in Spenser and Milton (e.g. Faerie Queene IV iii 43, Comus 675–6, 636–7). The Amaranth is an unfading flower found only in Paradise, and symbolic of immortality (cp. e.g. Faerie Queene III vi 45, Lycidas 149, Paradise Lost iii 353–7; cp. R&H 1308 and note, Athanase 131 and note). 63. Death;] death, Nbk 8. 64. Obviously anticipating the wine of life in the following line; but S. perhaps also suggests a visual image of the circulatory blood system. 65. Cp. Euripides, Bacchae 773–4: οἴνου δὲ μηκέτ’ ὄντος οὐκ ἔοτιν Κύττρις οὐδ’ ἄλλο τερπνὸν οὐδέν ἀνθρώποις ἔτι

(‘When wine is no more found, then Love is not,/Nor any joy beside is left to men.’ Loeb trans.) 66. prey] chase Nbk 8. Presumably S.’s change to the press transcript; the reading is doubtful, but the word in Nbk 8 does seem definitely to begin cha. See BSM ix 330–1, 600. 72. thought] Nbk 8; thought, 1820, 1839. The line appears to imply an extreme materialism in prioritising the physical capacity for speech over thought itself, and commentators have noted the comparison with IV 415–17. But the idea that thought is actually made possible by speech is difficult to reconcile with S.’s discussions of language and mentality elsewhere; cp. e.g. DMAA (1818): ‘Their very language [i.e. the Athenians] — a type of the understandings of which it was the creation and the image — in variety, in simplicity, in flexibility, and in copiousness, excels every other language of the western world.’ (Prose 217). Cp. also ‘On Life’ (1819): ‘Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them.’ (Prose 172). The received line could be understood to refer simply to two related Promethean gifts. GM conjectured a hyphen between speech and created, which together with the absence of a comma after thought in Nbk 8 would imply that thought, usefully articulated and made shareable by speech, is the subject of the following line. For suggestive discussion, see Wasserman 136–8, and William Keach, Shelley’s Style (1984) 34–7. In Gk thought λόγος is both thought (reason) and speech, and neither is conceivable without the other.

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Which is the measure of the universe; And Science struck the thrones of Earth and Heaven, Which shook, but fell not; and the harmonious mind Poured itself forth in all-prophetic song; And music lifted up the listening spirit Until it walked, exempt from mortal care, Godlike, o’er the clear billows of sweet sound; And human hands first mimicked and then mocked, With moulded limbs more lovely than its own, The human form, till marble grew divine, And mothers, gazing, drank the love men see Reflected in their race — behold, and perish. He told the hidden power of herbs and springs, And Disease drank and slept. Death grew like sleep. He taught the implicated orbits woven Of the wide-wandering stars, and how the Sun Changes his lair, and by what secret spell The pale Moon is transformed, when her broad eye

73. universe;] Universe Nbk 8. Adapted from the famous dictum of the Sophist Protagoras, ‘Man is the measure of all things’. 74. Earth and Heaven,] Earth and Heaven Nbk 8; earth and heaven, 1820, 1839. The last line of S.’s fair copy of Act II in Nbk 8; the fair copy continues in Nbk 9 (f. 1v). 77–9. Suggesting Christ walking on the water, Matthew xiv 25–6. 82. till marble] Inserted on the page facing the draft, which originally read until it grew divine; S. has cancelled it (but not until). divine,] Nbk 9, 1840; divine; 1820; divine 1839. 83–4. It was generally believed that strong visual or mental impressions during pregnancy could modify an unborn child, hence the resemblance of a child to its father (cp. R&H 1218–24 and note, and see Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia (1794–6) ch. 39.6.3). Many eds have followed Swinburne’s gloss, quoted in Zillman Variorum 471: ‘Women with child gazing on statues . . . bring forth children like them — children whose features reflect the passion of the gaze and perfection of the sculptured beauty; men, seeing, are consumed with love; “perish” meaning simply “deperire”; compare Virgil’s well-worn version, “Ut vidi, ut perii” [“As I saw, how was I lost!” (Eclogue viii 41)].’ But S.’s sense may more straightforwardly be that women, in gazing on idealised statues, imagine the potentialities of their unborn children; cp. IV 412–14 and note. The subject of behold, and perish is presumably the men of line 83, but the grammar is dislocated and the sense unclear; S. perhaps intends an ironic contrast between the permanence of ideal representations of humanity, and the transient experience of actual people (a major theme in PU as a whole). 84. race —] Nbk 9; race, 1820, 1839. 87–9. Grabo (1930) 169–70 suggests that the implicated (i.e. ‘entangled, mingled together’, Concordance) orbits might be those of the planets of the solar system, or alternatively might be those of comets, citing a possible source in J. S. Bailly’s Letters to Voltaire (S. mentions Bailly in his note to Q Mab vi 45–6). The sun’s changing lair probably refers either to the seeming movement of the sun relative to the constellations, or to Herschel’s discovery that the solar system is moving towards the constellation Hercules. 88. stars,] Nbk 9; stars; 1820, 1839. Sun] Nbk 9; sun 1820, 1839. 89. spell] See note to I 61. 90. Moon] moon Nbk 9, 1820, 1839.

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Gazes not on the interlunar sea; He taught to rule, as life directs the limbs, The tempest-wingèd chariots of the Ocean, And the Celt knew the Indian. Cities then 95 Were built, and through their snow-like columns flowed The warm winds, and the azure ether shone, And the blue sea and shadowy hills were seen. Such, the alleviations of his state, Prometheus gave to man — for which he hangs 100 Withering in destined pain: but who rains down Evil, the immedicable plague, which, while Man looks on his creation like a God And sees that it is glorious, drives him on, The wreck of his own will, the scorn of Earth, 105 The outcast, the abandoned, the alone? Not Jove: while yet his frown shook Heaven, aye, when His adversary from adamantine chains

91. interlunar] I.e. between a waning and waxing moon; cp. Milton, Samson Agonistes 87–9: ‘silent as the moon/When she deserts the night/Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.’ sea;] Nbk 9; sea: 1820, 1839. 92–4. I.e. the development of marine navigation in sailing ships enabled inter-continental communication. 94–7. Cp. L ii 73: ‘Above & between the multitudinous shafts of the [?sunshiny] columns [of Pompeii], was seen the blue sea reflecting the purple heaven of noon above it, & supporting as it were on its line the dark lofty mountains of Sorrento, of a blue inexpressibly deep . . .’ 99. man —] Nbk 9; man, 1820, 1839. 100–16. Asia’s metaphysical question concerning the origin of evil receives a sceptical answer from S. in the dramatic context. Jove embodies the evil for which humanity is itself collectively responsible; cp. Rousseau, Émile (1762), Bk iv, ‘The Creed of a Savoyard Priest’: ‘It is the abuse of our powers that makes us unhappy and wicked. Our cares, our sorrows, our sufferings are of our own making. Moral ills are undoubtedly the work of man, and physical ills would be nothing but for our vices which have made us liable to them . . . O Man! seek no further for the author of evil; thou art he. There is no evil but the evil you do or the evil you suffer, and both come from yourself ’ (Everyman trans. Barbara Foxley (1911) 244). But Asia’s oracular intuition implies deeper questions about ultimate origins which are not susceptible to human inquiry. 100. rains] Nbk 9, 1839; reigns 1820 (perhaps deriving from a mistaken proof correction, as a compositor’s error seems unlikely); first corrected in 1829. 101. immedicable] ‘Incapable of being healed’. Peacock uses the word in ‘Ahrimanes’ (SC iii 223), and see also Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV cxxvi. There is also an ironic allusion to the remediable plagues in Exodus viii. 102. Cp. Paradise Lost iv 32–4: ‘O thou that with surpassing glory crowned/Look’st  from thy sole dominion like the god/Of this new world . . .’ 103. on,] on Nbk 9, 1820, 1839. 104. Earth,] Nbk 9; earth, 1820, 1839. 106. Heaven,] Nbk 9; heaven 1820, 1839. 107. Cp. Prometheus Bound 6: ἀδαμαντίνων δεσμῶν ἐν ἀρρήκτοις πέδαις (‘adamantine chains that cannot be broken’).

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Cursed him, he trembled like a slave. Declare Who is his master? Is he too a slave? Demogorgon 110 All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil: Thou knowest if Jupiter be such or no. Asia Whom called’st thou God? Demogorgon I spoke but as ye speak, For Jove is the supreme of living things. Asia Who is the master of the slave? Demogorgon If the Abysm 115 Could vomit forth its secrets: — but a voice Is wanting, the deep truth is imageless; For what would it avail to bid thee gaze On the revolving world? what to bid speak Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance and Change? To these 120 All things are subject but eternal Love. Asia So much I asked before, and my heart gave The response thou hast given; and of such truths

109–16. Cp. the questions and answers between Philocles and Lysis (a Pythagorean) in Barthelemy vi 24–32: ‘Philocles: Tell me, Lysis, who formed the world?/Lysis: God./. . . Philocles: Is God the author of evil?/Lysis: The good Being can only be the cause of good.’ 110. It is a repeated emphasis of S.’s that tyrants, as the agents and perpetrators of evil, are morally as damaged as their victims, and effectively as enslaved as their slaves. Cp. I 50–6, 480–2, 632–4. For the doctrine that it is worse to do than to suffer evil, see Plato, Gorgias, 469–80 (e.g. 469: ‘to do wrong is worse, in the same degree as it is fouler, than to suffer it . . .’ Loeb trans.); and cp. note to I 402–5. 114. Abysm] Nbk 9; abysm 1820, 1839. 115. secrets: — but] Nbk 9; secrets. But 1820, 1839. As Wasserman 345 notes, ‘vomere and evomere were the terms most frequently used by the Latin authors to describe volcanic action’. 116. ‘All figures from the world of human experience are misleading when applied to ultimates’ (F. W. Pottle, in Shelley: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. G. Ridenour (1965) 146). 117–20. ‘Love is human — not in the sphere of operation of these things’ (GM). 118. what] Nbk 9; What 1820, 1839. 120. Love.] love. Nbk 9. 121–3. Paul Turner (RES n.s. x (1959) 274–5) argues that S.’s image of the heart as an oracular shrine is adapted from Lucretius, De Re. Nat. i 736–9. 122. response] Stressed on the first syllable; cp. Alastor 564 and note, R&H 448.

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Each to itself must be the oracle. One more demand; and do thou answer me 125 As my own soul would answer, did it know That which I ask. Prometheus shall arise Henceforth the Sun of this rejoicing world: When shall the destined hour arrive? Demogorgon Behold! Asia The rocks are cloven, and through the purple night 130 I see cars drawn by rainbow-wingèd steeds Which trample the dim winds: in each there stands A wild-eyed charioteer, urging their flight. Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there, And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars: 135 Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink With eager lips the wind of their own speed, As if the thing they loved fled on before,

124–6. S.’s draft in Nbk 9 at first read: One more demand . . . and be thine answer now Nor doubtful nor obscure. He then altered be to do, thine to thou, and now to me, cancelled Nor doubtful nor obscure, and wrote As my own soul would answer, did it know/That which I ask — on the facing page. 126–8. ‘Asia prophesies: ignorantly she triggers off what she announces .  .  . First Asia breathes the divine vapour and is inspired to be her own oracle, until her ultimate question: When shall the destined hour arrive? And at this point she is answered by a volcanic explosion . . .’ (GM). 127. Sun] Nbk 9; sun 1820, 1839. 129. The rocks are cloven] A volcanic eruption caused by the meeting of Demogorgon and the sea-sisters. The purple night presumably refers to the night of darkness in Demogorgon’s realm; see II v 8–11 and note. 132. charioteer,] Nbk 9; charioteer 1820, 1839. 133. Recalling Coleridge, Ancient Mariner (1798) 451–6: Like one, that on a lonely road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turn’d round, walks on And turns no more his head: Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread. 135–8. Cp. S.’s description in a letter to Peacock of the Arch of Titus in Rome: ‘There are three arches, whose roofs are panelled with fretwork, & their sides adorned with similar reliefs. The keystone of these arches is supported each by two winged figures of Victory, whose hair floats on the wind of their own speed,  & whose arms are outstretched bearing trophies, as if impatient to meet .  .  . Their lips are parted; a delicate mode of indicating the fervour of their desire to arrive at their destined resting place, & to express the eager respiration of their speed.’ (To Peacock, 23 March 1819, L ii 86, 89). S. also recalls Ariel’s ‘I drink the air before me, and return’, The Tempest V i 102.

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And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks Stream like a comet’s flashing hair: they all 140 Sweep onward. Demogorgon These are the immortal Hours, Of whom thou didst demand. One waits for thee. Asia A spirit with a dreadful countenance Checks its dark chariot by the craggy gulf. Unlike thy brethren, ghastly charioteer, 145 What art thou? Whither wouldst thou bear me? Speak! Spirit I am the shadow of a destiny More dread than is my aspect: ere yon planet Has set, the Darkness which ascends with me Shall wrap in lasting night Heaven’s kingless throne. Asia 150 What meanest thou? Panthea That terrible shadow floats Up from its throne, as may the lurid smoke Of earthquake-ruined cities o’er the sea.

138. locks] hair Nbk 9; altered in the press transcript because of the changes to the following line. 139. Nbk 9 first read Streams on the blast like meteors & they all. S. then cancelled the line and wrote above it like a comets scattered hair, and then cancelled scattered hair. The received form of the line was presumably written for the press transcript. The derivation of ‘comet’ is from Gk κομήτης, ‘longhaired’; see I 165–8 and note. With S.’s use of scattered for hair cp. IV 224–5 and note. 143. Checks its dark] Nbk 9 first read Waits with its; S. then cancelled this and wrote Checks [above Stays canc.] its dark on the facing page. 145. What] Nbk 9; Who 1820, 1839; perhaps S.’s alteration to the press transcript, but the draft reading makes better sense given the Spirit’s answer. 146. shadow] image is written on the facing page in Nbk 9, presumably as an unused alternative. 148. Darkness] Nbk 9; darkness 1820, 1839. 149. Heaven’s] Nbk 9; heaven’s 1820, 1839. 151–2. The lurid smoke/Of earthquake-ruined cities suggests Pompeii and Herculaneum, both destroyed by Vesuvius. Cp. also Southey, Letters from England (1807) Letter xxxvii: ‘A heavy cloud of black smoke hung over the city [Birmingham], above which in many places black columns were sent up with prodigious force from the steam-engines . . . Every where around us . . . the tower of some manufactory was to be seen in the distance, vomiting up flames and smoke, and blasting every thing around with its metallic vapours . . .’ 151. S. at first wrote as doth the lurid smoke, then cancelled doth and substituted may, and cancelled smoke and substituted dust; the reversion to may and smoke in the press transcript was perhaps to avoid the near rhyme on doth and dust.

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Lo! it ascends the Car . . . the coursers fly Terrified: watch its path among the stars 155 Blackening the night! Asia Thus I am answered: strange! Panthea See, near the verge, another chariot stays: An ivory shell inlaid with crimson fire, Which comes and goes within its sculptured rim Of delicate strange tracery; the young Spirit 160 That guides it has the dove-like eyes of hope. How its soft smiles attract the soul! — as light Lures wingèd insects through the lampless air.

165

Spirit My coursers are fed with the lightning, They drink of the whirlwind’s stream, And when the red morning is bright’ning They bathe in the fresh sunbeam; They have strength for their swiftness I deem: Then ascend with me, Daughter of Ocean.

153. Car . . .] Nbk 9; car; 1820, 1839. 154–62. S. had difficulty with these lines in Nbk 9, which has a number of cancellations and modifications; see BSM ix 356–7, 607. 156–9. Asia’s shell-chariot associates her with the sea-born Venus Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and associated by Lucretius with the generative principle, whose emblem is a shell; the lines also anticipate the account in II v 20–32 (see note) of Asia’s Aphrodite-like birth in a veinèd shell (cp. delicate strange tracery). 156. verge,] Nbk 9; verge 1820, 1839. 158. comes and goes] S. at first wrote burns around in Nbk 9, then cancelled it and continued with the received reading. 159. Spirit] Nbk 9; spirit 1820, 1839. 160. hope.] Nbk 9; hope; 1820, 1839. S.’s dove-like eyes are adapted from a familiar epithet in English poetry; see III iii 46, and note on dove-eyed. 161. soul! —] Nbk 9; soul! 1820, 1839. 163–6. The chariot is powered by electrical energy from the sun. Grabo (1930) 130–1 notes that, according to Beccaria, at dawn, atmospheric electricity is either non-existent or at its lowest ebb, and that according to Darwin and Davy electrical effects accompany the action of the whirlwind. Cp. II v 1–2, and see commentary in Cameron (1974) 523, and King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work (1960) 181. 167. deem:] deem Nbk 9; deem, 1820, 1839. 168. Daughter] Daughters Nbk 9; daughter 1820, 1839. Presumably here and at line 174 below, a change to the press transcript.

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I desire — and their speed makes night kindle; I fear — they outstrip the Typhoon; Ere the cloud piled on Atlas can dwindle We encircle the earth and the moon: We shall rest from long labours at noon: Then ascend with me, Daughter of Ocean.

170

Scene v

The Car pauses within a cloud on the top of a snowy mountain. Asia, Panthea, and the Spirit of the Hour. Spirit On the brink of the night and the morning My coursers are wont to respire; But the Earth has just whispered a warning That their flight must be swifter than fire: They shall drink the hot speed of desire!

5

Asia Thou breathest on their nostrils, but my breath Would give them swifter speed. Spirit Alas! It could not. Panthea O Spirit! pause, and tell whence is the light Which fills this cloud — the sun is yet unrisen.

169. desire —] Nbk 9; desire: 1820, 1839. 170. fear —] Nbk 9; fear: 1820, 1839. 173. at] ere Nbk 9; presumably a change to the press transcript. 174. Daughter] daughters Nbk 9; daughter 1820, 1839. II v 1–2. See II iv 163–6 and note. 2. respire] I.e. take breath. 4. I.e. swifter than the fire of Demogorgon’s eruption. 8–11. The sun is eclipsed by the eruption, which delays the ‘dawn’ until noon, when Jupiter has been overthrown. The darkness brought on by volcanic eruption is described in classical and other authors known to S.; cp. e.g. Breislak’s eye-witness account of the eruption of Vesuvius in 1794: ‘At Caserta, more than ten miles from Vesuvius, torches were obliged to be used at mid-day, and the gloom was only broken by the frequent flashes of lightning which partially displayed the mountain.’ (Edinburgh Review v (1804) 31). S. also suggests the ‘darkness at noon’ of the crucifixion: cp. Matthew xxvii 45, ‘Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour’; and Joshua x 13: ‘And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies . . . So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day’. 8. O] Nbk 9; Oh 1820, 1839. 9. this cloud —] Nbk 9; the cloud? 1820, 1839.

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shelley: selected poems Spirit The sun will rise not until noon. Apollo Is held in Heaven by wonder; and the light Which fills this vapour, as the aërial hue Of fountain-gazing roses fills the water, Flows from thy mighty sister. Panthea Yes, I feel . . .

15

Asia What is it with thee, sister? Thou art pale.

20

Panthea How thou art changed! I dare not look on thee; I feel, but see thee not. I scarce endure The radiance of thy beauty. Some good change Is working in the elements, which suffer Thy presence thus unveiled. The Nereids tell

11–14. Cp. Paradise Lost vii 243–9: ‘Let there be light,’ said God; and forthwith light Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure, Sprung from the deep, and from her native east To journey through the airy gloom began, Sphered in a radiant cloud, for yet the sun Was not; she in a cloudy tabernacle Sojourned the while. From this point, Asia increasingly takes on the powers of the sun. 11. Heaven] Nbk 9; heaven 1820, 1839. 12. this vapour] I.e. the volcanic cloud, now obscuring the light of the sun. 14. feel . . .] Nbk 9; feel — 1820, 1839. 16–71. The central instance of a characteristic image in S., of beautiful transformative power radiated from a female presence (cp. e.g. Henry and Louisa 112–16 and note (Longman i 18, no. 7)), and To Jane. The recollection 41–52). 17–20. See note to lines 48–71 below. 17. feel,] Nbk 9; feel 1820, 1839. 20. The Nereids, the fifty (or one hundred) daughters of the old sea-god Nereus, were nymphs of the Aegean; cp. III ii 44–8, which implies that Asia and the Nereids are sisters. 20–32. Panthea’s account of Asia’s birth associates her with Venus Aphrodite, born of sea-foam and carried on a shell to the shores of Cythera in the Aegean (Hesiod, Theogony 192; the myth of the shell appears in early mythographers). One important direct source for S.’s conception here is probably Botticelli’s painting ‘The Birth of Venus’ in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Frederic S. Colwell (K-SMB xxviii (1977) 32–5) argues that this influence is implausible given the painting’s obscurity at that time, and the unlikelihood of S.’s having seen it. But S. could have seen the painting on the morning of 19 August 1818, when he spent at least four hours with Claire Clairmont waiting for the coach to Venice, and when by his own account (L ii 32–3) he saw of Florence only the Lung’Arno (the Gallery, which included a ‘Venus Temple’, is on the Lung’Arno; cp. Eustace III i). S.’s evocation of sculpture at II iv 80–2, and an implication in a letter from Bologna of November 1818 (L ii 53: ‘The Apollo & the Venus are as they were’), together with his habit at other times of visiting galleries with Claire Clairmont, all

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30

35

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That on the day when the clear hyaline Was cloven at thine uprise, and thou didst stand Within a veinèd shell, which floated on Over the calm floor of the crystal sea, Among the Aegean isles, and by the shores Which bear thy name, love, like the atmosphere Of the sun’s fire filling the living world, Burst from thee, and illumined Earth and Heaven And the deep ocean and the sunless caves And all that dwells within them; till grief cast Eclipse upon the soul from which it came: Such art thou now; nor is it I alone, Thy sister, thy companion, thine own chosen one, But the whole world which seeks thy sympathy. Hearest thou not sounds i’ the air which speak the love Of all articulate beings? Feelest thou not The inanimate winds enamoured of thee? — List! [Music

40

45

Asia Thy words are sweeter than aught else but his Whose echoes they are: yet all love is sweet, Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever. Like the wide Heaven, the all-sustaining air, It makes the reptile equal to the God: They who inspire it most are fortunate, As I am now; but those who feel it most

support the possibility; and there is no other obvious source which brings together so many of the details, and the general conception, of Panthea’s description. Other direct contexts include a passage in Darwin’s Origin of Society i 371–8, in The Temple of Nature, which has an interesting note on Venus as ‘the beauty of organic nature rising from the sea’; and cp. also Keats, Endymion i 624–7: ‘Ah, see her hovering feet,/More bluely veined, more soft, more whitely sweet/Than those of sea-born Venus, when she rose/From out her cradle shell.’ 21. hyaline] ‘Glassy-surfaced sea’; Milton (Paradise Lost vii 619: ‘the clear hyaline, the glassy sea’) adapts the word from the Gk θάλασσα ὑάλινη of Revelation iv 6, ‘sea of glass like unto crystal’. 22. thine] Nbk 9 (alt. from thy); thy 1820, 1839. 26–30. S. identifies Asia with love, electricity, and the life-supporting energy of the sun; see I 765 and note, III iv 100–5 and note. Panthea’s description of Asia’s transformation here recalls her own earlier account at II i 87–91 of a similar change in Prometheus. 26. name,] Nbk 9; name; 1820, 1839. 28. Earth and Heaven] Nbk 9; earth and heaven 1820, 1839. 30. dwells] dwell Nbk 9 (perhaps a change by S. to the press transcript). 37. thee? — List!) thee? — list Nbk 9; thee? List! 1820, 1839. 40. Cp. A Tale of Society as it is: from facts, 1811 (Longman i 193–8, no. 68) 89, ‘The sun’s kind light feeds every living thing’. For ‘Given or returned’ cp. PU III iii 59–60. 42. Heaven,] Nbk 9; heaven, 1820, 1839.

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shelley: selected poems Are happier still, after long sufferings, As I shall soon become. Panthea List! Spirits speak.

50

55

Voice (in the air, singing) Life of Life! thy lips enkindle With their love the breath between them; And thy smiles before they dwindle Make the cold air fire; then screen them In those looks where whoso gazes Faints, entangled in their mazes. Child of Light! thy limbs are burning Through the vest which seems to hide them,

47. List! Spirits speak.] 1820; List, spirits speak Nbk 9; List! Spirits, speak. 1829, 1839. As Taylor 41 notes, the perpetuation in 1839 of an obvious error introduced in 1829 is evidence that 1829 was the copy text for PU in 1839; see headnote, and II i 171 and note. The attribution of this half-line to Panthea is canc. in Nbk 9 but restored in 1820. SD. Nbk 9 has Voice in the Air with Song of an enamoured Spirit written above and canc. The received SD was presumably included in the press transcript. S.’s Italian trans. of lines 48–71 in Nbk 16, probably made in 1821 from a copy of 1820, is headed ‘Una voce nel aere’ (see Longman iv 12–21, no. 366). 48–71. The lyric offers homage to Asia as the embodiment of Absolute Love and Beauty, in a series of invocations which move from high abstraction to an increasingly accessible sensory mode. In strictly dramatic terms, Asia appears by this point to have taken the place of the sun (cp. line 10). 48. Life!] life! Nbk 9. 52–3. Cp. Dante, Purgatorio xxxii 1–6: Mine eyes with such an eager coveting Were bent to rid them of their ten years’ thirst [for sight of Beatrice], No other sense was waking: and e’en they Were fenced on either side from heed of aught; So tangled, in its custom’d toils, that smile Of saintly brightness drew me to itself (trans. Cary). S.’s conception also suggests Dantean influence more generally; cp. e.g. Paradiso xxi 1–12. 52. looks] Nbk 9; looks, 1820, 1839. 54–5. S.’s intensification of a much-used contemporary image, encouraged by prevailing fashion in women’s clothes which approached that reported in antiquity of the women of Cos (in the eastern Aegean). S. noted the drapery of a Venus Genetrix in Florence, ‘the original of which must have been the “woven wind” of Chios’ (Prose 346). The literary source was Petronius, Satyricon 55–6: ‘Aequum est induere nuptam ventum textilem,/palam prostare nudam in nebula linea’ (‘Your bride might as well clothe herself in woven wind, as stand forth publicly naked under her mist of muslin’). 54. limbs] Nbk 9, 1839; lips 1820, 1829. S. also corrected the word in his presentation copy of 1820 to Leigh Hunt (see BSM ix 610); lips for limbs does not immediately suggest a printer’s error, but it is hard to believe that Peacock or anyone else could have introduced the mistake in checking proof. Such a painfully obvious error will have been in S.’s errata list. 55. them,] them Nbk 9; them; 1820, 1839.

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As the radiant lines of morning Through the clouds ere they divide them; And this atmosphere divinest Shrouds thee wheresoe’er thou shinest. 60

65

70

Fair are others; — none beholds thee, But thy voice sounds low and tender Like the fairest — for it folds thee From the sight, that liquid splendour, And all feel, yet see thee never, As I feel now, lost forever! Lamp of Earth! where’er thou movest Its dim shapes are clad with brightness, And the souls of whom thou lovest Walk upon the winds with lightness, Till they fail, as I am failing, Dizzy, lost . . . yet unbewailing!

56–7. Cp. Romeo and Juliet III v 7–8: ‘Look, love, what envious streaks/Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east’. 57. clouds] Nbk 9, 1820; clouds, 1839. 60–4. ‘It is still impossible to see Absolute Beauty, of course; she is veiled now by her own radiance . . . The suggestion is that the fall of Jupiter allows Love to manifest herself in a form much closer to her essence, as she did once in the form of Aphrodite in the Golden Age. The eclipse is over’ (GM). 60. others; —] Nbk 9; others; 1820, 1839. 62. fairest —] Nbk 9; fairest, 1820, 1839. 65, 78. forever] Nbk 9; for ever 1820, 1839; see I 23 and note. 71. Dizzy, lost . . .] Nbk 9; Dizzy, lost, 1820, 1839. BSM ix 610–11 argues that S. has two suspension points preceding Dizzy in Nbk 9, ‘in order to capture the dizziness and failing he is attempting to convey’ (an example of ‘a kind of mimetic chirography which occurs elsewhere in PBS’s manuscripts’). But the Nbk 9 reading is debatable, and a comma after failing at the end of the previous line is clear in Nbk 9, so suspension points at the start of the next line would give an unusual and odd punctuational effect. 71–2. Between these lines in Nbk 9 is a transitional passage, uncancelled but not included in the press transcript, which makes clear that the preceding lines 48–71 are sung by Prometheus through Panthea’s lips, thus providing a climax to her intermediary role between the central characters: Asia You said that Spirits spoke but it was thee Sweet sister, for even now thy curved lips Tremble as if the sound were dying there Not dead Panthea      Alas it was Prometheus spoke Within me, and I know it must be so I mixed my own weak nature with his love and    And my thoughts

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shelley: selected poems Asia My soul is an enchanted boat Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing; And thine doth like an angel sit Beside the helm conducting it, Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing. It seems to float ever, forever, Upon that many-winding river, Between mountains, woods, abysses, A paradise of wildernesses! Till, like one in slumber bound, Borne to the ocean, I float down, around, Into a sea profound of ever-spreading sound. Meanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinions In Music’s most serene dominions, Catching the winds that fan that happy Heaven. And we sail on, away, afar, Without a course, without a star, But by the instinct of sweet music driven; Till, through Elysian garden islets By thee, most beautiful of pilots,

Are like the many forests of a vale Through which the might of whirlwind and of rain Had passed they glimmer through the evening light As mine do now in thy beloved smile. The passage is given here with light editorial tidying; for a full diplomatic text, see BSM ix 374–5. 72–110. This lyric was a late addition in Nbk 9, probably one of the additional passages for PU S. sent to England in December 1819 (see headnote). Its position in the nbk suggests that S. inserted the lines into pages originally left blank during the copying of Act II, and evidence relating to III i 8 (see note) indicates that the lyric, together with the passage given in the preceding note, was copied into the nbk after Act III had been copied for the press. The sole surviving draft for the lyric is in Nbk 12, which contains only late work on PU. For a full discussion, see BSM ix 611. S.’s Italian trans. of these lines is in Nbk 17 (see BSM vi 250–5). 72–84. The opening lines of Asia’s lyric incorporate concepts and some phrasing from S.’s terza rima lines My spirit like a charmed bark doth swim (Longman ii 333–4, no. 153), written probably late in 1817 and themselves related to To Constantia (‘Thy voice, slow rising like a Spirit, lingers’). See Chernaik 55–7 for commentary on the affinities between To Constantia and Asia’s lyric. 72. boat] Boat Nbk 9; boat, 1820, 1839. 81. paradise] Paradise Nbk 9. 84. profound] Nbk 9, 1820 and 1839 mark the internal rhyme here with a comma. 86. Music’s] Nbk 9; music’s 1820, 1839. dominions,] dominions Nbk 9; dominions; 1820, 1839. 87. Heaven.] Heaven Nbk 9; heaven. 1820, 1839. 90. But] Nbk 9; But, 1820, 1839. 91. Till,] Nbk 9; Till 1820, 1839.

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Where never mortal pinnace glided, The boat of my desire is guided: Realms where the air we breathe is Love, Which in the winds and on the waves doth move, Harmonizing this Earth with what we feel above. We have passed Age’s icy caves, Manhood’s dark and tossing waves, And Youth’s smooth ocean, smiling to betray: Beyond the glassy gulfs we flee Of shadow-peopled Infancy, Through Death and Birth, to a diviner day; A paradise of vaulted bowers Lit by downward-gazing flowers, And watery paths that wind between Wildernesses calm and green, Peopled by shapes too bright to see, And rest, having beheld; somewhat like thee; Which walk upon the sea, and chant melodiously! End of the Second Act

95. Love,] Love Nbk 9; love, 1820, 1839. 96. winds and on] Nbk 9; winds on 1820, 1829, 1839 (a transcription error). As Rossetti 1870 noticed, the error awkwardly affects both sense and metre; but S. may have omitted it from his errata list. 97. Earth] Nbk 9; earth 1820, 1839. 98–103. The journey backwards through time, and which reverses the ageing process, derives from Plato, Statesman 269–71 (see letter from E. M. W. Tillyard, TLS (29 Sept. 1932) 691); cp. also Phaedrus 249–50. There is a suggestive account of Orphism in Thomas Taylor, Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (2nd edn 1816) 472–3, which describes how under Saturn, souls move from age to youth. S. may be more immediately indebted to Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’ (1807) 58–84, describing the soul’s development from pre-natal existence to manhood in quasi-Platonic terms which are carefully inverted in Asia’s lyric. 100. Youth’s] youth’s Nbk 9. 102. Infancy,] infancy, Nbk 9. 103. Death and Birth,] death and birth Nbk 9. 104. paradise] Paradise Nbk 9. 108–10. Cp II iv 77–9 and note. 109–10. The grammar is compressed and difficult: rest (line 109) is governed by we (lines 98, 101); Which in line 110 refers back to the shapes too bright to see (line 108); Asia presumably realises, as these shapes become visible to her, that they resemble Prometheus himself (somewhat like thee).

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ACT III Scene i Heaven. Jupiter on his Throne; Thetis and the other Deities assembled.

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Jupiter Ye congregated Powers of Heaven, who share The glory and the strength of him ye serve, Rejoice! henceforth I am omnipotent. All else has been subdued to me; alone The soul of man, like unextinguished fire, Yet burns towards Heaven with fierce reproach, and doubt, And lamentation, and reluctant prayer, Hurling up insurrection, which might make Our antique empire insecure, though built On eldest faith, and Hell’s coeval, fear; And though my curses through the pendulous air, Like snow on herbless peaks, fall flake by flake, And cling to it; though under my wrath’s night It climb the crags of life, step after step, Which wound it, as ice wounds unsandalled feet, It yet remains supreme o’er misery, Aspiring . . . unrepressed; yet soon to fall:

III i 1. Powers of Heaven,] Powers of Heaven Nbk 9; powers of heaven, 1820, 1839. 3. I am] am I Nbk 9; presumably S.’s alteration to the press transcript. 4. has] Alt. from had in Nbk 9; had 1820, 1839. 5–7. Cp. Revelation xiv 11: ‘And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name’. 5. like unextinguished] Nbk 9, 1839; like an unextinguished 1820, 1829. Perhaps in S.’s errata list. ‘What alarms Jupiter at the opening of Act III is that the soul of man (“like unextinguished fire”) is busy “Hurling up insurrection”, just as the vapour is “hurled up” [cp. II iii 4] from Demogorgon’s spiraculum and from Vesuvius itself ’ (GM). 6. Heaven] Nbk 9; heaven 1820, 1839. 8. Hurling up] Nbk 9 at first read In tameless. This was cancelled, and S. wrote the masks of a rebellion on the facing page as a replacement; this was in its turn cancelled and replaced by Hurling up written above in pencil, which was subsequently overwritten by the copy of Asia’s lyric at the end of Act II (see note to II v 72–110). Cp. Paradise Lost i 669: ‘Hurling defiance toward the vault of heaven’. 10. Hell’s] Nbk 9; hell’s 1820, 1839. 11. Recalling King Lear III iv 66–7: ‘Now all the plagues that in the pendulous air/Hang fated o’er men’s faults light on thy daughters!’ 13. night] Nbk 9, 1839; might 1820, 1829. This last word of the line in Nbk 9 runs over to the facing page, and was presumably miscopied in the press transcript (or produced by a printer’s error); possibly on S.’s errata list. 15. unsandalled] Timothy Webb (‘Negatives in Prometheus Unbound’, in Shelley Revalued 39) suggests that S. adapts this word from the Gk ἀσάνδᾰλος, found for example in Bion, ‘Death of Adonis’ 21 (trans. by S. in 1819; see Longman ii 697–700, no. 201). 17. Aspiring . . . unrepressed;] Nbk 9; Aspiring, unrepressed, 1820, 1839.

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Even now have I begotten a strange wonder, That fatal child, the terror of the earth, Who waits but till the destined Hour arrive, Bearing from Demogorgon’s vacant throne The dreadful might of ever-living limbs Which clothed that awful spirit unbeheld, To redescend and trample out the spark . . . Pour forth Heaven’s wine, Idæan Ganymede,

18–19. Parodying Paradise Lost v 603–4: ‘This day I  have begot whom I  declare/My only Son’. Cp. Psalms ii 7: ‘I will declare the decree: the Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee’; and Hebrews i 5: ‘For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee? And again, I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a Son?’ 19. child,] Child, Nbk 9. earth,] Earth, Nbk 9. The pun on fatal, i.e. both ‘destined’ and ‘destructive’, is Miltonic; cp. Paradise Lost ii 101–5: by proof we feel Our power sufficient to disturb his heaven, And with perpetual inroads to alarm, Though inaccessible, his fatal throne; Which if not victory is yet revenge. C. E. Pulos (‘Shelley and Malthus’, PMLA lxvii (1952) 113–24) has persuasively argued that the fatal child represents the ideas of Thomas Malthus as set forth in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Nbk 11 36 has apparent early drafts for PU III i on the same page as jotted notes on ‘the principle of population’, and S. was reading Malthus in October 1818 (L ii 43). The Essay was an answer to Godwin’s Political Justice, and argued that human perfectibility was impossible because the population increases in geometric proportion, while the capacity to produce food increases only arithmetically, thereby ensuring that the population must periodically be checked by war, famine, and other disasters. Thus Jupiter believes that his offspring will help to protect his continuing sway over human development. S. may more specifically recall phrasing from Hazlitt’s Reply to Malthus (1807): ‘Mr Malthus’s reputation may, I fear, prove fatal to the poor of this country. His name hangs suspended over their heads, in terrorem like some baleful meteor’ (Hazlitt Works i 181). This would import into S.’s phrase a more definite reference to the controversy surrounding his father-in-law, in keeping with other semicoded personal allusions in PU (see III iii 65–7 and note, and headnote), and of a piece with his overt discussions of Malthus, e.g. in the Preface to L&C, and in PVR (Prose 247–8, SC vi 1204). S.’s terror of the earth echoes King Lear II iv 279–81: ‘I will do such things —/What they are yet I know not; but they shall be/The terrors of the earth’. 20. destined] Nbk 9, 1839; distant 1820, 1829. Probably Mary’s transcription error (the word is rather ill-written in Nbk 9), as a printer’s error is unlikely, and S. would presumably have recognised his own writing. Probably on S.’s errata list. Hour] Nbk 9; hour 1820, 1839. 24. redescend] Nbk 9; redescend, 1820, 1839. spark . . .] Nbk 9; spark. 1820, 1839. In 1820 (and subsequent eds), this scene employs line-breaks unusually at several points (lines 24/25, 33, 63, 70, 79), presumably to enhance the dramatic effect of Jupiter’s one-sided exchange with Demogorgon. There is no line-break in Nbk 9 at line 33, or line 79 (and see note to lines 70–4), but it is likely that such a sustained layout feature would derive from S.’s change to the press transcript. 25–51. Jupiter’s ironically misplaced confidence is exactly the hubris of classical Gk tragic drama. 25. Ganymede was the eternally youthful cup-bearer to the gods, taken for his beauty by Zeus from Mount Ida near Troy. Heaven’s] Nbk 9; heaven’s 1820, 1839.

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shelley: selected poems And let it fill the daedal cups like fire, And from the flower-inwoven soil divine Ye all-triumphant harmonies arise, As dew from earth under the twilight stars: Drink! be the nectar circling through your veins The soul of joy, ye ever-living Gods, Till exultation burst in one wide voice Like music from Elysian winds. And thou Ascend beside me, veilèd in the light Of the desire which makes thee one with me, Thetis, bright Image of Eternity! When thou didst cry, ‘Insufferable might! God! Spare me! I sustain not the quick flames, The penetrating presence; all my being, Like him whom the Numidian seps did thaw Into a dew with poison, is dissolved, Sinking through its foundations’ — even then Two mighty spirits, mingling, made a third

26. daedal] Dædal 1820, 1839. ‘Of elaborate workmanship’; see note to One sung of thee who left the tale untold (Longman ii 417–8, no. 175) 3. 27. divine] Nbk 9, 1820; divine, 1839. 29. earth] Earth Nbk 9. 34–6. Ironically recalling the transformation of Asia in II v. 36–48. Jupiter’s bride Thetis is, like Asia, a Nereid or sea-nymph, and thus develops the pattern by which Prometheus is doubled in his adversary. Thetis was fated to bear a son mightier than his father, which in Aeschylus is the secret known to Prometheus; S. assigns to Jupiter the rape of Thetis that was performed in the myth by Peleus after Zeus had been forewarned (see Ovid, Met. xi 229–65). S.’s Jupiter actually has a child by Thetis; in the myth, he avoids thus sealing his fate. 36. Image of Eternity!] Image of Eternity — Nbk 9; image of eternity! 1820, 1839. S.’s Thetis appears to represent time (image of eternity); i.e. Jupiter as tyranny, when wedded to Thetis as time, begets the conditions for his own downfall (see note to lines 54–5). Cp. Epipsychidion 115: ‘An image of some bright Eternity’. 37–9. Thetis is here associated with Semele, overwhelmed by the sexual presence of Jove; cp. Ovid, Met. iii 308–9: ‘corpus mortale tumultus/non tulit aetherios donisque iugalibus arsit’ (‘Her mortal body bore not the onrush of heavenly power, and by that gift of wedlock she was consumed’, Loeb trans.). 40–1. S. recalls the gruesome passage in Lucan, Pharsalia ix 762–88, where Sabellus is rapidly decomposed to a pool of venom by a bite from a seps (the highly poisonous snake of fable) in the Numidian desert. The phrasing also perhaps suggests Hamlet I ii 129–30: ‘O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,/Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!’ 42. foundations’ — even] foundations’ — Even Nbk 9; foundations:’ even 1820, 1839. 43–5. In Nbk 9 S. apparently first left line 44 metrically incomplete at either, then wrote two lines as follows: Even now unbodied and invisible/Between us, floats our mighty Progeny. He then cancelled the first of these two lines, replacing it with the second half of the received text of line 44 (which, unbodied now), and cancelled our mighty Progeny to replace it with felt although unbeheld written above. There is no punctuation in Nbk 9 after now at the end of line 44, and a comma is very firmly written in after floats in line 45 (see BSM ix 384–5). In 1820 and 1839, the punctuation Mightier than either, which, unbodied now,/Between us floats, fell, allhough unbeheld alters the sense. With 43–44 cp. Prometheus Bound 768: ἤ τέξεταί γε παῖδα ϕέρτερον πατρός (‘she shall bear a son stronger than his sire’). 43. spirits, mingling,] 1820; spirits mingling Nbk 9; spirits, mingling 1839.

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Mightier than either, which, unbodied now Between us, floats, felt although unbeheld, Waiting the incarnation, which ascends (Hear ye the thunder of the fiery wheels Griding the winds?) from Demogorgon’s throne. Victory! victory! Feelest thou not, O world, The earthquake of his chariot thundering up Olympus? [The Car of the HOUR arrives. Demogorgon descends and moves towards the Throne of Jupiter. Awful Shape, what art thou? Speak! Demogorgon Eternity. Demand no direr name. Descend, and follow me down the abyss. I am thy child, as thou wert Saturn’s child; Mightier than thee: and we must dwell together Henceforth in darkness. Lift thy lightnings not. The tyranny of Heaven none may retain, Or reassume, or hold, succeeding thee: Yet if thou wilt — as’tis the destiny Of trodden worms to writhe till they are dead —

46–8. ascends] ascends — Nbk 9; ascends, 1820, 1839. The brackets in lines 47–8 appear in 1820; Nbk 9 has only a question mark after winds in line 48. 48. Griding] ‘Grating against with a strident sound’; the word was adapted from Middle English by Spenser (see e.g. Shepheardes Calendar, Februarie 4, Faerie Queene III ii 37), and taken up by Milton (Paradise Lost vi 329). 49. world,] 1820; World Nbk 9; world! 1839. 50. earthquake] Earthquake Nbk 9. SD. The Car of the Hour is the first car from II iv 142–4. 51. Shape,] Nbk 9; shape, 1820, 1839. 52. The direr name is usually taken to be ‘Necessity’; although Demogorgon may perhaps simply intend his own name. 54–5. On the historical inevitability of Jupiter’s fall, cp. ‘Fragment on Reform’: ‘The distribution of wealth no less than the spirit by which it is upheld and that by which it is assailed render the event inevitable. Call it reform or revolution, as you will, a change must take place; one of the consequences of which will be the wresting of political power from those who are at present the depositories of it’ (Prose 261). 55–6. I.e. Jupiter is not destroyed, and he maintains the potential to return; cp. IV 565–9 and note. 55. S. wrote what is probably He Rhea’s on the blank facing page in Nbk 9, as an alternative for Mightier than thee, which has been underlined presumably to confirm its inclusion in the press transcript. According to Hesiod (Theogony 137–8, 154ff., 453ff.) Rhea was the sister and bride of Kronos, or Saturn; she deceived him by substituting a stone for the infant Zeus and so saved him from being eaten by his father Kronos. Zeus ultimately usurped his father’s tyranny. 57. Heaven] Nbk 9; heaven 1820, 1839. 59. will —] Nbk 9; wilt, 1820, 1839. 60. dead —] Nbk 9; dead, 1820, 1839.

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Detested prodigy! Even thus beneath the deep Titanian prisons I trample thee! thou lingerest? Mercy! mercy! No pity, no release no respite! . . . O, That thou wouldst make mine enemy my judge. Even where he hangs, seared by my long revenge On Caucasus — he would not doom me thus. Gentle, and just, and dreadless, is he not The monarch of the world? What then art thou? No refuge! no appeal! Sink with me then — We two will sink in the wide waves of ruin, Even as a vulture and a snake outspent

62. Titanian] After their defeat at the hands of Zeus and the gods, the Titans were imprisoned deep underground in Tartarus. The prisons of the Titans were traditionally associated with the volcanic regions of Sicily and the Neapolitan coast. 63–9. Jupiter appeals for mercy to ‘mine enemy’ as Satan appeals to Christ against the stern justice of God in Paradise Regained iii 212–2: My error was my error, and my crime My crime, whatever for itself condemned, And will alike be punished, whether thou Reign or reign not; though to that gentle brow Willingly I could fly, and hope thy reign, From that placid aspect and meek regard, Rather than aggravate my evil state, Would stand between me and thy Father’s ire (Whose ire I dread more than the fire of hell), A shelter and a kind of shading cool Interposition, as a summer’s cloud. 64. respite! . . . O,] respite! . . . oh Nbk 9; respite! Oh, 1820, 1839. 65. judge.] Nbk 9; judge, 1820, 1839. The stop is quite faint and slightly misplaced in Nbk 9, but definite. 66. revenge] Nbk 9; revenge, 1820, 1839. 67. Caucasus —] Caucasus! 1820, 1839. 68–9. These lines are inserted on the facing page in Nbk 9, but not at a later date judging from the ink and handwriting. 69. 1820 omits then, an obvious error creating an ametrical line. The error was perpetuated in 1829 but corrected in 1839, suggesting that it was on S.’s errata list. 70–4. Sink with me then . . . shoreless sea.] These lines were added later on the facing page in Nbk 9 (see BSM ix 394–5). 70. then —] Nbk 9; then, 1820, 1839. 71. will] shall Nbk 9; presumably S.’s alteration to the press transcript. in] Nbk 9; on 1820, 1839; the i of in in Nbk 9 is formed slightly to resemble what could be an o, but the dot above is clear. 72. A recurring image in S. for the battle of good and evil; cp. L&C I vi–xiv and note, Alastor 227–32.

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Drop, twisted in inextricable fight, Into a shoreless sea. Let hell unlock Its moulded oceans of tempestuous fire, And whelm on them into the bottomless void This desolated world, and thee, and me, The conqueror and the conquered, and the wreck Of that for which they combated. Ai! Ai! The elements obey me not . . . I sink . . . Dizzily down — ever, forever, down; And, like a cloud, mine enemy above Darkens my fall with victory! Ai! Ai!

Scene ii

The mouth of a great river in the Island Atlantis. Ocean is discovered reclining near the shore; Apollo stands beside him. Ocean He fell, thou sayest, beneath his conqueror’s frown? Apollo Aye, when the strife was ended which made dim The orb I rule, and shook the solid stars. 75. oceans] Oceans Nbk 9. 77. This and thee read The and thou in Nbk 9; presumably S.’s change to the press transcript. 79, 83. Ai] In Gk, a cry of lamentation. 80. not . . . I sink . . .] Nbk 9; not. I sink 1820, 1839. 81. This line reads Dizzily down — ever, forever, down in Nbk 9; 1820 and 1839 read Dizzily down, ever, for ever, down. Following this line in Nbk 9 is a canc. line: Down down down down dizzily, far & deep. 82–3. Added later on the facing page in Nbk 9; mine in Nbk 9 has been canc. and replaced by the written above. S. presumably restored the original reading in the press transcript. The imagery in these lines is volcanic. III. ii. This scene parallels II ii in providing commentary on part of the dramatic action not directly represented, though as various commentators have noted, the emphasis here is on the future. SD. Atlantis was a mythical large island off the Straits of Gibraltar, an earthly paradise where Plato, in the unfinished Critias, places his ideal commonwealth. Ocean associates with water and thus with Asia (he was also in his mythic origins a river-god; hence the setting at The mouth of a great river). Apollo as the supreme Gk god of the sun, beauty, prophecy, medicine and poetry, associates with fire and thus with Prometheus. ‘It is fitting . . . that the withdrawal of eclipsing Jupiter from the heavens be reported by the sun-god to Ocean, father of the Oceanids and, according to Aeschylus, Prometheus’ sympathizer .  .  . In effect, heaven has communicated to earth the fact that the false barrier between them has been removed’ (Wasserman 358). See also III iv 111–21 and note. 2–9. As Cameron (1974) 531 notes, these lines imply a considerable passage of time. 2. dim] Written after pale canc. in Nbk 9. 3. stars.] Nbk 9; stars, 1820, 1839. Reiman (1977) glosses solid stars as ‘the fixed stars’; but S. probably intends the planets: cp. Herschel, qu. in Grabo (1930) 83: ‘planets [as distinct from stars] are solid opaque bodies, shining only by superficial light, whether it be innate or reflected’.

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shelley: selected poems The terrors of his eye illumined Heaven With sanguine light, through the thick ragged skirts Of the victorious Darkness, as he fell: Like the last glare of day’s red agony, Which, from a rent among the fiery clouds, Burns far along the tempest-wrinkled Deep. Ocean He sunk to the abyss? to the dark void? Apollo An eagle so, caught in some bursting cloud On Caucasus, his thunder-baffled wings Entangled in the whirlwind, and his eyes Which gazed on the undazzling sun, now blinded By the white lightning, while the ponderous hail Beats on his struggling form, which sinks at length Prone, and the aërial ice clings over it. Ocean Henceforth the fields of Heaven-reflecting sea Which are my realm, will heave, unstained with blood, Beneath the uplifting winds, like plains of corn Swayed by the summer air; my streams will flow Round many-peopled continents, and round Fortunate isles; and from their glassy thrones Blue Proteus and his humid nymphs shall mark The shadow of fair ships, as mortals see

4. Heaven] Nbk 9; heaven 1820, 1839. 4–6. S. probably recalls descriptions of volcanic eruptions with their power to create artificial night, and perhaps draws on his own night view of Vesuvius in December 1818 (L ii 63). 5. sanguine] Written under crimson canc. in Nbk 9. 6. Darkness,] Nbk 9; darkness 1820, 1839. 9. Deep.] Deep Nbk 9; deep. 1820, 1839. 10. abyss? to] Nbk 9; abyss? To 1820, 1839. 11–16. See Michael O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings (1989) 112 for good commentary on this passage. Volcanic activity was known often to be accompanied by violent storms, and S.’s bursting cloud, thunder, whirlwind, white lightning and hail all suggest that he sustains here the association of Demogorgon’s intervention with the phenomena of a major volcanic eruption. 11. so,] Nbk 9; so 1820, 1839; i.e. ‘like an eagle’, with the verb understood from the preceding line. 19. I.e. there will be no more naval wars or slavery; cp. lines 29–31 and note below. 22. many-peopled] Nbk 9; many peopled 1820, 1839. 24. Proteus] See III iii 65 and note. nymphs] Nymphs Nbk 9.

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The floating bark of the light-laden moon With that white star, its sightless pilot’s crest, Borne down the rapid sunset’s ebbing sea; Tracking their path no more by blood and groans And desolation, and the mingled voice Of slavery and command — but by the light Of wave-reflected flowers, and floating odours, And music soft, and mild, free, gentle voices, That sweetest music, such as spirits love. Apollo And I shall gaze not on the deeds which make My mind obscure with sorrow, as eclipse Darkens the sphere I guide — but list, I hear The small, clear, silver lute of the young Spirit That sits i’ the morning star. Ocean

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Thou must away? Thy steeds will pause at even — till when, farewell. The loud deep calls me home even now to feed it With azure calm out of the emerald urns Which stand forever full beside my throne. Behold the Nereids under the green sea, Their wavering limbs borne on the wind-like streams,

26. light-laden] Nbk 9 (alt. from unladen), perhaps with a pun on ‘lightly laden’ and ‘laden with light’; light laden 1820, 1839. 27–8. ‘A star above the tip of a new moon suggests a boat guided by an invisible (sightless) pilot with a star as his crest’ (Butter (1970)). 29–31. Another reference to the conditions of naval service and warfare, and to the slave trade. 29. groans] Nbk 9; groans, 1820, 1839. 31. command —] Nbk 9; command; 1820, 1839. 33. free] Written above frank canc. in Nbk 9. 36. eclipse] Eclipse Nbk 9. 37. guide —] Nbk 9; guide; 1820, 1839. 38–9. See Curran (1975) 59–60 for commentary on the symbolic patterning of morning and evening stars in PU. 39. i’ the] Nbk 9 (S. has canc. the n of in), 1839; on the 1820, 1829; probably in S.’s errata list. morning] Morning Nbk 9. away?] Nbk 9; away; 1820, 1839. 40. In Nbk 9, there is no punctuation after farewell, and even is written above an illegible canc. word; even, till when farewell: is the reading in 1820 and 1839. Following this line in Nbk 9 is a canc. line: Hark the loud Deep calls me home too, to feed it. 43. forever] Nbk 9; for ever 1820, 1839. 44–8. This passage implies that Asia and the Nereids are sisters; see II v 20 and note. 45. streams] Nbk 9 (the terminal s is poorly formed and could be taken for a comma in transcription); stream 1820, 1839.

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shelley: selected poems Their white arms lifted o’er their streaming hair With garlands pied and starry sea-flower crowns, Hastening to grace their mighty sister’s joy. [A sound of waves is heard. It is the unpastured sea hungering for calm. Peace, monster; I come now! Farewell. Apollo Farewell!

Scene iii

Caucasus. Prometheus, Hercules, Ione, the Earth, Spirits, Asia, and Panthea, borne in the Car with the Spirit of the Hour. [Hercules unbinds Prometheus, who descends. Hercules Most glorious among Spirits, thus doth strength To wisdom, courage, and long-suffering love, And thee, who art the form they animate, Minister, like a slave. Prometheus 5

Thy gentle words Are sweeter even than freedom long desired And long delayed.

46. Cp. L&C II xxix 919–20. 48. The SD following this line reads The roar of waves is heard; it has been added later in pencil, and was presumably revised by S. in the press transcript. 49. unpastured] ‘Unfed’. OED cites this usage as the earliest example of the word in the sense of ‘not employed for pasture’, but this does not fit the context, nor, as Webb (Shelley Revalued 39) notes, does it conform to ‘S.’s usage elsewhere and to his views on the wastefulness of pasturage’; Webb cps. the unpastured dragon (Adonais 238), Lat. impastus (‘unfed’, ‘hungry’), and S.’s use of the Spenserian word depasturing in Hymn to Mercury (Longman iii, no. 336) 29 and in his trans. of a passage from Plato, Republic (Notopoulos 498). S. may alternatively recall the Homeric epithet ἀτρύγετος, ‘unfruitful’. sea] Sea Nbk 9. calm.] Calm Nbk 9. 50. now!] Nbk 9; now. 1820, 1839. III. iii. 1–4. Hercules is the Roman name for Gk Heracles; in Aeschylus, Heracles rescues Prometheus from the persecution of Zeus by killing the eagle which comes daily to eat his liver. His speech here suggests that strength is subordinate, but still necessary to wisdom, courage, and long-suffering love; mind cannot free itself unaided. 1. Spirits,] Nbk 9; spirits, 1820; spirits! 1839. 4. Minister,] Nbk 9; Minister 1820, 1839. 5–6. Cp. II i 15. As various commentators have noted, the reader can presume that Hercules exits at this point.

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Asia, thou light of life, Shadow of beauty unbeheld; and ye, Fair sister-nymphs, who made long years of pain Sweet to remember, through your love and care; Henceforth we will not part. There is a Cave All overgrown with trailing odorous plants Which curtain out the day with leaves and flowers, And paved with veinèd emerald, and a fountain Leaps in the midst with an awakening sound. From its curved roof the mountain’s frozen tears, Like snow, or silver, or long diamond spires, Hang downward, raining forth a doubtful light; And there is heard the ever-moving air

7. Shadow] I.e. ‘image’. 8. sister-nymphs] Nbk 9; sister nymphs 1820, 1839. made] make Nbk 9 (presumably a change to the press transcript). 10. Cave] Nbk 9; cave, 1820, 1839. 10–24. There has been much disagreement concerning the relation of this cave to the cavern described by the Earth at lines 124–47 below (see Zillman Variorum 524–5), some arguing that they are one and the same, others distinguishing between them, and all variously finding merits and demerits in either case. Unlike the cavern described by the Earth, the cave described here is apparently not next to a temple, and does not have obvious connection with Demogorgon’s cave described in II iii. The cave described here by Prometheus is a central instance of a symbol ubiquitous in S.’s poetry, and has attracted extensive commentary. Those committed to a Platonic reading of S. have given this passage particular attention as a focal point of the Platonism they see as pervasive in PU, understood in these lines to derive specifically from Plato’s myth of the cave in Republic 514ff. W. B. Yeats (‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’, in Essays and Introductions (1961) 81–2) argued that ‘so good a Platonist as Shelley could hardly have thought of any cave as a symbol, without thinking of Plato’s cave that was the world; and so good a scholar may well have had Porphyry on ‘the Cave of the Nymphs’ in his mind’ (see also e.g. Grabo (1935), Notopoulos, and especially Rogers 147–68). But the lines do not appear to offer close parallels with Platonic sources, even in the context of a scene with an unmistakable Platonic dimension (see below, lines 160–75 and notes). See also Curran (1975) 75ff., 217, for possible sources in Zoroastrianism, and in Boccaccio’s Genealogie. The cave fits PU’s patterns of geological and volcanic symbolism and imagery, and its interest in oracular exhalation; there are also hints of actual caves S. knew or may have known about, not only the classically associated caves around Naples but also caves such as Poole’s Hole and the Devil’s Arse, near Buxton, Elden Hole (also in Derbyshire), and the cavern of Dunmore Park near Kilkenny in Ireland. 11. plants] Nbk 9; plants, 1820, 1839. 13. fountain] Nbk 9, 1820; fountain, 1839. 15. the mountain’s frozen tears] I.e. stalactites. 17. light;] Nbk 9; light: 1820, 1839. 18. air] Nbk 9; air, 1820, 1839.

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shelley: selected poems Whispering without from tree to tree, and birds, And bees; and all around are mossy seats, And the rough walls are clothed with long soft grass; A simple dwelling, which shall be our own, Where we will sit and talk of time and change, As the world ebbs and flows, ourselves unchanged — What can hide man from mutability? And if ye sigh, then I will smile; and thou, Ione, shall chant fragments of sea-music, Until I weep, when ye shall smile away The tears she brought, which yet were sweet to shed. We will entangle buds and flowers, and beams Which twinkle on the fountain’s brim, and make Strange combinations out of common things, Like human babes in their brief innocence;

20–1. Cp. L&C iv 1428–31: We came at last To a small chamber, which with mosses rare Was tapestried, where me his soft hands placed Upon a couch of grass and oak-leaves interlaced. 22–4. Cp. King Lear V iii 8–19: Come, let’s away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage; When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down And ask of thee forgiveness; so we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too — Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out — And take upon’s the mystery of things As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out In a wall’d prison packs and sects of great ones That ebb and flow by th’ moon. 22. own,] own Nbk 9; own; 1820, 1839. 23–5. Prometheus is here clearly distinguished from mankind in history; as the poem repeatedly implies, his intercourse with living people is limited by the categorical difference in his mode of existence (i.e. he is of the mind, but not limited to specific minds). 24. unchanged —] Nbk 9; unchanged. 1820, 1839. 25. mutability?] Mutability? — Nbk 9. 27. shall chant] Nbk 9; shalt chaunt 1820 (perhaps altered by Peacock in proof), 1829; shall chaunt 1839 (presumably from S.’s errata list). 30. flowers,] Nbk 9; flowers 1820, 1839.

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And we will search, with looks and words of love, For hidden thoughts, each lovelier than the last, Our unexhausted spirits, and like lutes Touched by the skill of the enamoured wind, Weave harmonies divine, yet ever new, From difference sweet where discord cannot be. And hither come, sped on the charmèd winds Which meet from all the points of heaven, as bees From every flower aërial Enna feeds At their known island homes in Himera, The echoes of the human world, which tell Of the low voice of love, almost unheard,

34–6. I.e. ‘we will search . . . our unexhausted spirits . . . for hidden thoughts’; with looks and words of love qualifies search, each lovelier than the last qualifies thoughts. 34. search,] Nbk 9, 1820; search 1839. 36. spirits,] Nbk 9; spirits; 1820, 1839. 39. be.] Nbk 9; be; 1820, 1839. 40–8. This sentence (like the sentence following, lines 49–56) offers a difficult grammatical complexity (see discussion in Neville Rogers, ‘The Punctuation of Shelley’s Syntax’, K-SMB xvii (1966) 20–30). In Nbk 9, S.’s punctuation is very light. 1820 and 1839 make the whole passage 40–56 a single sentence, with a semicolon after free in line 48 (the word is not punctuated in Nbk 9), after which point their punctuation becomes increasingly confusing. Subsequent eds have proposed a wide variety of punctuation. The text here mainly follows 1839 for lines 40–8. There is a history of attempted paraphrase of the passage, inaugurated by Robert Bridges (Spirit of Man, rev. impression 1917; see Zillman Variorum 238–9); GM and KE offer the following: ‘And hither from all directions, like bees homing to their familiar hives, come the echoes of the human world: the whisper of love, the murmur of pity, and the music which is itself an echo of the love and pity of the human heart — echoes of all that alleviates man’s condition’. For a long and subtle paraphrase of the whole passage, lines 40–62, see I. A. Richards, Beyond (1973) 197–9. 40. hither] 1820, 1839; thither Nbk 9; presumably S.’s change to the press transcript. winds] Nbk 9; winds, 1820, 1839. 41–3. The verb is understood from line 41; ‘as bees . . . [meet] . . . at their known island homes’. S.’s phrasing probably most directly recalls Paradise Lost iv 268–71: Not that fair field Of Enna, where Proserpine gathering flowers Her self a fairer flower by gloomy Dis Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain To seek her through the world . . . There may also be a recollection of Marvell, ‘Upon Appleton House’ 291: ‘The bee through these known alleys hums’. Proserpina was raped by Dis in a high (aerial) flowery meadow near Henna in Sicily (Ovid, Met. v 385–96). S.’s bees were perhaps suggested by the abundance of flowers in Ovid’s account, more particularly in Fasti iv 420ff., where Ceres (mother of Proserpina) is said to have passed through Himera (on the North coast of Sicily) in fleeing from her daughter’s distress. Hybla in Sicily was famed for its honey. 41. heaven,] Heaven, Nbk 9. 42. feeds] Nbk 9; feeds, 1820, 1839.

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shelley: selected poems And dove-eyed pity’s murmured pain, and music, Itself the echo of the heart, and all That tempers or improves man’s life, now free. And lovely apparitions — dim at first Then radiant, as the mind, arising bright From the embrace of beauty whence the forms Of which these are the phantoms, casts on them The gathered rays which are reality — Shall visit us, the progeny immortal Of Painting, Sculpture, and rapt Poesy, And arts, though unimagined, yet to be. The wandering voices and the shadows these Of all that man becomes, the mediators

46. dove-eyed] Cp. Song of Solomon v 12, ‘His eyes are as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters, washed with milk, and fitly set’; S.’s epithet (also adapted at II iv 160) is frequent in English poetry, e.g. Chatterton, ‘The Complaint’, Beattie, ‘Ode to Peace’ III i 12, Coleridge, ‘Ode to the departing Year’ 68. See also Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847) ch. 10. 46–7. Echoing Twelfth Night II iv 14–21: Duke. . . . If ever thou shalt love, In the sweet pangs of it remember me; For such as I am all true lovers are, Unstaid and skittish in all motions else Save in the constant image of the creature That is belov’d. How dost thou like this tune? Viola. It gives a very echo to the seat Where love is thron’d. 48. free.] free Nbk 9; free; 1820, 1839. 49. apparitions —] apparitions Nbk 9, Reiman (1977); apparitions, 1820, 1839, Rossetti 1870, Butter (1970). first] Nbk 9, Reiman (1977); first, 1820, 1839, Rossetti 1870, Butter (1970). 49–56. Another difficult sentence (see note to lines 40–8 above). Eds have varied considerably from the early witnesses, and from each other, in their punctuation; the problem centres on which parts of the sentence to mark as parenthetic or relative, either by dashes or brackets (or both). The collation here notes differences with several eds. Like the preceding sentence, the passage has attracted paraphrase; GM and KE offer the following: ‘And lovely imaginings will come, too; vague at first, but growing more vivid as the mind (fresh from intercourse with Beauty, an intercourse which generates the ideal concepts that these imaginings illustrate) realises them in actual works of art: the offspring of painting, sculpture, poetry, and arts not yet invented’. 49–53. The passage is Platonic; the mind’s capacity to envisage and comprehend ideals is nourished through intercourse with the beautiful. Cp. Symposium 209–12. Wasserman 273 suggests that the myth of Aurora and Tithonus is ‘recognisable behind’ this passage; cp. Odyssey v 1. 50. radiant,] Nbk 9, 1820, 1839; radiant, — Rossetti 1870; radiant — Butter (1970), Reiman (1977). 51. beauty whence] Nbk 9; beauty, whence 1820, 1839, Butter (1970); beauty (whence Rossetti 1870, Reiman (1977). 52. phantoms,] Nbk 9, 1820, 1839, Butter (1970); phantoms), Rossetti 1870; phantoms) Reiman (1977). 53. gathered] ‘Concentrated’ (Concordance; cp. II i 84 and note). reality —] Butter (1970), Reiman (1977); reality, Nbk 9, 1820, 1839; reality, — Rossetti 1870. 55. rapt] Nbk 9, 1839; wrapt 1820, 1829; presumably corrected from S.’s errata list.

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Of that best worship, love, by him and us Given and returned; swift shapes and sounds, which grow More fair and soft as man grows wise and kind, And veil by veil, evil and error fall . . . Such virtue has the cave and place around. [Turning to the Spirit of the Hour. For thee, fair Spirit, one toil remains. Ione, Give her that curvèd shell, which Proteus old Made Asia’s nuptial boon, breathing within it A voice to be accomplished, and which thou Didst hide in grass under the hollow rock. Ione Thou most desired Hour, more loved and lovely Than all thy sisters, this is the mystic shell;

60. Cp. II v 40. 62. fall . . .] Nbk 9; fall: 1820, 1839. 64–8. This passage appears to include a complex pun on S.’s name and poetic calling, and suggests further implicit references to his immediate family (cp. III i 19 and note). The Shelley family Coat of Arms included three conch shells (see the crest on the cover of Dowden Life, and the illustration and catalogue entry in Shelley’s Guitar 2, 6) and in addition to his known propensity for punning on his own and others’ names, S. may have in mind a family legend recorded in Hogg 3: ‘Sir Guyon de Shelley, one of the most famous of the Paladins . . . carried about with him at all times three conchs [sic] fastened to the inside of his shield, tipt respectively with brass, with silver, and with gold. When he blew the first shell, all giants, however huge, fled before him. When he put the second to his lips, all spells were broken, all enchantments dissolved; and when he made the third conch, the golden one, vocal, the law of God was immediately exalted, and the law of the Devil annulled and abrogated, wherever the potent sound reached. Some historians affirm, that the third shell had a still more remarkable effect; that its melting notes instantly softened the heart of every female, gentle or simple, who heard them, to such an extent, that it was impossible for her to refuse whatever its owner might ask.’ S.’s lines hint at a fleeting identification between Prometheus and Asia, and himself and Mary (implying that Prometheus and Asia are indeed to be thought of as married in PU), with Godwin (humorously) as Proteus; Mary’s wedding gift to S. is thought of as S.’s gift of poetry, informed by Godwin’s writings. The shell would further identify with S.’s poetic prophecy to the world, and more specifically with PU itself in the future moral efficacy envisaged for it by S. 65. that curvèd shell] See preceding note. Asia, like Venus Aphrodite, was born on a shell (see II v 20–32 and note). Shells have a range of symbolic associations with poetry and its effects; the lyre itself was conventionally thought of as originally fashioned from a tortoise shell (see S.’s Hymn to Mercury). Proteus] A sea-god with the power to change shape, and to foretell the future (see Virgil, Georgic iv 387ff.). S.’s conception of Proteus, as the informing spirit of the natural human world, appears particularly indebted to Bacon (a favourite of S.’s); cp. TL 269–73, Prose Works 250 and see Wasserman 348–9. Murray’s ed. note in Prose Works 465 explains that S. thinks of Proteus ‘not as the prophetic old man of the sea but, in the Orphic mystical sense, as the source of the elemental material world, a symbolic application of his character derived from his ability to change into whatever shape he pleased until caught in one of them, on which occasion he was obliged to truthfully answer any query put to him.’ old] Nbk 9, 1820; old, 1839. 70. this is the] 1820, 1829; this the Nbk 9, 1839. An odd crux; usually, 1839’s reversion to the nbk reading would imply an erratum noted by S., but here the sense suggests a transcription error in Nbk 9 perhaps coinciding with an uncaught printer’s error in 1839.

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shelley: selected poems See the pale azure fading into silver Lining it with a soft yet glowing light: Looks it not like lulled music sleeping there?

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Spirit It seems in truth the fairest shell of Ocean: Its sound must be at once both sweet and strange. Prometheus Go, borne over the cities of mankind On whirlwind-footed coursers: once again Outspeed the sun around the orbèd world; And as thy chariot cleaves the kindling air, Thou breathe into the many-folded shell, Loosening its mighty music; it shall be As thunder mingled with clear echoes. Then Return; and thou shalt dwell beside our cave. [Kissing the ground And thou, O Mother Earth! — The Earth

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I hear, I feel; Thy lips are on me, and their touch runs down Even to the adamantine central gloom Along these marble nerves;’tis life,’tis joy, And through my withered, old, and icy frame The warmth of an immortal youth shoots down Circling. Henceforth the many children fair Folded in my sustaining arms — all plants,

71–3. Recalling the shell-chariot of the second spirit at II iv 156–9. 72. light:] 1820, 1839; light. Nbk 9; perhaps a change to the press transcript, although the stop in Nbk 9 is faint and could be accidental. 73–5. 80–2. The shell’s music strengthens its association with poetry; cp. II ii 24–40 and note. 76–83. The Spirit reports back at the end of III iv. 80. shell,] Shell Nbk 9. 82. echoes. Then] echoes — then Nbk 9; echoes: then 1820, 1839. SD. The SD is in Nbk 9 but not in 1820 or 1839, and was presumably omitted or cancelled in the press transcript. 1820 has a gap between lines 83 and 84, which might suggest a printer’s error. 84–90. Paralleling the birth of Prometheus at I 154–8. 84. I hear] Perhaps implying that until the touch of Prometheus’s lips, Earth has heard nothing; cp. I 112ff. and note, and see lines 111–12 and note below. 85. their touch] Nbk 9; thy touch 1820, 1839; probably a printer’s error uncaught by Mary. 88. And] Nbk 9, 1820; And, 1839. 91. arms —] arms; Nbk 9, 1820, 1839; dashes here and at line 95 below clarify that the list from lines 91–5 predicates the many children of line 90 above.

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And creeping forms, and insects rainbow-winged, And birds, and beasts, and fish, and human shapes, Which drew disease and pain from my wan bosom, 95 Draining the poison of despair — shall take And interchange sweet nutriment; to me Shall they become like sister-antelopes By one fair dam, snow-white and swift as wind, Nursed among lilies near a brimming stream. 100 The dew-mists of my sunless sleep shall float Under the stars like balm; night-folded flowers Shall suck unwithering hues in their repose; And men and beasts in happy dreams shall gather Strength for the coming day and all its joy: 105 And death shall be the last embrace of her Who takes the life she gave, even as a mother, Folding her child, says, ‘Leave me not again!’ Asia O mother! wherefore speak the name of death? Cease they to love, and move, and breathe, and speak, 110 Who die? The Earth It would avail not to reply: Thou art immortal, and this tongue is known

93–5. Grabo (1930) cites Darwin’s view in Botanic Garden that ‘contagious atoms’ sent up from the centre of the earth by volcanic eruption were the source of pestilence: ‘Those epidemic complaints, which are generally termed influenza, are believed to arise from vapours thrown out from earthquakes in such abundance as to affect large regions of the atmosphere’. Cp. I 175–7. 95. despair —] despair, Nbk 9, 1820, 1839; see note to line 91. 96–9. Cp. Song of Solomon iv 5: ‘Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies’. 99. stream.] stream; Nbk 9. 101. balm;] balm, Nbk 9; balm: 1820, 1839. Cp. I am drunk with the honey-wine (Longman ii 421, no. 178) 2 and note. 102. unwithering] Nbk 9, 1839; unwitting 1820, 1829. The word is poorly formed in Nbk 9 and could have been mistranscribed by Mary in the press transcript (though presumably not by S.); probably corrected in 1839 from S.’s errata list. In Nbk 9, S. first wrote this line Shall suck unwithering colours as they dream, then canc. the last four words and replaced them with the received reading written on the facing page. repose;] repose Nbk 9; repose: 1820, 1839. 104. day] Nbk 9; day, 1820, 1839. 105–14. S. consistently maintained a sceptical position on knowledge of an afterlife; cp. IV 536–8 and note, and see e.g. his note to Hellas 197–210, and ‘On a Future State’, Prose 175–8. 111–12. Cp. I 148–51.

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But to the uncommunicating dead. Death is the veil which those who live call life: They sleep, and it is lifted: and meanwhile 115 In mild variety the seasons mild — With rainbow-skirted showers, and odorous winds, And long blue meteors cleansing the dull night, And the life-kindling shafts of the keen sun’s All-piercing bow, and the dew-mingled rain 120 Of the calm moonbeams, a soft influence mild — Shall clothe the forests and the fields — aye, even The crag-built deserts of the barren deep — With ever-living leaves, and fruits, and flowers. And Thou! There is a Cavern where my spirit

113–14. Cp. Milton, Sonnet xiv: When faith and love which parted from thee never, Had ripened thy just soul to dwell with God, Meekly thou didst resign this earthy load Of death, called life; which us from life doth sever. Cp. also F. Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, Adventures of Telemachus (1699; trans. J. Hawkesworth, 1784) 179, 184: ‘ “It is here alone,” [in Elysium] says he, “that there is life; the shadow only, and not the reality, is to be found upon earth” . . . “These, my son, whom you believe to be dead, these only are the living; those are the dead who languish upon earth the victims of disease and sorrow” . . . “the terms are inverted, and should be restored to their proper place”.’ The veil of line 113 suggests a Platonic context, but there appears to be no direct source in Plato, and S.’s phrasing perhaps implies a more sceptical reserve. The use of the veil image here clearly bears on the question of a life after earthly existence, and is therefore quite different from the image of the ‘painted veil’ at III iv 190–2, which like the image in S.’s sonnet Lift not the painted veil almost certainly derives from Lucretius (see notes). 115–23. The sentence is awkward in comprising two substantial parenthetic passages. Dashes are here introduced in lines 115, 120 and 122, and a dash adopted from Nbk 9 in line 121. The sense is ‘the seasons mild . . . shall clothe the forests and the fields . . . with ever-living leaves, and fruits, and flowers’: lines 114–20 qualify seasons; lines 121–2, aye, even/The crag-built deserts of the barren deep, qualify the forests and the fields. The vision of a redeemed physical nature is in keeping with S.’s conviction that humanity’s moral state and physical environment are not merely correlated but are linked aspects of the same cosmic harmony; see Q Mab viii 145–86 and note, II iv 49–58 and note. 115. mild —] mild Nbk 9, 1820, 1839118. sun’s] Sun’s Nbk 9. 120. mild —] mild; Nbk 9; mild, 1820, 1839. 121. fields —] Nbk 9; fields, 1820, 1839. 122. deep —] deep Nbk 9; deep, 1820, 1839. 123. The arguments of Malthus are implicitly countered in S.’s vision of the possibilities for global food supply (cp. III i 19 and note). 124. Thou! There] Thou . . . there Nbk 9; thou! There 1820, 1839. Cavern] Nbk 9; cavern 1820, 1839. where] whence Nbk 9; presumably S.’s change to the press transcript. 124–47. The Earth’s cavern may be the same as the cave described by Prometheus earlier (see lines 10–24 above, and notes), although there are significant differences in the two descriptions. This cavern suggests the oracular cave of Demogorgon in II iii, but now purified of the ill effects associated with its vapours (it may also equate with the ‘abyss’ into which Jupiter falls in III i; see Paul Dawson, The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (1980) 126). As various commentators have noted, S.’s

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125 Was panted forth in anguish whilst thy pain Made my heart mad, and those who did inhale it Became mad too, and built a temple there, And spoke, and were oracular, and lured The erring nations round to mutual war, 130 And faithless faith, such as Jove kept with thee; Which breath now rises, as among tall weeds A violet’s exhalation, and it fills With a serener light and crimson air Intense, yet soft, the rocks and woods around; 135 It feeds the quick growth of the serpent vine, And the dark linked ivy tangling wild, And budding, blown, or odour-faded blooms

description suggests the cave at Delphi, especially in the account in Diodorus Siculus (xvi 26) describing the frenzy of those inhaling the oracular vapours (see II iii and notes). The description seems to draw specifically on S.’s impressions of Lake Avernus near Naples, ‘once a chasm of deadly & pestilential vapours’ and of Solfatara and the area towards Pozzuoli (see L ii 61–2). Cp. Quarterly Review x (1814) 202: ‘of the numerous persons who put their ear to the aperture [in the side of a volcanic mountain], from a curiousity . . . they all became mad, instantly mad, and were never again restored to the light of reason, or the rational government of themselves’ (and see note to IV 321). See Wasserman 278–82 for excellent commentary on the whole passage lines 124–75. If as noted above, line 84 and note, Earth has heard nothing until kissed by Prometheus, then she will not have heard Prometheus’s account of a cave at lines 10–24. 126–9. Suggesting sibylline frenzy; but hinting also at the descent into violence, and the subsequent rise of Napoleonic imperialism, following the French Revolution; cp. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III lxxxi, on Napoleon: For then he was inspired, and from him came, As from the Pythian’s mystic cave of yore, Those oracles which set the world in flame, Nor ceased to burn till kingdoms were no more . . . 126. who] Nbk 9, 1820; that 1829, 1839; clear evidence that Mary used 1829 as the copy-text for 1839 (see Taylor 41). 131–4. The exhalation of a crimson air suggests the ‘nitrous gas’ described by Humphrey Davy and Joseph Priestley (see Grabo (1930) 188–90); the Earth now produces a nitrogen-rich breath wholly beneficial in its effects, in contrast to the poisonous mixture of gases exhaled in pre-revolutionary time; see II iii 43–4 and note. 131. S. at first began this line Which now floats upward in Nbk 9, then canc. and replaced these words with Which breath now rises written on the facing page. among] Nbk 9; amongst 1820, 1839; perhaps S.’s change to the press transcript, but possibly altered by the printer or in proof. 136. Ivy was sacred to Bacchus (Ovid, Fasti iii 767–70); S. thus develops the Dionysian associations of the cave, and anticipates the reference of line 154 below. 137–8. Cp. S.’s description of the Astroni crater near Naples: ‘The willow trees had just begun to put forth their green & golden buds, and gleamed like points of lambent fire among the wintry forest’ (L ii 78).

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Which star the winds with points of coloured light As they rain through them, and bright, golden globes 140 Of fruit, suspended in their own green heaven; And, through their veinèd leaves and amber stems The flowers whose purple and translucid bowls Stand ever mantling with aërial dew, The drink of spirits; and it circles round, 145 Like the soft waving wings of noonday dreams, Inspiring calm and happy thoughts, like mine Now thou art thus restored. This Cave is thine. Arise! Appear! [A Spirit rises in the likeness of a winged child. This is my torch-bearer, Who let his lamp out in old time with gazing 150 On eyes from which he kindled it anew With love, which is as fire, sweet daughter mine,

138. Which star] S. at first wrote Starring in Nbk 9, then canc. it in pencil and replaced it with Which star written in pencil on the facing page; a change to the fair copy which must have been included in the press transcript. light] Nbk 9; light, 1820, 1839. 139. bright,] Nbk 9, 1820; bright 1839. 139–40. Cp. Mazenghi (Longman ii, no. 166) 80–3 (and see note): it was a feast When’er he found those globes of deep red gold Which in the woods the strawberry tree doth bear, Suspended in their emerald atmosphere. 140. heaven;] Nbk 9; heaven, 1820, 1839; the long sentence lines 124–47 involves from line 135 a series of complex clauses all governed by It feeds. S.’s semicolon here (and at line 144) helps better than a comma to control the grammar. 141. And,] Nbk 9; And 1820, 1839. 142–4. See headnote to I am drunk with the honey-wine (Longman ii 621, no. 178). 144. spirits;] Nbk 9; spirits: 1820, 1839. 146. mine] Nbk 9; mine, 1820, 1839. 147. In Nbk 9, this line reads Now thou art thus restored . . . that Cave is thine; presumably altered by S. in the press transcript. Cave] Nbk 9; cave 1820, 1839. SD. The Spirit who appears here in the likeness of a winged child is another example in this scene (with the two caves, and the two temples; see below, line 161) of an element which may or may not be identified with another instance in this or the following scene. Wasserman 278 offers persuasive commentary on this figure: ‘The Spirit of the Earth who appears in Acts III and IV . . . derives from the network of interconnected myths introduced . . . by the identification of Asia with Venus. For this winged child . . . marked by suggestively sexual speech, performs in the poem’s special context the role of Eros, or Cupid, son of Venus.’ 148. torch-bearer,] torch-bearer Nbk 9; torch-bearer; 1820, 1839. A  torch was the emblem of Prometheus; cp. line 170 below. 149–52. The Spirit’s energy is renewed by the love transmitted from Asia’s (i.e. its mother’s) eyes; cp. III iv 1–19 and note, 15–19 and note, 24, 95–56. 151. daughter] Daughter Nbk 9.

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For such is that within thine own. Run, wayward! And guide this company beyond the peak Of Bacchic Nysa, Mænad-haunted mountain, 155 And beyond Indus, and its tribute rivers, Trampling the torrent streams and glassy lakes With feet unwet, unwearied, undelaying; And up the green ravine, across the vale, Beside the windless and crystalline pool 160 Where ever lies, on unerasing waves, The image of a temple, built above, Distinct with column, arch, and architrave,

152. own. Run, wayward!] own — run Wayward! Nbk 9; own. Run, wayward, 1820, 1839. 154–5. Euripides’ The Cyclops 63–75, trans. by S. probably in June  1818, may be the direct source here (‘Nor can I join the Nymphs on Mount Nysa in singing the song “Iacchos Iacchos” to Aphrodite, whom I swiftly pursued in the company of white-footed Bacchants’, Loeb trans.), although S.’s trans. of these lines (see no. 172 lines 60–5; Longman ii 378) does not include the reference to Nysa. Dionysus was born on Mount Nysa (see e.g. Iliad vi 133, where the association with Mænads is prominent, and Diodorus Siculus i 15, iii 68). Nysa, variously a mountain, city, or island, was variously situated far to the East of Greece; places were named after the mythic Nysa by adherents of Dionysian cults. S.’s geography implies a journey from the Indian Caucasus westwards and north towards Athens and the Promethean temple of line 161 below (see Curran (1975) 91). The details may also recall Paradise Lost iv 275–9 (a passage immediately following that recollected in lines 41–3 above): that Nyseian isle Girt with the river Triton, where old Cham, Whom Gentiles Ammon call and Lybian Jove, Hid Amalthea and her florid son Young Bacchus from his stepdame Rhea’s eye . . . 155. Indus,] Nbk 9; Indus 1820, 1839. 157. undelaying;] Nbk 9; undelaying, 1820, 1839. 158–61. Cp. L ii 61: ‘. . . we landed to visit Lake Avernus. We passed thro the cavern of the Sybil (not Virgils Sybil) which pierces one of the hills which circumscribe the lake & came to a calm & lovely basin of water surrounded by dark woody hills, & profoundly solitary. Some vast ruins of the temple of Pluto stand in a lawny hill on one side of it, and are reflected in its windless mirror.’ 159–61. S. repeatedly describes reflected buildings in this way; cp. e.g. WA 513–15, OL 76–9, Lines written among the Euganean Hills 142–3. 159. pool] Nbk 9; pool, 1820, 1839. 160–7. The temple beside the cavern, to which the Spirit is directed, combines features from western and eastern architectural traditions. Frederic S. Colwell (‘Figures in a Promethean Landscape’, K-SJ xlv (1996) 118–31, with photograph) has identified a possible model for S.’s description in the classical temple, certainly well known to S., on an island in the Lago di Borghese on the Roman Pincio. E. B. Hungerford, Shores of Darkness (1941) 197–200, since followed by many commentators, noted that the references to the Lampadephoria (see lines 168–70 and notes, below) imply that S. is thinking of the temple to Prometheus situated in the Athenian Academy, and that Earth’s cavern would therefore be in the nearby grove of Colonus, itself connected with Prometheus and containing an entrance into the Underworld (see Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 39–40, 50–5). In Sophocles, the grove is sacred to the Furies, and S.’s setting would thus imply the victory of Prometheus over their influences (see also Butter (1970) 299–300).

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And palm-like capital, and over-wrought, And populous most with living imagery — 165 Praxitelean shapes, whose marble smiles Fill the hushed air with everlasting love. It is deserted now, but once it bore Thy name, Prometheus; there the emulous youths Bore to thy honour through the divine gloom 170 The lamp which was thine emblem . . . even as those Who bear the untransmitted torch of hope 163. capital,] capitals, Nbk 9; presumably S.’s change to the press transcript, to match the singulars of the preceding line. 164. most with] with most Nbk 9; presumably S.’s change to the press transcript. imagery —] imagery Nbk 9; imagery, 1820, 1839. 165. Praxiteles was an Athenian sculptor, ranked in antiquity second only to Phidias (see III iv 112 and note). The marble smiles suggest early Gk male nude statues, the so-called kouroi, copies of which S. would have seen in Florence and Rome. 168–70. Opposite these lines in Nbk 9 S. has written on the facing page ‘The beginning of Platos Republic’. The Republic opens with references to an Athenian festival involving a race by young men carrying torches, the Lampadephoria, run in emulation of Prometheus’s feat in bringing fire to humanity. Cp. Pausanias, Description of Greece I xxx: ‘In the Academy is an altar to Prometheus, and from it they run to the city carrying burning torches. The contest is while running to keep the torch still alight; if the torch of the first runner goes out, he has no longer any claim to victory, but the second runner has. If his torch also goes out, then the third man is the victor. If all the torches go out, no one is left to be the winner’ (Loeb trans.). See also Thomas Taylor’s trans. of Pausanias (3 vols, 1794) iii 252: ‘This custom adopted by the Athenians, of running from the altar of Prometheus to the city with burning lamps, in which he alone was victorious whose lamp remained unextinguished in the race, was intended to signify that he is the true conqueror in the race of life, whose rational part is not extinguished, or, in other words, does not become dormant in the career.’ S. ordered Taylor’s trans. in July 1817 (L i 548). S. would certainly have known the famous passage in Lucretius which uses an image from the Lampadephoria: sic rerum summa novatur semper, et inter se mortales mutua vivunt: augescunt aliae gentes, aliae minuuntur, inque brevi spatio mutantur saecla animantum et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt. (De Re. Nat. ii 75–9) (‘Thus the sum of things is ever being renewed, and mortal creatures live dependent one upon another. Some species increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and, like runners, pass on the torch of life’, Loeb trans.) 169. divine gloom] Cp. II ii 22. 170. emblem . . .] Nbk 9; emblem; 1820, 1839. 171–5. In Nbk 9, S. first wrote Who bear the untransmitted torch of hope Into the grave across the night of life .  . . Beside it is the destined Cave . . . depart! He then wrote on the facing page the further lines As thou hast borne it most triumphantly/To this High [alt. to far] goal of Time . . . depart, farewell!, and corrected line 175 to its received form.

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Into the grave, across the night of life, As thou hast borne it most triumphantly To this far goal of Time. Depart, farewell. 175 Beside that temple is the destined Cave.

Scene iv

A forest. In the background, a Cave. Prometheus, Asia, Panthea, Ione, and the Spirit of the Earth.

5

Ione Sister, it is not earthly . . . how it glides Under the leaves! how on its head there burns A light like a green star, whose emerald beams Are twined with its fair hair! how, as it moves, The splendour drops in flakes upon the grass! Knowest thou it? Panthea It is the delicate spirit That guides the earth through heaven. From afar The populous constellations call that light

175. Cave.] Cave . . . Nbk 9; cave. 1820, 1839. III iv 1–19. This description of the Spirit of the Earth combines various effects of electricity as understood by the science of S.’s day, including the electrical character of phosphorescent light in animals and vegetable matter, and the supposed electrical origins of the gases associated with the ignis fatuus and related phenomena, such as fogs, gravity and magnetism (see Grabo (1930) 123–30, who cites in particular the accounts of electricity in Beccaria, Treatise upon Artificial Electricity (English trans. 1776), Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy, and Darwin, Botanic Garden). S.’s implication is that the Earth is guided by electricity in the physical sphere as it is guided by love in the moral sphere, and that the two modes of influence are in a relation not simply of correspondence but of actual identity (see lines 15–19 and note, and cp. e.g. I 122–3 and note). The Spirit identifies in mythic terms with Eros or Cupid to Asia’s Venus (see note to stage direction following III iii 147), while in physical terms conforming to contemporary scientific opinion that electricity was emitted from the earth. 1. earthly . . .] Earthly . . . Nbk 9; earthly: 1820, 1839. 3. light] Nbk 9; light, 1820, 1839. 2–4. The details here suggest a Leyden Jar, an instrument very familiar to S., which produces a green electric light if the terminals are of copper (see Grabo (1930) 126). 5. Cp. Coleridge, Ancient Mariner 272–6: Beyond the shadow of the ship I watched the water-snakes: They moved in tracks of shining white, And when they reared, the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes. Coleridge is himself thinking here of the phosphorescence of marine life in tropical waters. 7. heaven.] Heaven. Nbk 9. 8. The likelihood of life on other planets was a commonplace of scientific speculation in S.’s day; cp. I 2, 163–5.

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shelley: selected poems The loveliest of the planets; and sometimes It floats along the spray of the salt sea, Or makes its chariot of a foggy cloud, Or walks through fields or cities while men sleep, Or o’er the mountain tops, or down the rivers, Or through the green waste wilderness, as now, Wondering at all it sees. Before Jove reigned It loved our sister Asia, and it came Each leisure hour to drink the liquid light Out of her eyes, for which it said it thirsted As one bit by a dipsas; and with her It made its childish confidence, and told her All it had known and seen, for it saw much, Yet idly reasoned what it saw; and called her — For whence it sprang it knew not, nor do I — ‘Mother, dear Mother.’ Spirit of the Earth (running to ASJA) Mother, dearest Mother; May I then talk with thee as I was wont? May I then hide my eyes in thy soft arms, After thy looks have made them tired of joy? May I then play beside thee the long noons, When work is none in the bright silent air? Asia I love thee, gentlest being, and henceforth Can cherish thee unenvied. Speak, I pray: Thy simple talk once solaced, now delights. Spirit of the Earth Mother, I am grown wiser, though a child Cannot be wise like thee, within this day; And happier too; happier and wiser both.

15–19. The Spirit’s energy is renewed from Asia, who is its mother; cp. III iii 148–52. 19. dipsas;] Nbk 9; dipsas, 1820, 1839. The dipsas (from Gk διψάω, to thirst’) was a mythical snake which caused raging thirst by its bite (cp. Lucan, Pharsalia ix 699ff., and Paradise Lost x 526). 22. her —] Nbk 9; her, 1820, 1839. 23. I —] Nbk 9; I, 1820, 1839. S.’s underlying scepticism is discernible in Panthea’s confessed ignorance of origins here. 24. The caps. are from Nbk 9. Facing this line on the opposite page in Nbk 9 is a stage direction ‘Asia & the spirit have entered the cave’; presumably, S. decided to omit it in the press transcript, as it appears in no printed witness. 26. my] mine Nbk 9. 30. being,] Nbk 9, 1820; being! 1839. 33–85. This passage effectively reverses Milton’s account in Paradise Lost xi 423ff. of the growth of evil after the Fall.

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Thou knowest that toads, and snakes, and loathly worms, And venomous and malicious beasts, and boughs That bore ill berries in the woods, were ever An hindrance to my walks o’er the green world: And that, among the haunts of humankind, Hard-featured men, or with proud, angry looks, Or cold, staid gait, or false and hollow smiles, Or the dull sneer of self-loved ignorance, Or other such foul masks, with which ill thoughts Hide that fair being whom we spirits call man; And women too, ugliest of all things evil, (Though fair, even in a world where thou art fair, When good and kind, free and sincere like thee), When false or frowning made me sick at heart To pass them, though they slept, and I unseen. Well, my path lately lay through a great city Into the woody hills surrounding it. A sentinel was sleeping at the gate: When there was heard a sound, so loud, it shook The towers amid the moonlight, yet more sweet Than any voice but thine, sweetest of all; A long, long sound, as it would never end: And all the inhabitants leapt suddenly Out of their rest, and gathered in the streets, Looking in wonder up to Heaven, while yet The music pealed along. I hid myself Within a fountain in the public square, Where I lay like the reflex of the moon

36–50. This sentence is phrased as a preliminary (Thou knowest . . .) to the information content of the following sentence (Well . . .). 37–9. Cp. lines 78–82 below. 39. An] Nbk 9, 1820; A 1829, 1839; Mary S. probably overlooked this change introduced by Galignani. 40–50. Men in line 41, together with women in line 46, are both governed by made in line 49; i.e. the sense is ‘hard-featured men . . . And women too . . . made me sick at heart . . .’. 41. or] Initiating a series of alternative predications of hard-featured men which continues to line 45. 42. Cp. Hamlet I v 108: ‘one may smile, and smile, and be a villain’. 47–8. These lines are not in parenthesis in Nbk 9. 52. it.] Nbk 9; it: 1820, 1839. 53. A] The Nbk 9; presumably S.’s change to the press transcript. The sentinel’s relaxed unwariness of threat implies that deep changes are already underway. 54–7. This is the sound of the shell given by Prometheus to the Spirit of the Hour; see III iii 65–82. 61–4. The green light produced by the Spirit’s electric phosphorescence allows it to camouflage itself in the fountain within the reflection of the moon shining through trees. 63–4. As O’Neill (Human Mind’s Imaginings 117) notes, the rhyme here ‘seems lax’.

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shelley: selected poems Seen in a wave under green leaves; and soon Those ugly human shapes and visages Of which I spoke as having wrought me pain, Passed floating through the air, and fading still Into the winds that scattered them; and those From whom they passed seemed mild and lovely forms After some foul disguise had fallen; and all Were somewhat changed; and after brief surprise And greetings of delighted wonder, all Went to their sleep again: and when the dawn Came — wouldst thou think that toads, and snakes and efts, Could e’er be beautiful? yet so they were, And that with little change of shape or hue: All things had put their evil nature off.

65–8. S. perhaps recalls Lucretius, De Re. Nat. iv 24ff., describing the Epicurean ειδωλα or ‘images’, the fine atomic films given off from the surfaces of things: esse ea quae rerum simulacra vocamus; quae, quasi membranae summo de corpore rerum dereptae, volitant ultroque citroque per auras, atque eadem nobis vigilantibus obvia mentes terrificant atque in somnis, cum saepe figuras contuimur miras simulacraque luce carentum, quae nos horrifice languentis saepe sopore excierunt (30–7) (‘there exist what we call images of things; which, like films drawn from the outermost surface of things, flit about hither and thither through the air; it is these same that, encountering us in wakeful hours, terrify our minds, as also in sleep, when we often behold wonderful shapes and images of the dead, which have often aroused us in horror while we lay languid in sleep’; Loeb trans.). These lines immediately precede the passage cited below in relation to lines 190–2; see also III iii 113–14, and headnote and notes to S.’s sonnet Lift not the painted veil. 70. fallen;] fallen — Nbk 9; fallen, 1820, 1839. 71. changed;] changed — Nbk 9; changed, 1820, 1839. 74–6. Cp. Coleridge, Ancient Mariner 277–82: Within the shadow of the ship I watched their [i.e. the water-snakes’] rich attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, They coiled and swam; and every track Was a flash of golden fire. O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware: Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware. 74. Came —] Nbk 9; Came, 1820, 1839. snakes] Nbk 9; snakes, 1820, 1839. 77. off.] off Nbk 9; off: 1820, 1839. Following this line in Nbk 9 is a canc. line: ‘Like an old garment soiled & overworn’.

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I cannot tell my joy, when o’er a lake, Upon a drooping bough with nightshade twined, I saw two azure halcyons clinging downward And thinning one bright bunch of amber berries With quick long beaks, and in the deep there lay Those lovely forms imaged as in a sky. So with my thoughts full of these happy changes, We meet again, the happiest change of all.

90

Asia And never will we part, till thy chaste sister Who guides the frozen and inconstant moon Will look on thy more warm and equal light Till her heart thaw like flakes of April snow, And love thee.

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Spirit of the Earth What! as Asia loves Prometheus? Asia Peace, wanton! thou art yet not old enough. Think ye, by gazing on each other’s eyes

78–83. The halcyons — i.e. kingfishers, from Gk ἀλκυών — are no longer fish-eating but vegetarian, and the formerly poisonous berries of the woody nightshade are now edible (see headnote to Passion: to the [Woody Nightshade] (Longman i 189–91, no. 66). The kingfishers are thinning the bunch because solanum dulcamara is peculiar in having ripe (red), half-ripe (amber) and unripe (green) berries in the same bunch; the birds are taking only the ripe berries. The phrase downward-clinging is odd as kingfishers ‘cling upward’; the suggestion may be that the Spirit observes the scene as reflected in a perfectly calm lake. With the implications of this passage, cp. Q Mab viii 127 and note. 78. lake,] Nbk 9; lake 1820, 1839. 81. bunch] In Nbk 9, this word is written in faint pencil above the original (and uncanc.) reading mass; an example of an apparently late change to the fair copy in Nbk 9 which was nevertheless included in the press transcript. berries] Nbk 9; berries, 1820, 1839. 83. sky.] sky Nbk 9; sky; 1820, 1839. 86–96. These lines were added later on the blank facing page in Nbk 9, probably to provide an anticipation of the dialogue between the Earth and Moon in IV 319–502, which S. would have been working on some time between August and December 1819. As BSM ix 637 notes, the passage was written into Nbk 9 before the fair copy of S.’s Preface to PU, which skips these lines. 86. sister] Sister Nbk 9. 90. What!] 1840; What, Nbk 9; What; 1820, 1839. 91–7. Asia wryly asks the Spirit of the Earth if he is so naive as to believe that children can be begotten by eye contact. A lamp cannot give light when it is being trimmed (i.e. cleaned out and made ready for relighting), and is here therefore likened to that ‘interlunar’ phase when the moon is invisible; prompting the Spirit of the Earth to question why he cannot produce offspring planets whose light would illumine such periods of darkness. 91. Peace, wanton!] 1840; Peace Wanton — Nbk 9; Peace, wanton, 1820, 1839. 92. ye,] Nbk 9; ye 1820, 1839. 92. Cp. Dante, Convito Treatise III Ch. 12: ‘In other intelligences she [the divine philosophy] exists in a lesser way, as though a mistress, of whom no lover has complete enjoyment, but must satisfy his longing by gazing on her’ (trans. Philip Wicksteed).

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shelley: selected poems To multiply your lovely selves, and fill With spherèd fires the interlunar air?

95

Spirit of the Earth Nay, Mother, while my sister trims her lamp ’Tis hard I should go darkling. Asia

Listen! look! [The Spirit of the Hour enters.

Prometheus We feel what thou hast heard and seen: yet speak. Sprit of the Hour Soon as the sound had ceased whose thunder filled The abysses of the sky, and the wide earth, 100 There was a change . . . the impalpable thin air And the all-circling sunlight were transformed, As if the sense of love, dissolved in them, Had folded itself round the spherèd world. My vision then grew clear, and I could see 105 Into the mysteries of the universe. Dizzy as with delight I floated down, Winnowing the lightsome air with languid plumes,

95. Mother,] Mother Nbk 9; mother, 1820, 1839. trims] In Nbk 9, the original reading was fills; S. then canc. fills and wrote trims above, but subsequently underlined fills presumably to indicate a return to that reading. But evidently, trims was preferred in the press transcript. 96–7. These are the last words spoken by Prometheus and Asia in PU. 96. Listen!] Nbk 9; Listen; 1820, 1839. 98–204. The Spirit of the Hour reports back on the journey undertaken under Prometheus’s order at III iii 64ff., and thus provides a second perspective, following that of the Spirit of the Earth, on the momentous changes following the liberation of Prometheus and his reunion with Asia. 98–9. I.e. the sound of the shell (cp. lines 54–7 above). 99. sky,] Nbk 9; sky 1820, 1839. 100–5. The atmosphere has been cleansed to transparency by Asia as the embodiment of love, electrical energy, and the spirit of animation; cp. I 831–2, II v 26–30. 100. change . . .] Nbk 9; change: 1820, 1839. 105. universe.] Universe Nbk 9; universe: 1820, 1839. 106–8. These lines are unpunctuated in Nbk 9; the grammar is ambiguous, as the subject of winnowing can be understood with equal plausibility as either the I of line 106, or the coursers of line 108. 107. Cp. II i 27, and Dante, Purgatorio (trans. Cary) ii 35: ‘Lo! how straight up to Heaven he holds them rear’d,/Winnowing the air with those eternal plumes,/That not like mortal hairs fall off or change.’

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My coursers sought their birth-place in the sun, Where they henceforth will live exempt from toil, 110 Pasturing flowers of vegetable fire; And where my moonlike car will stand within A temple, gazed upon by Phidian forms Of thee, and Asia, and the Earth, and me, And you fair nymphs, looking the love we feel, 115 In memory of the tidings it has borne; Beneath a dome fretted with graven flowers, Poised on twelve columns of resplendent stone,

108–10. Cp. Ovid, Met. iv 214–15: ‘Axe sub Hesperio sunt pascua Solis equorum’ (‘Beneath the western skies lie the pastures of the Sun’s horses’, Loeb trans.) and Claudian, De Consulato Stilichonis ii 467–70: Sic fatus croceis rorantes ignibus hortos ingreditur vallemque suam, quam flammeus ambit rivus et inriguis largum iubar ingerit herbis, quas Solis pascuntur equi (‘So saying he entered his garden starred with fiery dew, the valley round which runs a river of flame feeding with its bounteous rays the dripping weeds whereon the horses of the sun do pasture’, Loeb trans.) 110. fire;] fire — Nbk 9; fire. 1820, 1839; the dash in Nbk 9 was probably added after the completion of the following lines 111–24. 111–24. These lines were added on the blank facing page in Nbk 9; they are heavily corrected and were apparently composed straight into the nbk, presumably around the time of S.’s direct experience of the Roman architecture on which they draw (i.e. in March 1819). D. H. Reiman (‘Roman Scenes in PU 111 iv’, PQ xlvi (1967) 69–78; see also F. S. Colwell, K-SJ xlv (1996) 118–31) argues persuasively that in this description of a sun-temple of the future S. has specifically in mind ‘La Sala della Biga’ in the Vatican Museum, modified by some features taken from the Pantheon (for S.’s visits to the Vatican and the Pantheon, on successive days, see Mary Jnl i 251 for 8 and 9 March 1819, and cp. L ii 87–8). The Biga was a two-horse chariot of the moon (see Lucan, Pharsalia i 78), and its sculpture is found in the Vatican in the centre of a roughly circular room, with a fretted domed ceiling, and surrounded by pillars interspersed with statues (see Reiman 71–2 for speculation on S.’s possible adaptations of these statues to the mythic scheme of PU). The chariot’s two horses are yoked together by an amphisbæna (see line 119 and note). Reiman acknowledges that the Sala is not a temple, is not open to the sky, and has eight rather than twelve columns, and consequently suggests that the idea of an open-roofed temple may derive rather from the Pantheon. The architectural details combine to embody S.’s conception that the Car of the Hour, together with the protagonists in a revolution which has happened in real time, will be commemorated in a temple preserving their representations beyond temporal limit (see line 117 and note). For a different view of the temple, as Zoroastrian in conception, see Curran (1975) 78–9, 224–5. 112. Phidian forms] I.e. sculptures like those by Phidias, the supreme master of classical Gk sculpture, assumed to have been responsible for the giant statue of Athena which stood in the Parthenon, and for the metope, frieze, and pedimental figures of the Parthenon. 114. nymphs,] Nbk 9, 1839; nymphs 1820, 1829; perhaps in S.’s errata list. feel,] feel Nbk 9; feel; 1820, 1839. 115. it] I.e. the car of line 111 above. 117. The twelve columns perhaps suggest the Zodiac, or alternatively the twelve hours of the classical day, with the implication that in their circular arrangement they image time and its cycles transcended.

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shelley: selected poems And open to the bright and liquid sky. Yoked to it by an amphisbænic snake The likeness of those wingèd steeds will mock The flight from which they find repose. Alas, Whither has wandered now my partial tongue When all remains untold which ye would hear? As I have said, I floated to the earth: It was, as it is still, the pain of bliss To move, to breathe, to be; I wandering went Among the haunts and dwellings of mankind, And first was disappointed not to see Such mighty change as I had felt within Expressed in outward things; but soon I looked, And behold! thrones were kingless, and men walked One with the other even as spirits do: None fawned, none trampled; hate, disdain, or fear, Self-love or self-contempt, on human brows No more inscribed, as o’er the gate of hell,

118. Cp. S.’s letter to Peacock of 23–4 January 1819, describing the ‘upaithric’ (i.e. open-roofed) buildings of the Greeks: ‘They lived in a perpetual commerce with external nature and nourished themselves upon the spirit of its forms. Their theatres were all open to the mountains & the sky. Their columns that ideal type of a sacred forest with its roof of interwoven tracery admitted the light & wind, the odour & the freshness of the country penetrated the cities. Their temples were mostly upaithric; & the flying clouds the stars or the deep sky were seen above. O, but for that series of wretched wars which terminated in the Roman conquest of the world, but for the Christian religion which put a finishing stroke to the antient system; but for those changes which conducted Athens to its ruin, to what an eminence might not humanity have arrived!’ (L ii 74–5). 119. The amphisbæna was a snake with a lamp-eyed head at each end (see Lucan, Pharsalia ix 719, Paradise Lost x 524). 120–1. I.e. the sculpture of the horses will paradoxically catch in its fixity the speed of their headlong flight. 121. flight] Nbk 9, 1839; light 1820, 1829; probably on S.’s errata list. 124. earth:] Earth Nbk 9. 129. change] Nbk 9, 1820; change, 1839. within] Nbk 9, 1820: within, 1839. 130–204. Cp. the similar prophetic description in Q Mab ix 93–137. 131. behold!] Nbk 9; behold, 1820, 1839. Cp. A Retrospect of Times of Old (Longman i 240–4, no. 86) 1, and Q Mab iii 134–6. 132. do:] do, Nbk 9, 1820, 1839. 133, 137. fawned . . . frowned] In Nbk 9, these epithets are transposed; presumably S.’s change to the press transcript. 135. The subject of inscribed is the hate, disdain . . . fear, Self-love . . . self-contempt of lines 133–4 above; i.e. ‘hate [etc.] used to be inscribed on human brows just as “All hope abandon [etc.]” was inscribed over the gates of hell’.

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‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here’; None frowned, none trembled, none with eager fear Gazed on another’s eye of cold command, Until the subject of a tyrant’s will 140 Became, worse fate, the abject of his own, Which spurred him, like an outspent horse, to death. None wrought his lips in truth-entangling lines Which smiled the lie his tongue disdained to speak; None, with firm sneer, trod out in his own heart 145 The sparks of love and hope, till there remained Those bitter ashes, a soul self-consumed, And the wretch crept, a vampire among men, Infecting all with his own hideous ill.

136. abandon,] Nbk 9; abandon 1820, 1839. Recalling the words written on the gate of Hell in Dante, Inferno iii 1–9 (trans. Cary): Through me you pass into the city of woe: Through me you pass into eternal pain: Through me among the people lost for aye. Justice the founder of my fabric moved: To rear me was the task of Power divine, Supremest Wisdom, and primeval Love. Before me things create were none, save things Eternal, and eternal I endure. All hope abandon, ye who enter here. 140. abject] Concordance glosses as ‘slave’, but OED (def. B; citing this occurrence) ‘One cast off . . . an outcast’ is better; the sense is that some people become so entirely subjected to the will of a tyrant that they consciously relinquish self-determination, and are ‘cast off’ by their own will. 145. hope,] Nbk 9; hope 1820, 1839. 147. crept,] Nbk 9; crept 1820, 1839. 148. ill.] Nbk 9; ill; 1820, 1839. Cp. J&M 350–6: Yet think not though subdued — and I may well Say that I am subdued — that the full Hell Within me would infect the untainted breast Of sacred nature with its own unrest; As some perverted beings think to find In scorn or hate a medicine for the mind Which scorn or hate have wounded —

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None talked that common, false, cold, hollow talk 150 Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes, Yet question that unmeant hypocrisy With such a self-mistrust as has no name. And women, too, frank, beautiful, and kind As the free heaven which rains fresh light and dew 155 On the wide earth, passed; gentle, radiant forms, From custom’s evil taint exempt and pure; Speaking the wisdom once they could not think, Looking emotions once they feared to feel, And changed to all which once they dared not be, 160 Yet being now, made earth like Heaven; nor pride Nor jealousy, nor envy, nor ill shame, The bitterest of those drops of treasured gall, Spoilt the sweet taste of the nepenthe, love. Thrones, altars, judgement-seats, and prisons — wherein,

149–52. The verb in line 150 needs also to be understood in the line following: i.e. ‘that . . . talk which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes, yet which also makes the heart question that unmeant hypocrisy . . .’ Cp. Coleridge, Christabel 662–5: And pleasures flow in so thick and fast Upon his heart, that he at last Must needs express his love’s excess With words of unmeant bitterness. 153–63. S. repeatedly insists that the full equality of women is a necessary condition of a good society; see e.g. L&C II xxxiv–xlv, VIII xv. 155–9. For S., passion had no necessary conflict with reason, but its expression was distorted by ruling prejudices; cp. lines 193–9 below, and see Q Mab v 20–1 and note (for Godwin’s influence on S.’s thinking in this respect), viii 231–4. 155. gentle,] Nbk 9; gentle 1820, 1839. 160. made] make Nbk 9; presumably S.’s change to the press transcript. earth like Heaven;] Earth like Heaven — Nbk 9; earth like heaven; 1820, 1839. 161. ill shame,] 1820; ill shame Nbk 9; ill-shame, 1839. 163. nepenthe] See II iv 60 and note. 164. Cp. Paradise Lost v 601: ‘Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers’; see also Colossians i 16, and Revelation xx 4: ‘And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgement was given unto them . . .’. prisons —] prisons, Nbk 9; prisons; 1820, 1839. 164–204. Eds have proposed numerous solutions for the punctuation of this famously difficult passage, which is disastrously mispunctuated in 1820, 1839 and many subsequent texts, including Rossetti 1870 and Hutchinson. There appears to have been a methodically wrongheaded revision in 1820 of S.’s punctuation, perhaps suggesting an intervention by Peacock in proof-reading deriving from his failure to grasp the sense. Locock 1911 is the first ed to offer satisfactory emendation. S. seems to have taken special pains to punctuate the passage more carefully than usual in Nbk 9, particularly in lines 192–8, possibly supplementing his fair copy punctuation after seeing the effect of the pointing in 1820. He also corrected the pointing in Leigh Hunt’s presentation copy of 1820 (see BSM ix 644). The text here follows Nbk 9 in emending 1839 more radically than usual, but also introduces further pointing where necessary. This is another passage for which there is a tradition of paraphrase (see Zillman Variorum 256–7), and notwithstanding the obvious pitfalls and complexities, the present editors offer a paraphrase in

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165 And beside which, by wretched men were borne Sceptres, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes Of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance — Were like those monstrous and barbaric shapes, The ghosts of a no more remembered fame, 170 Which from their unworn obelisks look forth In triumph o’er the palaces and tombs Of those who were their conquerors, mouldering round. These imaged to the pride of Kings and Priests

support of the pointing here adopted: ‘The old oppressive institutions — which burdened people with the implements of bondage, and with books defending evil doctrines, interpreted by fools — were now like the hieroglyphics on the Egyptian obelisks in Rome (relics of a now-forgotten greatness), which stand intact among the decaying ruins of the city that had conquered Egypt. These obelisks were once emblems of religion and conquest to the Egyptian ruling classes, but are now merely something to gape at; in the same way, the relics of Earth’s final bondage stand like museum-pieces among its present inhabitants; and all those hideous forms and expressions of tyranny which men served by means of war, and imprisonment, and human sacrifice — flattering even while hating what they served — wither away over the buildings that embodied them. The gaudy pretence which those who existed under the old regime thought of as “life”, and which pretended to be a fulfilment of the ideals that people really wanted, is destroyed; the pretence is gone, the man himself remains, no longer oppressed — just simply man; free and equal, without social classes or racial or national distinctions — just simply man. — Not man without passions, however, yet man free from guilt or pain; for passion only gave rise to guilt and pain because he imposed these consequences (or allowed them to be imposed) on himself. And not free, either, from accident and death (although keeping them under control), because accident and death are the only ultimate impediments to man’s otherwise limitless potentialities.’ 167. glozed on] A pun; i.e. ‘glossed or explained’, but also ‘provided with a specious extenuating commentary’. ignorance —] ignorance, Nbk 9, 1820, 1839. 168–79. In 1818 there were ten Egyptian obelisks in Rome, mostly of solid granite; S. certainly knew at least some of them (see his letter to Peacock of 23 March 1819, L ii 83–90), and this passage draws on the associations and implications of their visual presence in the city. ‘Rome, the place of composition of Acts II and III of PU, is itself a symbol of the whole action. From the ruined top of the Baths of Caracalla [where S. actually wrote portions of the poem; see headnote] S. could look back and see the Coliseum and other ruins, including Egyptian obelisks [such as those definitely seen by S. in Piazza Navona, Piazza San Pietro, and Piazza Quirinale]. S. deploys them in the final speech of Act III as an elaborate image of historical relativism. The obelisks, with their obscene bird-headed and dog-headed gods, have, even though their own purpose is long forgotten, physically outlasted the ruins of their Roman conquerors. In the same way, after Jupiter’s fall the monuments of his oppression stand like museum-pieces among the dwellings of the peopled earth. Human dwellings decay, and in all likelihood Jupiter’s prisons etc will outlast any given set of them, but will eventually moulder in their turn. The intellectual activities of new civilisation are however not subject to decay . . .’ (GM). 168. monstrous] S. first wrote hideous, then crossed it out and wrote secret next to it; at some point, hideous was then retraced more boldly, and secret was underlined. The received reading monstrous is written on the facing page. See the passage from Landor, Gebir vi 301–8 qu. in note to IV 556. 170. Which] Nbk 9; Which, 1820, 1839. obelisks] Nbk 9; obelisks, 1820, 1839. 172. conquerors,] Nbk 9; conquerors: 1820, 1839. round.] round Nbk 9, 1820, 1839. 173. These] Nbk 9; Those 1820, 1839; The Nbk 9 reading is preferred to avoid confusion over the referent of the pronoun (the obelisks of line 170) by repetition of those from line 172. Kings and Priests] Nbk 9; kings and priests, 1820, 1839.

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A dark yet mighty faith, a power as wide 175 As is the world it wasted, and are now But an astonishment; even so the tools And emblems of its last captivity, Amid the dwellings of the peopled earth, Stand, not o’erthrown, but unregarded now; 180 And those foul shapes, abhorred by God and man, Which under many a name and many a form Strange, savage, ghastly, dark, and execrable, Were Jupiter, the tyrant of the world; And which the nations, panic-stricken, served 185 With blood, and hearts broken by long hope, and love Dragged to his altars soiled and garlandless, And slain amid men’s unreclaiming tears, Flattering the thing they feared, which fear was hate, Frown, mouldering fast, o’er their abandoned shrines: 190 The painted veil, by those who were, called life, Which mimicked, as with colours idly spread, All men believed and hoped, is torn aside —

175–6. are now/But an astonishment] I.e. they are not now meaningful. Reiman (‘Roman Scenes’ 76; see lines 111–24 and note, 168–79 and note, above; see also Reiman (1977) 193) argues that S. has in mind the hieroglyphics on the Egyptian obelisks in Rome, which were not decipherable at the time of S.’s residence in Rome (see Ozymandias, headnote and notes). But S. in these lines is referring to the monstrous and barbaric shapes of line 168, which is an odd way to describe hieroglyphics; and the passage goes on (lines 171–2) to identify the Romans as the conquerors of these shapes, which confirms that S. must be thinking of the Egyptian gods, which from their unworn obelisks look forth (line 170). 178. earth,] Earth, Nbk 9. 179. now;] Nbk 9; now. 1820, 1839. 180. God] Nbk 9; god 1820, 1839. 181. Which] Nbk 9; Which, 1820, 1839. form] Nbk 9, 1820; form, 1839. 185–7. The image suggests punishment by sacrificial murder; and as Timothy Webb (Shelley: A Voice not Understood (1977) 149–50) has shown, S. probably recalls the account in Lucretius De Re. Nat. i 80–101 of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia. Jephthah’s sacrifice of his daughter, Judges xi 30–40, and Idomeneus’s of his son, are also possible echoes. S.’s note to Q Mab v 189, ‘Even love is sold’, declares his conviction that love is degraded and destroyed by institutions and conventions that insist on continued co-habitation when the emotion itself has changed or disappeared: ‘A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.’ 186. Dragged to] Written above Slain at canc. in Nbk 9 (and also on the facing page). 187. This line has been added on the facing page in Nbk 9; it is not included in S.’s running line-count and was presumably a late addition. amid] S. first wrote among, then altered it to amid by cancelling the g and changing on to id; the change was presumably made after the press transcript, because among is the reading in 1820 and 1839 (see BSM ix 472). unreclaiming] ‘Passive, unprotesting’ (Concordance); OED cites only this occurrence. 190–2. The painted veil . . .] ‘The delusions that were thought to constitute real living by those who existed in the past, before Jupiter’s downfall’ (GM). The identical image is used in the sonnet Lift not the painted veil, but with a different meaning; see headnote and notes to that poem. 192. and] or Nbk 9; presumably S.’s change to the press transcript, although mistranscription is possible. aside —] Nbk 9; aside; 1820, 1839.

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The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains, Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed: — but man: 195 Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree, — the King Over himself; just, gentle, wise: — but man: Passionless? no — yet free from guilt or pain, Which were, for his will made, or suffered them, 200 Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves, From chance, and death, and mutability, The clogs of that which else might oversoar The loftiest star of unascended Heaven, Pinnacled dim in the intense inane. End of the Third Act

193–7. ‘The romantic and barbarous distinction of men into Kings and subjects, though it may suit the conditions of courtiers, cannot that of citizens . . . Every citizen is a member of the sovereignty, and, as such, can acknowledge no personal subjection: and his obedience can be only to the laws’ (Paine, Rights of Man Pt I; Paine Writings ii 386). 193. remains,] remains Nbk 9, 1820, 1839. 194. uncircumscribed: — but man:] Nbk 9; uncircumscribed, but man 1820, 1839. S. appears to have modified his initial punctuation here, to clarify the sense (see note to lines 164–204 above, and cp. the facsimile and commentary in BSM ix 470–1, 644). S. added a semicolon after man in Leigh Hunt’s presentation copy of 1820. The but man of lines 194 and 197 means ‘just simply man’; cp. Mont Blanc (B Text) lines 76–83 and notes, Q Mab viii 97, Adonais 328, Cyclops 612. See also Timon of Athens IV iii 499–500, Richard II V v 39–41, and Troilus and Cressida III iii 80–2: ‘And not a man for being simply man/Hath any honour, but honour for those honours/That are without him, as place, riches, and favour . . .’ 195. tribeless] Nbk 9; tribeless, 1820, 1839. 196–7. Recalling I 492. Cp. S.’s Sonnet: Political Greatness 10–14: Man who man would be, Must rule the empire of himself; in it Must be supreme, establishing his throne On vanquished will, — quelling the anarchy Of hopes and fears, — being himself alone. 196. degree, — the King] Nbk 9; degree, the king 1820, 1839. 197. wise: — but man:] Nbk 9; wise: but man 1820, 1839. 198–9. S. is thinking of such things as sexual jealousy, the moral ostracism of ‘fallen women’ and venereal disease; cp. lines 153–63 above, and see especially Q Mab viii 129–30, 230–1, ix 76–92. 198. Passionless? no —] Nbk 9; Passionless; no, 1820, 1839; S. added the question mark in Leigh Hunt’s presentation copy of 1820. 199. made,] Nbk 9; made 1820, 1839. 202. This line is written on the facing page in Nbk 9, replacing S.’s original Which clog that spirit, else which might outsoar canc. clogs] I.e. impediments. 203. Heaven,] Heaven Nbk 9; heaven, 1820, 1839. 204. inane] From Lat. inane, ‘Void space’; the word in this sense is frequent in Lucretius, and see also e.g. Virgil, Eclogue vi 31. After this line in Nbk 9, and at the very foot of the page, S. has written Prometheus, centred as if to indicate a further speech.

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Scene, — A part of the forest near the Cave of Prometheus. Panthea and Ione are sleeping: they awaken gradually during the first Song.

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Voice of Unseen Spirits The pale stars are gone! For the Sun, their swift shepherd, To their folds them compelling In the depths of the dawn, Hastes, in meteor-eclipsing array, and they flee Beyond his blue dwelling, As fawns flee the leopard . . . But where are ye? A train of dark Forms and Shadows passes by confusedly, singing. Here, oh here! We bear the bier Of the Father of many a cancelled year! Spectres we Of the dead Hours be, We bear Time to his tomb in eternity. Strew, oh strew

IV 1. S. returned to the beginning of Nbk 7 for the fair copy of Act IV (see headnote). The ‘Voice of Unseen Spirits’ which speaks here is identified at line 57 as that of the Spirits of Air and of Earth. stars] Stars Nbk 7. 2. Sun,] Sun Nbk 7; sun, 1820, 1839. shepherd,] 1820; Shepherd Nbk 7; shepherd, 1839. 3. compelling] Nbk 7; compelling, 1820, 1839. 4. dawn,] Dawn Nbk 7. 7. leopard . . .] Nbk 7; leopard. 1820; leopard, 1839. SD. The comma after confusedly is in Nbk 7 and 1820; 1839 omits it and thus alters the sense. Nbk 7 at this point has a further SD, ‘Panthea wakens’; it was presumably omitted in the press transcript (along with several others). 9. Here, oh here!] Here oh here! Nbk 7; Here, oh, here: 1820; Here, oh! here: 1839. This line answers the question in line 8, with the implication that lines 9–29 are sung by the ‘Train of dark forms and shadows’ (the passage perhaps suggests that they are thought of as dead leaves; the dead ages of the past are now blown away to nothingness). 11. Father] Nbk 7; father 1820, 1839; i.e. Jupiter, in apposition with the Time of line 14; as the King of Hours (line 20), he is buried along with the past ages darkened by his reign, and the hours of those ages here grieve for him (lines 15–20). The identification with Olympian Zeus imports into the figure of Jupiter an association with time, the sky and the calendar. Cp. II iv 32–3 and note. 13. Of the dead] Of dead Nbk 7. Presumably a change to the press transcript; the definite article is also in S.’s Italian trans. of these lines in Nbk 11 46 (though that trans. may well be of 1820; see BSM ix 494). 14. This line has been taken to indicate that time is now to be thought of as at an end; but it is only the dark time under Jupiter that is finished, as the poem clearly proceeds to a prospect of future time (following line 56 below). The whole conception of Act IV 1–179 implies not that time has ended, but that in S.’s post-revolutionary vision humanity can bring time under a measure of control. Cp. S.’s note to Q Mab viii 203–7 and editorial notes. 15. Strew, oh strew] Strew oh strew Nbk 7; Strew, oh, strew 1820; Strew, oh! strew 1839.

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Hair, not yew! Wet the dusty pall with tears, not dew! Be the faded flowers Of Death’s bare bowers Spread on the corpse of the King of Hours! Haste, oh haste! As shades are chased, Trembling, by day, from heaven’s blue waste, We melt away, Like dissolving spray, From the children of a diviner day, With the lullaby Of winds that die On the bosom of their own harmony. Ione What dark forms were they? Panthea The past Hours weak and grey, With the spoil which their toil Raked together From the conquest but One could foil.

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Ione Have they passed?

16. Cp. Adonais 91–99: ‘Another clipped her profuse locks, and threw/The wreath upon him, like an anadem,/Which frozen tears instead of pearls begem;’ these lines are based on Bion’s ‘Lament for Adonis’ 80–1: cp. also S.’s trans. of lines 18–21 of the Lament (no. 201; Longman ii 697–700): ‘The Oread nymphs are weeping — Aphrodite/With hair unbound is wandering through the woods,/ Wildered, ungirt, unsandalled — ’. 21. oh] Nbk 7; oh, 1820, 1839. 23. day,] Day, Nbk 7. waste,] waste Nbk 7; waste. 1820, 1839. 24–9. These lines are adapted from the last six lines of the fragmentary lyric The world is dreary (no. 203; Longman ii 707–8). 26. day,] day. Nbk 7. The stop marked the original end of this stanza and speech; the next three lines, 27–9, were squeezed into Nbk 7 later, thus exceeding the established stanza pattern. 29. harmony.] harmony Nbk 7; harmony! 1820, 1839. At this point in Nbk 7 is a stage direction ‘they vanish’, probably written in before the addition of lines 27–9, and presumably dropped in the press transcript. 31–4. I.e. the past Hours deprived human life of what they could while oppression lasted. 34. but One] Prometheus. The draft in Nbk 11 49 at first read which none, canc. and replaced with the received reading.

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shelley: selected poems Panthea They have passed; They outspeeded the blast; While’tis said, they are fled — Ione Whither, oh whither? Panthea To the dark, to the past, to the dead.

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Voice of Unseen Spirits Bright clouds float in heaven, Dew-stars gleam on earth, Waves assemble on ocean, They are gathered and driven By the storm of delight, by the panic of glee! They shake with emotion, They dance in their mirth — But where are ye? The pine boughs are singing Old songs with new gladness, The billows and fountains Fresh music are flinging, Like the notes of a spirit, from land and from sea; The storms mock the mountains

36. blast;] blast, Nbk 7, 1820, 1839. 37. fled —] Nbk 7; fled: 1820, 1839. 38. oh] Nbk 7; oh, 1820; oh! 1839. 40. heaven,] Heaven, Nbk 7. 41. earth,] Earth, Nbk 7. 42. ocean,] Ocean, Nbk 7. 44. storm] Storm Nbk 7. panic] In the Gk sense, from Pan. 46. mirth —] Nbk 7; mirth. 1820, 1839. 52. spirit,] spirit Nbk 7, 1820, 1839.

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With the thunder of gladness — But where are ye?

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Ione What charioteers are these? Panthea Where are their chariots? Semichorus of Hours I The voice of the Spirits of Air and of Earth Have drawn back the figured curtain of sleep Which covered our being and darkened our birth

54. gladness —] gladness. Nbk 7, 1820, 1839. The first four words of this line in Nbk 7 are written above Both howl in their canc. 57–179. These are the future hours of the new ages awaiting humanity. S.’s conception adapts the classical Horae, embodiments of time and the changing seasons and often associated with the Graces; as attendants on Venus, they were welcome at marriages and births because of their power to bring gifts and to make things grow, and were frequently figured in a dance. 57. and of Earth] and earth Nbk 7; presumably a change to the press transcript (S.’s Italian trans. follows the received text; see line 13 and note above). 58. Have] Attracted into the plural by Spirits; many eds have followed Rossetti 1870 in emending to has, but this obviously affects the prosody, and voice could be understood as plural. figured curtain] Cp. III iv 190 and note.

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shelley: selected poems In the deep — A Voice In the deep? Semichorus II Oh, below the deep. Semichorus I An hundred ages we had been kept Cradled in visions of hate and care, And each one who waked as his brother slept Found the truth — Semichorus II Worse than his visions were!

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Semichorus I We have heard the lute of Hope in sleep; We have known the voice of Love in dreams; We have felt the wand of Power, and leap — Semichorus II As the billows leap in the morning beams.

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Chorus Weave the dance on the floor of the breeze, Pierce with song heaven’s silent light, Enchant the Day that too swiftly flees, To check its flight ere the cave of Night. Once the hungry Hours were hounds Which chased the Day like a bleeding deer,

60. deep —] Nbk 7; deep. 1820, 1839. Oh,] 1820; Oh Nbk 7; Oh! 1839. 61–7. The future hours have existed in potential through the ages of oppression, imagining the evil conditions and sometimes waking to a brief intimation of their actuality; they have also been solaced and encouraged by the hopeful elements which were discernible in human experience. 61. An] Nbk 7, 1820; A 1829, 1839. 62. visions] Written above dreams canc. in Nbk 7; cp. line 66 below. 63. slept] Nbk 7; slept, 1820, 1839. 66. Love] love Nbk 7. dreams;] dream Nbk 7; dreams, 1820, 1839; changed in the press transcript together with the rhyme-word beams in line 68 (the draft in Nbk 11 86 also has plurals; dream in Nbk 7 may be the result of cramped space). 68. beams.] beam Nbk 7; beams! 1820, 1839. 69–72. These lines seem implicitly to suggest a change of emphasis: up to this point, time has been urged to pass quickly; now, it is urged to slow down. 70. heaven’s] Heaven’s Nbk 7. 71. Day] Nbk 7; day 1820, 1839. 72. check] Written below soothe canc. in Nbk 7. Night.] Night; Nbk 7; night. 1820, 1839. 73–6. See I 454–7 and note. 74. Day] Day, Nbk 7; day 1820, 1839.

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And it limped and stumbled with many wounds Through the nightly dells of the desert year. But now — oh weave the mystic measure Of music and dance and shapes of light, Let the Hours, and the Spirits of might and pleasure, Like the clouds and sunbeams, unite. A Voice Unite! Panthea See, where the Spirits of the human mind Wrapped in sweet sounds, as in bright veils, approach.

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Chorus of Spirits We join the throng Of the dance and the song, By the whirlwind of gladness borne along; As the flying-fish leap From the Indian deep, And mix with the sea-birds half asleep.

76. year.] Year Nbk 7. 77. now — oh] Nbk 7; now, oh 1820; now, oh! 1839. 78. music and dance] Nbk 7; music, and dance, 1820, 1839. 79. the Spirits] all Spirits Nbk 7; presumably S.’s change to the press transcript, reverting to the draft reading in Nbk 11 89. See line 131 below. 80. and sunbeams] and the sunbeams Nbk 7; probably changed in the press transcript along with the preceding line. Unite!] Nbk 7, 1820; Unite. 1839. 81. As various commentators have noted, these Spirits of the human mind, which speak in chorus with the future hours to line 179, are akin to or perhaps identical with those which comforted Prometheus in I 672–800, but their potential may now be realised. 82. as in bright veils,] like radiant veils, Nbk 7; presumably S.’s change to the press transcript. In Nbk 7, this line first read Clothed in sweet song, like radiant garments, come. 83–8. This stanza form, continued in lines 93–128 and 135–58, is that of S.’s The world is dreary, drafted in Nbk 11 149–50. 86–7. S. appears to introduce an understated sequence of evolutionary ideas. The fish in their element are repeatedly hinted at in lines 93–128, evolving first into birds (line 120) and ultimately (line 137) into mammals; thus, the continuing evolution of mind into future forms is underpinned by celebration of the preceding phases of the evolutionary process. S. was thoroughly familiar with late eighteenth-century evolutionary thought, which is repeatedly discussed in e.g. Darwin. See Botanic Garden, note to i 101: ‘From having observed the gradual evolution of the young animal or plant from its egg or seed; and afterwards its successive advances to its more perfect state, or maturity; philosophers of all ages seem to have imagined, that the great world itself likewise had its infancy and its gradual progress to maturity; this seems to have given origin to the very antient and sublime allegory of Eros, or Divine Love, producing the world from the egg of Night, as it floated in Chaos’. Cp. Akenside, Pleasures of the Imagination (1772) ii 257–61: The same paternal hand, From the mute shell-fish gasping on the shore, To men, to angels, to celestial minds, Will ever lead the generations on Through higher scenes of being. 88. half asleep.] Nbk 7, 1820; half-asleep. 1839.

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90

Chorus of Hours Whence come ye, so wild and so fleet, For sandals of lightning are on your feet, And your wings are soft and swift as thought, And your eyes are as Love which is veiled not?

95

Chorus of Spirits We come from the mind Of human kind, Which was late so dusk, and obscene, and blind; Now’tis an ocean Of clear emotion, A heaven of serene and mighty motion;

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From that deep abyss Of wonder and bliss, Whose caverns are crystal palaces; From those skiey towers Where Thought’s crowned Powers Sit watching your dance, ye happy Hours; From the dim recesses Of woven caresses, Where lovers catch ye by your loose tresses; From the azure isles Where sweet Wisdom smiles, Delaying your ships with her siren wiles; From the temples high Of Man’s ear and eye, Roofed over Sculpture and Poesy; From the murmurings Of the unsealed springs Where Science bedews her daedal wings.

92. Love] Nbk 7; love 1820, 1839. 96. ocean] Ocean, Nbk 7. 98. heaven] Heaven Nbk 7. motion;] motion. Nbk 7, 1820, 1839. 99–116. The Spirits originate in the mind’s capacities for wonder (99–101), thought (102–4), love (105– 7), wisdom (108–10), art (111–13), and scientific knowledge (114–16). 99. abyss] Abyss Nbk 7. 103. Powers] Nbk 7; powers 1820, 1839. 104. Hours;] Hours Nbk 7; Hours! 1820, 1839 105–10. Individual minds will effectively be able to prolong the period of their existence through the ‘slowing’ of time by a more concentrated exercise of consciousness; see S.’s note to Q Mab viii 203–7. 108. isles] Nbk 7; isles, 1820, 1839. 110. wiles;] wiles Nbk 7, 1820; wiles. 1839. 112. Man’s] man’s Nbk 7. 116. her] Nbk 7; his 1820, 1839. The reading in Nbk 7 is not very clear, and Mary possibly mistranscribed; as Zillman Text notes, S. elsewhere refers to Science as feminine. daedal] Dædal Nbk 7, 1820, 1839.

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Years after years, Through blood and tears, And a thick hell of hatreds, and hopes, and fears, We waded and flew, And the islets were few Where the bud-blighted flowers of happiness grew. Our feet now, every palm, Are sandalled with calm, And the dew of our wings is a rain of balm; And beyond our eyes The human love lies Which makes all it gazes on, Paradise. Chorus of Spirits and Hours Then weave the web of the mystic measure; From the depths of the sky and the ends of the earth, Come, swift Spirits of might and of pleasure, Fill the dance and the music of mirth, As the waves of a thousand streams rush by To an ocean of splendour and harmony! Chorus of Spirits Our spoil is won, Our task is done, We are free to dive, or soar, or run . . . Beyond and around, Or within the bound

118. blood and tears,] blood and tears Nbk 7; blood, and tears, 1820, 1839. 119. fears,] Nbk 7; fears; 1820, 1839. 126. And beyond our eyes] Nbk 7; And, beyond our eyes, 1820, 1839. 127. lies] Nbk 7, 1820; lies, 1839. 128. on,] Nbk 7; on 1820, 1839. 129. Following this line in Nbk 7 is a canc. line Of music & dance & shapes of light. 130. earth,] Earth Nbk 7. 134. ocean] Ocean Nbk 7. 135–58. Anticipating interplanetary travel and the colonisation of outer space. As Cameron (1974) 544–7 suggests, S.’s interest in astronomy, established since his schooldays, would have familiarised him with contemporary ideas (deriving chiefly from Kant and Herschel) concerning the immensity of the universe and the vast number of stars. Cp. ‘On the Devil and Devils’ (Prose 270): ‘The late invention and improvement of telescopes has considerably enlarged the notions of men respecting the bounds of the Universe . . .’ See also S.’s notes to Q Mab i 242–3, 252–3. 135–40. Cp. Midsummer Night’s Dream IV i 102–3: ‘We the globe can compass soon,/Swifter than the wandering moon’; and see also Milton, Comus 1012–16. 137. run . . .] Nbk 7; run; 1820, 1839. 138. and] In Nbk 7, S. has overwritten an ampersand with or; 1820 and subsequent eds read and, which was possibly restored by S. in the press transcript but which could easily be a misreading.

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shelley: selected poems Which clips the world with darkness round. We’ll pass the eyes Of the starry skies Into the hoar deep to colonize; Death, Chaos, and Night, From the sound of our flight Shall flee, like mist from a tempest’s might. And Earth, Air, and Light, And the Spirit of Might, Which drives round the stars in their fiery flight; And Love, Thought, and Breath, The powers that quell Death, Wherever we soar shall assemble beneath. And our singing shall build In the void’s loose field A world for the Spirit of Wisdom to wield; We will take our plan From the new world of man, And our work shall be called the Promethean. Chorus of Hours Break the dance, and scatter the song; Let some depart, and some remain. Semichorus I We, beyond heaven, are driven along —

140. Cameron (1974) 546 follows Grabo (1930) 165–7 in understanding world to mean ‘the universe’ here; but beyond in line 138 is incompatible with such a reading, and suggests rather that S. is thinking of the earth’s atmosphere. Some Spirits will travel beyond the atmosphere to create new human regions in space (Semichorus I, to line 171), while others will create new conditions for human life on earth (Semichorus II, to line 174). In line 155 below, world is clearly used in the modern sense of ‘planet’. See Butter (1954) 160 for good commentary and convincing arguments against Grabo’s interpretation. clips] I.e. ‘closely surrounds’. 141. eyes] Eyes Nbk 7. 143. deep] Deep Nbk 7. colonize;] colonize Nbk 7; colonize: 1820, 1839. 145. flight] Nbk 7; flight, 1820, 1839. 146. tempest’s] Tempests Nbk 7. 147–52. The new human planet will be made out of the elements, controlled by gravity (the Spirit of Might), and animated by human attributes (Love, Thought and Breath). 147. Earth, Air, and Light,] earth air and light Nbk 7. 149. stars] Stars Nbk 7. 150. Love, Thought, and Breath,] love, thought, and breath Nbk 7. 151. Death,] death, Nbk 7.154. void’s] Void’s Nbk 7. 156–8. Mind is to be the measure of everything. 161. heaven,] Heaven, Nbk 7. along —] Nbk 7; along: 1820, 1839.

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Semichorus II Us, the enchantments of earth retain —

165

Semichorus I Ceaseless and rapid and fierce and free With the Spirits which build a new earth and sea, And a Heaven where yet Heaven could never be — Semichorus II Solemn, and slow, and serene, and bright, Leading the Day, and outspeeding the Night, With the Powers of a world of perfect light —

170

Semichorus I We whirl, singing loud, round the gathering sphere, Till the trees, and the beasts, and the clouds appear From its chaos made calm by love, not fear — Semichorus II We encircle the oceans and mountains of earth, And the happy forms of its death and birth Change to the music of our sweet mirth.

175

Chorus of Hours and Spirits Break the dance, and scatter the song — Let some depart, and some remain; Wherever we fly we lead along In leashes, like star-beams, soft yet strong, The clouds that are heavy with Love’s sweet rain.

162. Us,] Superimposed over We in Nbk 7; the comma is possibly canc., and is omitted in 1820 and 1839. retain —] Nbk 7; retain: 1820, 1839. 163. Nbk 7; Ceaseless, and rapid, and fierce, and free, 1820, 1839. 165. Heaven where yet Heaven] Nbk 7; heaven where yet heaven 1820, 1839. be —] Nbk 7; be. 1820, 1839. The liberated Spirits of the human mind now have the potential to create in space an actual paradise in place of the fabled Christian ‘Heaven’ conventionally located in the sky. Cp. Revelation xxi 1: ‘And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea’. 167. Day,] day Nbk 7. Night,] night Nbk 7. 168. Powers] Nbk 7; powers 1820, 1839. light —] Nbk 7; light. 1820, 1839. 169–71. Describing the evolution of a habitable planet; Cameron (1974) 546 and Grabo (1930) 166 note that gathering sphere perhaps alludes specifically to the hypothesis, found in Herschel, Laplace and Erasmus Darwin, that the solid matter of new planets is formed from the stuff of nebulae. 171. fear —] Nbk 7; fear. 1820, 1839. 172. oceans and mountains of earth,] Oceans and Mountains of Earth Nbk 7; ocean and mountains of earth, 1820, 1839; the s of Oceans in Nbk 7 is not well-formed and could have been missed in transcription. 175. song —] Nbk 7; song, 1820, 1839. 176. remain;] remain Nbk 7; remain, 1820, 1839. 179. Love’s] Nbk 7; love’s 1820, 1839. In Nbk 7, this line is followed by a stage direction, ‘they depart’, which was presumably dropped in the press transcript.

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Panthea 180 Ha! they are gone! Ione Yet feel you no delight From the past sweetness? Panthea As the bare green hill, When some soft cloud vanishes into rain, Laughs with a thousand drops of sunny water To the unpavilioned sky! Ione Even whilst we speak 185 New notes arise . . . What is that awful sound? Panthea ’Tis the deep music of the rolling world, Kindling within the strings of the waved air Æolian modulations. Ione Listen too, How every pause is filled with under-notes, 190 Clear, silver, icy, keen, awakening tones, Which pierce the sense, and live within the soul, As the sharp stars pierce winter’s crystal air And gaze upon themselves within the sea.

180–93. Evidence from Nbk 7 suggests these lines were almost certainly added later, written into a space left by S. to bridge the opening lyric sequence of the Act with the blank verse account of the spheres of Earth and Moon that picks up at line 194 (see BSM ix 30–3, 502). 181. hill,] hill Nbk 7, 1820, 1839. 184–9. The approaching Spirits of the Earth and the Moon clearly make a sound. S. no doubt has the ‘music of the spheres’ primarily in mind; but King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work (2nd edn 1971) 191, also notes that Adam Walker (Walker 406) was impressed by Newton’s observation that ‘the widths of the spectrum occupied by each of the seven colours correspond exactly with the frequency-differences between the seven musical notes’; S. may be positing a further correspondence with the mathematical relations obtaining between the orbits of the planets. See also Darwin, Loves of the Plants, Interlude III. 185. arise . . .] Nbk 7; arise. 1820, 1839. 186–7. These lines are unpunctuated in Nbk 7.1820 has a comma after air. In 1839 the comma after air is omitted, and one inserted after world; this distinct alteration to the sense may derive from S.’s errata list. 187. waved air] S. was familiar with the wave theory of sound. 190. keen,] Nbk 7; keen 1820, 1839.

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Panthea But see where, through two openings in the forest 195 Which hanging branches overcanopy, And where two runnels of a rivulet, Between the close moss, violet-inwoven, Have made their path of melody — like sisters Who part with sighs that they may meet in smiles, 200 Turning their dear disunion to an isle Of lovely grief, a wood of sweet sad thoughts — Two visions of strange radiance float upon The ocean-like enchantment of strong sound, Which flows intenser, keener, deeper yet 205 Under the ground and through the windless air. Ione I see a chariot like that thinnest boat In which the Mother of the Months is borne

194–205. Panthea sees and hears the approach of the spirits of the Moon and the Earth, one within a chariot, the other within a sphere. These symbolic visions of the Spirits offer concentrated complex combinations of qualities and attributes, including a dense scientific allusiveness. The two visions appear through two openings in the forest along two runnels, i.e. small streams or brooklets, formed by the divergence of a rivulet so as to form an island. S. perhaps suggests in symbolic terms the recurrently shifting spatial relations of planets in the solar system, parting and meeting in a pattern dictated by the inter-relation of orbits under gravity. The details of the two elaborate descriptions which follow are conceived in overall terms to associate the Spirit of the Moon with outer space (lines 206–35), and the Spirit of the Earth with atomic space (lines 236–68). The conception of the whole passage, and more particularly the description of the Spirit of the Earth’s sphere, derives in part from the apocalyptic vision of God in a machine in Ezekiel i, and more specifically from various details of phrasing and diction in Milton’s adaptation of Ezekiel in Paradise Lost vi 749–852 (see Wiltrude L. Smith, ‘An Overlooked Source for Prometheus Unbound’, SP xlviii (1951) 783–92, and Ants Oras, ‘The Multitudinous Orb: Some Miltonic Elements in Shelley’, MLQ xvi (1955) 247–57). 197. violet-inwoven,] 1820; violet-inwoven Nbk 7; violet inwoven, 1839. 198. melody —] melody, Nbk 7, 1820, 1839. sisters] Written above friends canc. in Nbk 7. 201. thoughts —] thoughts Nbk 7; thoughts; 1820, 1839. 203. ocean-like] Ocean-like Nbk 7. 206–13. The new moon, appearing as a bright silver crescent with the rest of the moon obscured but still visible (lines 210–13), as in Coleridge’s epigraph (from ‘The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence’) to the ‘Dejection Ode’: ‘Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon,/With the old Moon in her arms’. See also TL 72–84. 207–9. Cp. Samson Agonistes 86–9: The sun to me is dark And silent as the moon, When she deserts the night, Hid in her vacant interlunar cave. 207. Mother of the Months] Nbk 7; mother of the months 1820, 1839.

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By ebbing light into her western cave When she upsprings from interlunar dreams, 210 O’er which is curved an orblike canopy Of gentle darkness, and the hills and woods, Distinctly seen through that dusk aery veil, Regard like shapes in an enchanter’s glass; Its wheels are solid clouds, azure and gold, 215 Such as the genii of the thunderstorm Pile on the floor of the illumined sea When the sun rushes under it; they roll And move and grow as with an inward wind. Within it sits a wingèd infant, white 220 Its countenance, like the whiteness of bright snow, Its plumes are as feathers of sunny frost, Its limbs gleam white, through the wind-flowing folds 208. light] Nbk 7; night 1820, 1839. The reading in 1820 is obviously wrong (the formation of li in Nbk 7 somewhat resembles an n) and implies that S. cannot have made the press transcript, as given his long-standing and informed interest in astronomy it is very unlikely that he would have made this error in copying from his own poem; ebbing night would suggest that the new moon sets in the west as the sun rises in the east, when S.’s sense is that the new moon sets with the setting sun (see lines 214–18 and note, below). This crux also suggests that Mary did not use the nbks in her possession to check her revised text of PU in 1839. 209. interlunar] I.e. between a waning and waxing moon. 210–13. S. recalls Paradise Lost i 286–91: the broad circumference Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views At ev’ning from the top of Fesole, Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe. Milton is thinking of Galileo, whose observations of the moon by telescope (an enchanter’s glass) first detected lunar equivalents of earthly landcsape (here obscured by the dusk aery veil of the earth’s shadow). 210. curved] Nbk 7, 1820, 1829; curbed 1839, 1840; a misprint. 211. woods,] woods Nbk 7, 1820, 1839. 213. Regard] I.e. ‘I regard . . .’; the subject is understood in parallel with ‘I see . . .’ in line 206 above. OED does offer a definition of regard as ‘To look, appear’ (def. 12), but describes this sense as ‘rare’, and with S.’s usage in this line as the only citation. 214–18. Presumably, S. has literally in mind the appearance of storm clouds over the sea at sunset, with the crescent moon low in the west (cp. lines 202–3 above). The intense detail also suggests symbolic meanings: S. perhaps thinks of the moon as having developed a luminous envelope, with sun-spots, like the sun in contemporary astronomical accounts; or he may hint at the processes believed, by Herschel and others, to be involved in the creation and structure of nebulae in outer space. 217. sun] Sun Nbk 7. 218. wind.] Nbk 7; wind; 1820, 1839. 219–23. The whiteness of the Spirit of the Moon is of course in visual terms obvious, but the repeated emphasis here further suggests that with no atmosphere to act as a prism, white is the only colour possible on the moon (cp. I 64–5, 82–3, II iii 72–5). Cp. Revelation i 14: ‘His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were as a flame of fire’. 219. infant,] Infant, Nbk 7.

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Of its white robe, woof of etherial pearl. Its hair is white, — the brightness of white light 225 Scattered in strings; yet its two eyes are heavens Of liquid darkness, which the Deity Within seems pouring, as a storm is poured From jagged clouds, out of their arrowy lashes, Tempering the cold and radiant air around 230 With fire that is not brightness; in its hand It sways a quivering moonbeam, from whose point A guiding power directs the chariot’s prow Over its wheelèd clouds, which as they roll Over the grass and flowers and waves, wake sounds 235 Sweet as a singing rain of silver dew.

224–5. Again the description combines a literal appropriateness with possibilities of scientific or quasi-scientific reference. The moon’s beams are likened to hair; cp. e.g. S.’s trans. of the Homeric Hymn To the Moon (Longman ii, no. 157): ‘Around the earth/From her immortal head in Heaven shot forth/Far light is scattered’; Cenci III i 6–7: ‘How comes this hair undone?/Its wandering strings must be what blind me so’; Alastor 248–9: ‘his scattered hair/Sered by the autumn of strange suffering’ (and cp. note to PU II iv 139). But the white light/Scattered in strings also suggests that ‘if the moon has no atmosphere there will be no bending of the light rays, which will be reflected directly without curvature’ (Grabo (1930) 154, who also proposes the further possibilities that S. is thinking of the light produced in electrical experiments, or of the fancied lunar equivalent of the aurora borealis). Cp. Herschel, ‘Observations of a Comet . . .’, Philosophical Transactions cii (1812) 134: ‘. . . had the curtain of light, which was drawn over it [the comet], been of any great thickness, the scattered rays of its lustre would have taken away the appearance of its darkness . . .’ (see the contents of this volume of the Transactions for a good example of the range of contemporary scientific interests variously at work in PU). 224. white, —] Nbk 7; white, 1820, 1839. 225–30. Herschel’s discovery of ‘dark heat rays’ (i.e. infra-red radiation) had been developed by Davy (Elements of Chemical Philosophy 221) to explain why the moon’s light is apparently without heat (see Grabo (1930) 111). S. is here thinking primarily of the dark craters visible on the moon, and attributing to them, speculatively, the emission of invisible rays; but S. is presumably thinking rather of ultra-violet light, because it is clear here and elsewhere that the moon is very cold (see lines 356–61 below). The apparent implication of hot rays in line 230 should therefore be understood in the context of the simile beginning as a storm is poured in line 227, i.e. as a predicate of the storm-lightning to which the moon’s rays are compared. 225. strings;] strings, Nbk 7; string; 1820, 1829; probably on S.’s errata list. heavens] Heavens Nbk 7. 229. around] Nbk 7; around, 1820, 1839. 230. that] which Nbk 7; presumably S.’s change to the press transcript. 232. The guiding power of the moonbeam held by the Spirit presumably embodies the moon’s exercise of gravitational and tidal influence. 234. Punctuated as in Nbk 7; Over the grass, and flowers, and waves, wake sounds, 1820, 1839.

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Panthea And from the other opening in the wood Rushes, with loud and whirlwind harmony, A sphere, which is as many thousand spheres, Solid as crystal, yet through all its mass 240 Flow, as through empty space, music and light: Ten thousand orbs involving and involved, Purple and azure, white and green and golden, Sphere within sphere; and every space between Peopled with unimaginable shapes,

236–52. The perspective shifts from telescopic to microscopic. The Spirit of the Earth sits within a sphere consisting of thousands of smaller spheres which, each spinning on its own axis, and visible through and between each other, are all in energetic movement. In literary terms, the passage draws as noted above (note to lines 194–205) on Ezekiel i and Paradise Lost vi 749ff., and perhaps on Dante, Purgatorio xxix (which Milton echoes and which itself derives in part from Ezekiel). There is little doubt that the sphere also embodies S.’s understanding of contemporary scientific ideas concerning the atomic structure of matter, although the visionary manner does not suggest any closely specific sources. Cp. Refutation of Deism: ‘Matter, such as we behold it, is not inert. It is infinitely active and subtile. Light, electricity and magnetism are fluids not surpassed by thought itself in tenuity and activity: like thought they are sometimes the cause and sometimes the effect of motion; and, distinct as they are from every other class of substances, with which we are acquainted, seem to possess equal claims with thought to the unmeaning distinction of immateriality.’ (Prose Works i 116). S. was certainly familiar with recent developments in chemistry; John Dalton’s New System of Chemical Philosophy, sketching an atomic theory of the elements, began to appear in 1808, by when scientists (such as Davy) and scientific popularisers (such as Darwin and Adam Walker) were engaged in energetic discussion of the implications and nature of molecules and atoms, following new research on the constituent nature of solids, liquids and gases (see Grabo (1930) 140ff., Butter (1954) 155). Here as elsewhere in PU these new ideas merge in S.’s description with older scientific ideas such as the notion of ‘concentric earths’ (see Darwin, Botanic Garden, Additional Note xxiv to Economy of Vegetation, ‘Granite’), although not all efforts of explanation in terms of specific scientific sources are convincing (see e.g. Thomas A. Reisner, ‘Some Models for Shelley’s Multitudinous Orb’ K-SJ xxiii (1974) 52–9). S.’s orbs even recall in general terms the Epicurean atomism of Lucretius (De Re. Nat. ii passim.). 238, 243, 247–8. Cp. Ezekiel x 10: ‘And as for their appearances, they four had one likeness, as if a wheel had been in the midst of a wheel’. 239–52. Cp. Paradise Lost v 620–4: Mystical dance, which yonder starry sphere Of planets and of fixed in all her wheels Resembles nearest, mazes intricate, Eccentric, intervolved, yet regular Then most, when most irregular they seem [.] See also Paradise Lost v 594–9, viii 80–4. 242. white and green] Nbk 7; white, green, 1820, 1839. Nbk 7 at first read Purple & azure, golden white & green. S. then canc. white & green, placed a caret after azure, and wrote in white & green & above. The writing is smudged and the ampersand after white could easily have been missed in transcription. For these colours, cp. Paradise Lost vii 479, ‘spots of gold and purple, azure and green’, and see also ix 429. 243–5. Early experiments with the microscope dramatically transformed scientific understanding of the minute bases of matter, which appeared to consist equally of extremely small basic particles, and of previously unimaginably confined space between these basic particles. See e.g. Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, ‘Microscopical Observations’, Philosophical Transactions ix (1674) 378–85.

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245 Such as ghosts dream dwell in the lampless deep, Yet each inter-transpicuous; and they whirl Over each other with a thousand motions, Upon a thousand sightless axles spinning, And with the force of self-destroying swiftness, 250 Intensely, slowly, solemnly roll on, Kindling with mingled sounds, and many tones, Intelligible words and music wild. With mighty whirl the multitudinous Orb Grinds the bright brook into an azure mist 255 Of elemental subtlety, like light; And the wild odour of the forest flowers, The music of the living grass and air, The emerald light of leaf-entangled beams, Round its intense, yet self-conflicting speed, 260 Seem kneaded into one aërial mass Which drowns the sense. Within the Orb itself, Pillowed upon its alabaster arms, Like to a child o’erwearied with sweet toil, On its own folded wings, and wavy hair, 265 The Spirit of the Earth is laid asleep, And you can see its little lips are moving Amid the changing light of their own smiles, Like one who talks of what he loves in dream. Ione ’Tis only mocking the Orb’s harmony . . . 246. inter-transpicuous;] inter-transpicuous, Nbk 7 (as two unhyphenated words), 1820, 1839. ‘Visible through or between each other’; OED gives this occurrence as the only example. Cp. Southey, Curse of Kehama vii 9: ‘that etherial Lake whose waters lie/Blue and transpicuous, like another sky’. 251–2. These lines were added in the press transcript. A first attempt to draft them is made vertically by this passage in Nbk 7 (f. 9r), and the received reading is worked out in Nbk 9 (f. 37r) on the page facing the closing lines of Act III. 253–61. Suggesting the earth’s atmosphere, ‘ground’ out of the ether through which the earth moves. 253. Orb] orb Nbk 7. 258. beams,] beams Nbk 7, 1820, 1839. 259. intense,] Nbk 7; intense 1820, 1839. self-conflicting] I.e. at once moving forward as a whole, and containing innumerable counter-directional movements. 261. Orb] orb Nbk 7. 262–8. The strikingly precise visualisation perhaps suggests a memory of William Shelley, who died in Rome aged 3½ on 7 June 1819 (between composition of the third and fourth acts of PU). 263. Like to a child o’erwearied] Like a child overwearied Nbk 7; a change to the press transcript. The alteration restores an iambic feel to the pentameter, although the line in its original form gives a metrical effect quite common in S., of a sharply marked counter-rhythm within a blank verse context (cp. e.g. line 221 above). 265. This Spirit of the Earth does not seem identical with the Spirit of the Earth in III iii and iv. Both radiate light from the head, but the Spirit’s in Act III is emerald (III iv 3), where this Spirit’s is azure or golden (cp. line 271 below). This Spirit also appears not to have the attributes of Eros, and generally to participate less in the poem’s network of classical motifs, and to suggest rather a quasi-scientific register. 266. moving] Nbk 7; moving, 1820, 1839. 269. mocking] I.e. echoing or copying (with no sense of derogation; cp. Alastor 425). Orb’s harmony . . .] Nbk 7; orb’s harmony. 1820, 1839.

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Panthea 270 And from a star upon its forehead, shoot, Like swords of azure fire, or golden spears With tyrant-quelling myrtle overtwined, Embleming Heaven and Earth united now, Vast beams like spokes of some invisible wheel 275 Which whirl as the Orb whirls, swifter than thought, Filling the abyss with sunlike lightenings, And perpendicular now, and now transverse,

270–9. Cp. Q Mab 146–54: Yet, human Spirit, bravely hold thy course, Let virtue teach thee firmly to pursue The gradual paths of an aspiring change: For birth and life and death, and that strange state Before the naked soul has found its home, All tend to perfect happiness, and urge The restless wheels of being on their way, Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life, Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal . . . The Spirit radiates beams of light like spokes of some invisible wheel, which penetrate the earth’s strata and lay bare its secrets (cp. II iii 51–2). The beams’ association with lightenings suggests electricity, and Grabo (1930) 144ff. argued that S. had in mind in the Spirit’s beams, not simply the colours produced in electrical experiments, but specifically the aurora borealis (assumed to be an electrical phenomenon). S.’s sun-like lightenings,/And perpendicular now, and now transverse might also suggest the concept, entertained by contemporary scientists, of ‘polarised light’ (see e.g. Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy 53). S. was familiar with contemporary scientific opinion that electricity, heat, light, magnetism and love were related substances which existed in different modifications of superfine ‘ether’ (see notes to I 122–3, 134, 765, II iii 66, iv 163–6, v 26–30, III iv 1–19). Any one specific scientific source here is unlikely; the underlying idea is that natural forces can be used to know and understand the history and true nature of the earth. S.’s overall conception may derive from Addison, Tatler 100 (ed. D. Bond, 3 vols (1987) ii 113–19), which describes a morally redemptive vision of a figure resembling ‘the Goddess of Justice’ who holds a mirror ‘endowed with the Same qualities as that which the Painters put into the Hand of Truth’. A light streams from the mirror which exposes falsehood and injustice, and which ‘pierced into all the dark Corners and Recesses of the Universe, and by that Means detected many Writings and Records which had been hidden or buried by Time, Chance or Design’. Nbk 7; orb’s harmony. 1820, 1839. 272. tyrant-quelling myrtle] The epithet is from Coleridge, ‘France: an Ode’ (1798) 37. Myrtle was sacred to Venus and thus associated with love (see Virgil, Eclogue vii 61, and Peacock, Rhododaphne (1818), note to Canto ii 176). ‘Among the Greeks victorious warriors were crowned with myrtle wreaths. There is perhaps a reference here to Harmodius and Aristogeiton who struck down Hipparchus the Tyrant and made Athens free in the year 514 BC. In the hymn of Callistratus to Harmodius there is a refrain which runs — ἐν μύρτου κλαδὶ τὸ ξίϕος ϕορήσω — ‘I’ll wreathe the sword in the myrtle bough’. To S., tyranny and ignorance were consubstantial powers; the rays of knowledge are weapons to strike down tyrants’ (Hughes 1820; the reference is persuasive, and S. would doubtless have encountered the Gk refrain, which is among the most famous of Gk drinking-songs, perhaps in a school anthology). 273. Heaven and Earth] Nbk 7; heaven and earth 1820, 1839. 274. spokes] Nbk 7, 1839; spoke 1820, 1829; corrected from S.’s errata list (also corrected by S. in Leigh Hunt’s presentation copy of 1820). 275. Orb] orb Nbk 7, 1820, 1839. 276. sunlike lightenings,] sunlike lightenings Nbk 7; sun-like lightnings, 1820, 1839.

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Pierce the dark soil, and as they pierce and pass, Make bare the secrets of the Earth’s deep heart; 280 Infinite mines of adamant and gold, Valueless stones, and unimagined gems, 279. Earth’s] Earths Nbk 7; earth’s 1820, 1839. 280–314. As in lines 194–269 above, this passage is shaped around specific literary sources, but adapted to provide an imaginative adumbration of various contemporary or older scientific ideas concerning the age, structure, and geological and archaeological evidence of the earth. Cp. Keats, Endymion (1818: read by S. between 20 August and 6 September 1819; see L ii 110, 117) iii 119–36: Far had he roam’d, With nothing save the hollow vast, that foam’d, Above, around, and at his feet; save things More dead than Morpheus’ imaginings: Old rusted anchors, helmets, breast-plates large Of gone sea-warriors; brazen beaks and targe; Rudders that for a hundred years had lost The sway of human hand; gold vase emboss’d With long-forgotten story, and wherein No reveller had ever dipp’d a chin But those of Saturn’s vintage; mouldering scrolls, Writ in the tongue of heaven, by those souls Who first were on the earth; and sculptures rude In ponderous stone, developing the mood Of ancient Nox; — then skeletons of man, Of beast, behemoth, and leviathan, And elephant, and eagle, and huge jaw Of nameless monster. A cold leaden awe These secrets struck into him . . . Like Keats S. also recalls Richard 111 I iv 21–33: O Lord, methought what pain it was to drown, What dreadful noise of waters in my ears, What sights of ugly death within my eyes! Methoughts I saw a thousand fearful wrecks, A thousand men that fishes gnaw’d upon, Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl, Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels, All scatt’red in the bottom of the sea; Some lay in dead men’s skulls, and in the holes Where eyes did once inhabit there were crept, As’twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems, That woo’d the slimy bottom of the deep And mock’d the dead bones that lay scatt’red there. 280. mines] Nbk 7; mine 1820, 1839. BSM ix 506 argues that this was a change to the press transcript, and that infinite mine is correct because it ‘is in apposition to earth’s deep heart in the line above’. But infinite mines is in apposition with the secrets of the earth’s deep heart, and the following lines make it clear that S. is thinking of several different kinds of hidden subterranean phenomena. 281. Valueless] The epithet is ambiguous: both ‘priceless’ and ‘worthless’ (depending on whether the stones acquire a value in human terms). Cp. Q Mab v 248, and Richard III I iv 27, quoted in note to lines 287–96 below.

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And caverns on crystalline columns poised With vegetable silver overspread; Wells of unfathomed fire, and water-springs 285 Whence the great sea, even as a child, is fed, Whose vapours clothe Earth’s monarch mountain-tops With kingly, ermine snow. The beams flash on And make appear the melancholy ruins Of cancelled cycles; anchors, beaks of ships, 290 Planks turned to marble, quivers, helms, and spears, And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels Of scythèd chariots, and the emblazonry Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts, Round which Death laughed, sepulchred emblems 295 Of dead destruction, ruin within ruin! The wrecks beside of many a city vast,

282. poised] Nbk 7, 1839; poured 1820, 1829; obviously corrected from S.’s errata list, and also corrected in Hunt’s presentation copy of 1820. 283. vegetable silver] I.e. silver in a formation resembling organic growth; Cp. Paradise Lost iv 219–20: ‘ambrosial fruit/Of vegetable gold’, echoed in Southey, Thalaba i 31, ‘Trees of vegetable gold’ (see also Southey’s note, citing ‘Pietro Martire’: ‘the vein of gold is a living tree, and that the same, by all waies that it spreadeth and springeth from the root by the softe pores and passages of the earth, putteth forth branches even unto the uttermost parts of the earth . . .’). The whole description of ‘Shedad’s mighty pile’ in Southey (Thalaba i 30–1) suggests S.’s descriptive details in lines 280–3, and cp. also the description of the undersea city of Baly in Curse of Kehama xvi. 284–7. ‘The sea is fed from springs within the earth, and the snow is produced from water vapour sucked up from the sea by the sun’ (Butter (1970)); see note to II iv, opening stage direction, for S.’s wider symbolic use of water and geological symbolism in PU. The theory that the earth contained vast water-filled caverns was associated with Buffon, La théorie de la terre (1749) (see also headnote to Mont Blanc). 285. child,] Nbk 7; child 1820, 1839. 286. Earth’s] Nbk 7; earth’s 1820, 1839. 287. The beams flash on] I.e. ‘the beams continue to flash’. In Nbk 7, S. first wrote see, as they flas, then canc. that and wrote beneath as the beams flash; he then canc. as and added deep, which is itself canc. and replaced by on to give the received reading. 288–95. Suggesting archaeological evidence of ancient, classical and medieval warfare. 289. ships,] ships Nbk 7; ships; 1820, 1839. 290. marble,] Nbk 7; marble; 1820, 1839. S. would have seen examples of petrified wooden artefacts, e.g. in the ‘Natural History Cabinet’ at Matlock in Derbyshire (see L i 501: ‘There is a Cabinet d’Histoire Naturelle at Chamouni, just as at Matlock & Keswick & Clifton . . .’). 291. targes] Shields. 294. Death] Nbk 7; death 1820, 1839. 296–302. This passage appears to have in mind the evolutionary gradualism of ‘Uniformitarianism’, the geological theory developed by James Hutton and set forth in his Theory of the Earth (1795; popularised and extended in James Playfair, Illustration of the Huttonian Theory . . . (1802)). Hutton established that natural processes were active over enormously long time-spans, and that their cycles of evolution were governed by consistent natural laws. Cp. also S.’s letter from the Lake District to Elizabeth Hitchener, 23 November 1811: ‘Imagination is resistlessly compelled to look back upon the myriad ages whose silent change placed them here, to look back when, perhaps this retirement of peace and mountain simplicity, was the Pandemonium of druidical imposture, the scene of Roman Pollution, the resting place of the savage denizen of these solitudes with the wolf. — Still, still further! — strain thy

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Whose population which the Earth grew over Was mortal, but not human; see, they lie, Their monstrous works and uncouth skeletons, 300 Their statues, homes, and fanes; prodigious shapes Huddled in grey annihilation, split, Jammed in the hard, black deep; and over these The anatomies of unknown wingèd things, And fishes which were isles of living scale, 305 And serpents, bony chains, twisted around The iron crags, or within heaps of dust To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs Had crushed the iron crags; — and over these The jagged alligator, and the might

reverted Fancy when no rocks, no lakes no cloud-soaring mountains were here, but a vast populous and licentious city stood in the midst of an immense plain, myriads flocked towards it; London itself scarcely exceeds it in the variety, the extensiveness of [or?] consummateness of its corruption’ (L i 189). 297. Earth] Nbk 7; earth 1820, 1839. 298. mortal, but not human] Probably referring to speculation, as found for example in Lord Monboddo, Origin and Progress of Language (1773–92; ordered by S. 24 December 1812, L i 344) that man had developed from earlier species. Discussion of the idea was frequent in scientific writers, including Cuvier; see S.’s note to Q Mab viii 211–12 and notes, and also Darwin’s note to Botanic Garden i 101. lie,] lie Nbk 7, 1820, 1839. 299. works] Nbk 7; works, 1820, 1839. 300. homes,] Nbk 7; homes 1820, 1839. 302–14. The implications of the fossil record were the subject of wide debate in S.’s day, particularly under the influence of the anti-evolutionist Georges Cuvier, whose Recherches sur les ossements fossiles (1812) argued that the evidence for extinct species pointed to a series of catastrophic events in the earth’s history causing massive land upheavals and floods that destroyed entire species. S. was certainly familiar with the debate from at least his Oxford period, and knew e.g. James Parkinson’s Organic Remains of a Former World (1804–1811), which he was reading in 1812 (L i 255); see Grabo (1930) 177ff. for details of possible direct influence on this passage from Parkinson. Interest in Cuvier’s ideas, and in the meaning of fossils, was however ubiquitous in the period; see e.g. Byron, Don Juan ix 37–8, and his Preface to Cain (1821), and cp. GM, supplement to lxxxiii pt i (1813) 658: ‘Fossils have recently been found in the neighbourhood of Brentford, on the side of the Thames, about six miles West from London. The soil, as far as it has been dug, consists of five distinct beds. The uppermost is a gravelly loam; the second, sand and gravel; the third, a calcareous loam; the fourth, sand; and the fifth, blue clay . . . The uppermost bed contains no fossil remains whatever. The next three contain the tusks of elephants, both African and Indian, of the hippopotamus, the horns and jaws of oxen, the horns of deer, pearl-shells, and the shells of fresh-water fish; but no sea-animals. The clay contains the fossil remains of sea-animals alone; as echini, shells &c . . .’ 302, 308. over these] S.’s strata seem to be going the wrong way; i.e. earlier and earlier deposits appear nearer and nearer to the surface. Perhaps over is to be understood as ‘next in succession as we go deeper’; or the idea of cyclic evolution, integral to Hutton’s ideas and implicit in Cuvier, may be in mind (in which case ‘prehistoric’ layerings would recur as later deposits than the relics of previous civilisations). 302. these] Nbk 7; these, 1820, 1839. 304. Cp. Paradise Lost vii 412–15: ‘There Leviathan,/Hugest of living creatures, on the deep/Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims,/And seems a moving land’. 308. crags; —] Nbk 7; crags; 1820, 1839.

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310 Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores And weed-overgrown continents of Earth Increased and multiplied like summer worms On an abandoned corpse, till the blue globe 315 Wrapped deluge round it like a cloak, and they Yelled, gasped, and were abolished; or some God Whose throne was in a comet, passed, and cried ‘Be not!’ — and like my words they were no more. The Earth The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness! 320 The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness, The vaporous exultation, not to be confined! 310. behemoth] See Job xl 15, from which occurrence behemoth has typified the notion of a very large and powerful beast; variously interpreted from the Hebrew as either an elephant or a hippopotamus (cp. also Paradise Lost vii 471). 311. shores] Nbk 7; shores, 1820, 1839. 312. Earth] Nbk 7; earth, 1820, 1839. 314–18. S. entertains two alternative contemporary theories to account for the catastrophes which, judging from the fossil record, had apparently visited the earth in previous ages. Cuvier posited earthly catastrophes such as floods (see note to lines 302–14 above); others hypothesised a catastrophe ensuing from the gravitational disruption of a comet passing close to the earth (e.g. Davy; see Grabo (1930) 175–6). Laplace, System of the World (1796), trans. J. Pond 2 vols (1809) conjectured the direct impact of a comet, followed by deluge, and a subsequent rebuilding of the moral world ‘whose existing monuments do not go much further back than three thousand years’ (ii 64). 317. comet,] Comet, Nbk 7. cried] cried — Nbk 7; cried, 1820, 1839. 318. ‘Be not!’ — and] Be not! — & Nbk 7; Be not! And 1820, 1839. 319–502. The duet of the Earth and Moon affirms the identity of Love in the moral world with the ‘imponderable’ forces understood as different modifications of the power in nature for influence between bodies separated in space: electricity, magnetism, gravity, and heat (see note to I 765). Like the Earth in relation to the Sun, the Moon is attracted to the Earth in both physical and overtly sexual senses, and is kindled into life by the influences of Earth, just as Earth is sustained by the light and other influences of the Sun. S.’s primary emphasis is on volcanic activity as the principal mode of the Earth’s self-renewing creativity. S.’s myth of the animation of the Moon (not to be understood literally, but nevertheless enriched by an imaginative consciousness of the scientific possibilities) offers a new inflexion of the central Golden Age myths in western civilisation, and implicitly acknowledges them (e.g. Virgil’s Eclogue iv, the biblical accounts such as Isaiah xi 1–9, and Milton’s re-presentation of classical and biblical accounts). Throughout this exchange, the Moon addresses herself rapturously to the Earth, but the Earth appears either self-absorbed, or concerned to celebrate his relation to the Sun; until a change at line 493. 319. The Earth which speaks here is to be understood differently from the ‘character’ Earth of Act I; this Earth is primarily a planetary body, and brother to the Moon, rather than mother to all life. This Earth, and also the Moon, can equally be distinguished from the Spirits of Earth and Moon described above, who are evidently conceived as young children; the duet of Earth and Moon is definitely adult and frankly sexual (however incestuously). See also line 515 and note. 321. exultation,] Nbk 7; exultation 1820, 1839. The vaporous exultation recalls contemporary accounts of volcanic activity; cp. e.g. Sir William Hamilton, ‘Account of the Earthquakes which happened in Italy in . . . 1783’, Philosophical Transactions lxxiii (1783) 169–208: ‘the exhalations which issued during the violent commotions of the earth were full of electrical fire, just as the smoke of volcanoes is constantly observed to be during violent eruptions . . . Perhaps . . . the whole destruction I have been describing may have proceeded simply from the exhalations of confined vapours, generated by the fermentation of such minerals

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Ha! ha! the animation of delight Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light, And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind! The Moon Brother mine, calm wanderer, Happy globe of land and air, Some Spirit is darted like a beam from thee, Which penetrates my frozen frame, And passes with the warmth of flame, 330 With love, and odour, and deep melody Through me, through me! 325

The Earth Ha! ha! the caverns of my hollow mountains, My cloven fire-crags, sound-exulting fountains, Laugh with a vast and inextinguishable laughter. 335 The oceans, and the deserts, and the abysses Of the deep air’s unmeasured wildernesses Answer from all their clouds and billows, echoing after. They cry aloud as I do: — ‘Sceptred Curse, Who all our green and azure universe 340 Threatenedst to muffle round with black destruction, sending A solid cloud to rain hot thunderstones, And splinter and knead down my children’s bones, All I bring forth, to one void mass battering and blending; as produce volcanos, which have escaped where they meet with least resistance . . .’ (194, 197). See also e.g. Quarterly Review x (1814) 202: ‘Near Ribeira Grande, we are told there is an aperture in the side of a mountain, from whence a light vapour arises, which, if corked up, would generate an earthquake, or cause an explosion that would blow up the mountain’ (cp. note to III iii 124–47). 322. animation] Animation Nbk 7. 324. wind!] Nbk 7; wind. 1820, 1839. 325. For the Earth as brother of the Moon, see Ovid, Met. ii 208–9. 332–4. The details are again volcanic; the draft of line 333 in Nbk 12 (20r rev.) at first read ‘My mouthed fire hills’ (uncanc.), and S. also tried ‘volcanoes’ (canc.); see MYR vi. 335. The Oceans and the Desarts and the Abysses Nbk 7; abysses, 1820, 1839. 336. Of] Nbk 7 (and also in the draft, Nbk 12 f. 20r); And 1820, 1839; possibly a change to the press transcript, but probably a mistranscription. wildernesses] Nbk 7; wildernesses, 1820, 1839. 338. do: — ‘Sceptred Curse] do — Sceptred Curse Nbk 7; do. Sceptred curse 1820, 1839. There are no speech marks around lines 338–55 in Nbk 7, 1820, or 1839. The phrase is a double synecdoche for Jupiter. 339–42. Cp. Sir William Hamilton’s account of the 1794 eruption of Vesuvius, Philosophical Transactions lxxxv (1795) 91: ‘One cloud heaped on another, and succeeding each other incessantly, formed in a few hours such a gigantic and elevated column of the darkest hue over the mountain, as seemed to threaten Naples with immediate destruction, having at one time been bent over the city, and appearing to be much too massive and ponderous to remain long suspended in the air’ (the article includes a striking illustration of this cloud). 339. universe] Universe Nbk 7. 340–1. Cp. OWW 26–8 (itself a volcanic image): ‘vaulted with all thy congregated might/Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere/Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst’. 343. blending;] blending Nbk 7; blending. 1820, 1839.

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shelley: selected poems ‘Until each crag-like tower, and storied column, Palace, and obelisk, and temple solemn, My imperial mountains crowned with cloud, and snow, and fire; My sea-like forests, every blade and blossom Which finds a grave or cradle in my bosom, Were stamped by thy strong hate into a lifeless mire:

350

‘How art thou sunk, withdrawn, covered — drunk up By thirsty nothing, as the brackish cup Drain’d by a desert-troop, a little drop for all! And from beneath, around, within, above, Filling thy void annihilation, Love 355 Bursts in like light on caves cloven by the thunder-ball.’ The Moon The snow upon my lifeless mountains Is loosened into living fountains, My solid oceans flow, and sing, and shine: A spirit from my heart bursts forth, 360 It clothes with unexpected birth My cold, bare bosom: oh, it must be thine On mine, on mine!

345. obelisk, and temple] Obelisk and Temple Nbk 7. 348. in] on Nbk 7; presumably S.’s change to the press transcript. 349. mire:] mire Nbk 7; mire. 1820, 1839. 350–5. ‘Jupiter and all the paraphernalia he stands for are absorbed back into Demogorgon’s darkness — into the realm of potentiality (because it will always be possible for him to reemerge; that depends on man himself). In so far as humanity created Jupiter, and tolerated his thrones and prisons and churches, he is simply a hole in space’ (GM). 350. covered —] Nbk 7; covered, 1820, 1839. 352. desert-troop,] Desart-troop — Nbk 7. all!] Nbk 7; all; 1820, 1839. 354. Love] Nbk 7; love 1820, 1839. 355. the thunder-ball] Nbk 7, 1839; thunder-ball 1820, 1829; presumably on S.’s errata list. 356–61. Contemporary scientific opinion held that the moon had little or no atmosphere, but probably had frozen water, which might be a basis for life if heat from the Earth and Sun could be retained, particularly in conjunction with ‘air’ which might be exhaled by lunar volcanic activity (cp. above, lines 225–30 and note). See Darwin’s note to Botanic Garden ii 82: ‘. . . as [the moon] seems to have suffered and to continue to suffer much by volcanos, a sufficient quantity of air may in process of time be generated to produce an atmosphere; which may prevent its heat from so easily escaping, and its water from so easily evaporating, and thence become fit for the production of vegetables and animals. That the moon possesses little or no atmosphere is deduced from the undiminished lustre of the stars, at the instant when they emerge from behind her disk. That the ocean of the moon is frozen is confirmed from there being no appearance of lunar tides’; see also Walker 225–39 for the view that the Earth’s own atmosphere had been produced from within by the action of the Sun’s heat. 358. oceans] Oceans Nbk 7. 361. oh,] Nbk 7; Oh! 1820, 1839.

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Gazing on thee I feel, I know, Green stalks burst forth, and bright flowers grow, 365 And living shapes upon my bosom move: Music is in the sea and air, Wingèd clouds soar here and there, Dark with the rain new buds are dreaming of: ’Tis Love, all Love! The Earth It interpenetrates my granite mass, Through tangled roots and trodden clay doth pass Into the utmost leaves and delicatest flowers; Upon the winds, among the clouds’tis spread, It wakes a life in the forgotten dead — 375 They breathe a spirit up from their obscurest bowers — 370

And like a storm, bursting its cloudy prison With thunder, and with whirlwind, has arisen Out of the lampless caves of unimagined being, With earthquake shock and swiftness making shiver 380 Thought’s stagnant chaos, unremoved forever, Till Hate, and Fear, and Pain, light-vanquished shadows, fleeing,

363. Cp. II i 27 and note. 369. Love, all Love!] Nbk 7; love, all love! 1820, 1839. 370–405. A  long and difficult sentence; the main verb, leave, explicitly (although ambiguously; see notes below) governs lines 382–93, and is understood to govern lines 394–405. 370. The referent of the pronoun is Love, picked up from the Moon’s preceding speech. 374–5. dead —] dead Nbk 7; dead, 1820, 1839. bowers —] bowers Nbk 7; bowers. 1820, 1839. The dashes are necessary to clarify that line 375 is in parenthetic predication of the forgotten dead of line 374. The lines are unpunctuated in Nbk 7, and in 1820 and 1839, the stop after bowers (together with the colon after being in line 378) obscures the grammatical relation of this stanza to the stanza following. 375. See note to line 392. 376. storm,] Nbk 7; storm 1820, 1839. 377. has arisen] I.e. ‘it (Love, understood from the pronoun of line 370) has arisen’. 378. being,] being Nbk 7; being: 1820, 1839.379–80. An adverbial sub-clause qualifying has arisen. 379. shock] Nbk 7 clearly reads shook, but the word sounds oddly in this context and is perhaps a transcription slip on S.’s part. 380. unremoved forever] I.e. ‘fixed in place up until now’; cp. Paradise Lost iv 987, ‘Like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved’. forever,] Nbk 7; for ever, 1820, 1839. 381–4. The grammar is ambiguous. The plural subject of Leave in line 382 is Hate, and Fear, and Pain and the verb is transitive in this occurrence; i.e. ‘Hate, Fear and pain, in fleeing from Man, leave him in the condition of being a sea reflecting love’. The sea reflecting love is thus placed in contrast with the many-sided mirror of line 382. In the following stanza, leave is again the governing verb but is understood intransitively (see note to line 388). The following two stanzas, lines 394–405, then return to a transitive understanding of leave. 381. Hate, and Fear, and Pain,] Hate and Fear and Pain, Nbk 7; hate, and fear, and pain, 1820, 1839.

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Leave Man — who was a many-sided mirror Which could distort to many a shape of error This true fair world of things — a sea reflecting Love; 385 Which over all his kind, as the sun’s heaven Gliding o’er ocean, smooth, serene, and even, Darting from starry depths radiance and life, doth move: Leave Man, even as a leprous child is left Who follows a sick beast to some warm cleft 390 Of rocks, through which the might of healing springs is poured; Then when it wanders home with rosy smile, Unconscious, and its mother fears awhile It is a Spirit — then, weeps on her child restored:

382–4. Cp. Ruins (end ch. 24): ‘. . . this further truth will then appear . . . That real objects have in themselves an identical, constant, and invariable mode of existence, and that in your organs exists a similar mode of being affected and impressed by them. But at the same time, inasmuch as these organs are liable to the direction of your will, you may receive different impressions, and find yourselves under different relations towards the same objects; so that you are with respect to them, as it were, a sort of mirror, capable of reflecting them such as they are, and capable of disfiguring and misrepresenting them.’ 382. Man —] Man, Nbk 7, 1820, 1839. mirror] Nbk 7; mirror, 1820, 1839. 383. error] Nbk 7; error, 1820, 1839. 384. things —] Nbk 7; things, 1820, 1839. sea] Sea Nbk 7; Love;] Nbk 7; love; 1820, 1839. Cp. Young, Night Thoughts, Night ix: ‘Nature is the glass reflecting God,/As, by the sea, reflected is the sun,/Too glorious to be gaz’d on in his sphere’. 385. Which refers to Love, his to Man. sun’s heaven] Suns Heaven Nbk 7. 386. ocean,] Ocean Nbk 7. even,] Nbk 7; even 1820, 1839. 387. life,] Nbk 7 (also in the draft, Nbk 12 f. 24v); light, 1820, 1839; possibly S.’s change to the press transcript (radiance & light & life is canc. in the draft), but a mistranscription is perhaps more likely (radiance and light seems tautologous). move:] move Nbk 7; move. 1820; move, 1829, 1839 (probably a mistaken editorial correction in Galignani, left uncorrected or unnoticed by Mary). 388–93. S. has in mind the legend of King Bladud, who was banished from the court of his father Hudibras after contracting leprosy and lived as a swineherd; he saw his swine benefit from bathing in hot marshes, and after bathing himself was cured of his leprosy and founded the City of Bath on the sight of the hot springs. The story is given in most historical accounts of Bath; see e.g. Southey’s Letters from England (1807) ch. lxxiv. 388. as a leprous child is left] I.e. by leprosy. left] Nbk 7; left, 1820, 1839. 392. its mother fears awhile] Cp. Mary L i 123 (to Maria Gisborne, 28 December 1819): ‘If by any chance you have not sent the Prometheus add the word bowers after from their obscurest & in the other change it to it’s mother fears awhile’. The first of these might be explained as a doubtful reading (line 375 above) for which Mary had belatedly sought clarification from S. (the word is corrected and obscure in Nbk 7); perhaps line 392 had been altered in the press transcript, and S. subsequently decided to restore the received reading, which appears in Nbk 7. 393. Spirit —] Nbk 7; spirit, 1820, 1839. restored:] restored. Nbk 7, 1820, 1839.

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Man, oh, not men! a chain of linked thought, Of love and might to be divided not, Compelling the elements with adamantine stress; As the sun rules, even with a tyrant’s gaze, The unquiet republic of the maze Of planets, struggling fierce towards heaven’s free wilderness:

400

Man, one harmonious Soul of many a soul, Whose nature is its own divine control, Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea; Familiar acts are beautiful through love; Labour, and Pain, and Grief, in life’s green grove 405 Sport like tame beasts — none knew how gentle they could be! His will, with all mean passions, bad delights, And selfish cares, its trembling satellites, A spirit ill to guide, but mighty to obey, Is as a tempest-wingèd ship, whose helm 410 Love rules, through waves which dare not overwhelm, Forcing Life’s wildest shores to own its sovereign sway. All things confess his strength. Through the cold mass Of marble and of colour his dreams pass — Bright threads, whence mothers weave the robes their children wear; 415 Language is a perpetual Orphic song, 394–423. Man will control nature just as the sun controls the planets. 394. Man, O, not men!] ‘I.e. not sectarian pressure-groups but collective man’ (GM). 397–9. Referring to the balanced stress of centrifugal and gravitational forces in the orbits of the solar system. 397. sun] Sun Nbk 7. 398. republic] Republic Nbk 7. 399. planets,] Planets, Nbk 7. heaven’s] Heaven’s Nbk 7. wilderness:] wilderness. Nbk 7, 1820, 1839. 400. Soul] Nbk 7; soul 1820, 1839. 404. Labour, and Pain, and Grief,] Labour and Pain and Grief Nbk 7; labour, and pain, and grief, 1820, 1839. 405. beasts —] Nbk 7; beasts, 1820, 1839. 408. I.e. the will is bad when in command, but beneficent under the guidance of love. 411. Life’s] Nbk 7; life’s 1820, 1839. sovereign] Nbk 7 reads sovereigns, and the draft in Nbk 12 f. 24r reads sovereign’s; but all printed witnesses agree on the received reading. 412–14. I.e. sculptors and artists give their ideal visions of man material embodiment; and mothers dream that their children will actually be like that. Cp. II iv 83–4 and note, and see The Daemon of the World (no. 115; Longman i 489–508) i 16–17. 413. pass —] pass Nbk 7; pass; 1820, 1839. 414. threads,] Nbk 7; threads 1820, 1839. In Nbk 7, this line originally began And mothers gazing, which S. then canc. and replaced with the received reading written above. The canc. reading exactly repeats a phrase from II iv 83–4. 415–18. Like the passage in II iv 72 (see note), this passage has been taken to imply the subordination of thought to language; but rules in line 416 suggests that thought exists independently of language, while dependant on it for control and communication; as Cameron (1974) 557 notes, S. here refers specifically to Literature (developing the allusions to other arts in this stanza). 415. Orphic] Orpheus was the mythical father of Gk poetry; the epithet here suggests in general terms the power of poetry.

262

shelley: selected poems Which rules with daedal harmony a throng Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.

The lightning is his slave; heaven’s utmost deep Gives up her stars, and like a flock of sheep 420 They pass before his eye, are numbered, and roll on! The tempest is his steed, — he strides the air; And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare, ‘Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none.’ The Moon The shadow of white Death has passed 425 From my path in heaven at last, A clinging shroud of solid frost and sleep; And through my newly-woven bowers Wander happy paramours, Less mighty, but as mild as those who keep 430 Thy vales more deep. The Earth As the dissolving warmth of dawn may fold A half-unfrozen dew-globe, green and gold And crystalline, till it becomes a wingèd mist, And wanders up the vault of the blue day,

416. Which rules] In Nbk 7, these words are canc., and Ruling is written in pencil to the left; S. probably restored the original reading in the press transcript, but this could be a change made after despatch of the transcript. daedal] Nbk 7; Dædal 1820, 1839. Cp. III i 26 and note. 418–23. These lines anticipate specific forms of future productive human control over nature: electricity, astronomy, aviation, and submarine travel. 418. lightning] Lightning Nbk 7; heaven’s] Heavens Nbk 7. Cp. Priestley (History and Present State of Electricity, 3rd edn 1775) ii 136: ‘. . . what would Newton himself have said, to see the present race of Electricians imitating in miniature all the known effects of that tremendous power, nay disarming the thunder of its power of doing mischief, and, without any apprehension of danger to themselves, drawing lightning from the clouds into a private room . . .’ 421. tempest] Tempest Nbk 7. steed, —] Nbk 7; steed, 1820, 1839. 423. There are no speech marks in Nbk 7, 1820, or 1839. 424. Death] Nbk 7; death 1820, 1839. has] hath Nbk 7; presumably a change to the press transcript (perhaps to remove the awkward repetition of th). 424. heaven] Heaven Nbk 7. 427. bowers] Nbk 7; bowers, 1820, 1839. 431. dawn] Dawn Nbk 7. 432. half-unfrozen] Nbk 7; half infrozen 1820 (a misprint); half unfrozen 1839. green and gold] Nbk 7; green, and gold, 1820, 1839. 434. day,] Day Nbk 7.

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Outlives the noon, and on the sun’s last ray Hangs o’er the sea, a fleece of fire and amethyst —

The Moon Thou art folded, thou art lying In the light which is undying Of thine own joy, and heaven’s smile divine; 440 All suns and constellations shower On thee a light, a life, a power Which doth array thy sphere — thou pourest thine On mine, on mine! The Earth I spin beneath my pyramid of night, 445 Which points into the heavens, dreaming delight, Murmuring victorious joy in my enchanted sleep; As a youth lulled in love-dreams, faintly sighing, Under the shadow of his beauty lying Which round his rest a watch of light and warmth doth keep. 435. sun’s] Sun’s Nbk 7. 436. sea,] sea; Nbk 7. amethyst —] Nbk 7; amethyst. 1820, 1839. On this dash, see Butter (1970): ‘Earth’s sentence is unfinished, and we cannot be sure how he would have applied the simile — perhaps to the Moon (as the warmth of the sun has dissolved the cold dewdrop to vapour so the new warmth on the moon has dissolved its snow into fertilizing clouds). But the Moon interrupts and applies it to the Earth (as the cloud of vapour is derived from the earth and is lighted gloriously by the sun, so the light which enfolds the earth comes from his own joy and heaven’s smile)’. 439. heaven’s] Heavens Nbk 7. 442. sphere —] Nbk 7; sphere; 1820, 1839. 444–9. The simile is deceptively complex. In broad terms, it likens the earth, when ‘sleeping’ in the darkness of its own shadow but still cared for by the light and heat of the sun, to a lover, oblivious while asleep of the actual presence of the loved-one who nevertheless keeps a loving watch over the sleeper. It is however difficult to reconcile the details of the astronomical term of the comparison with the term of human relationship. If Under the shadow of his beauty lying is understood as ‘lying under the shadow of his (the sleeping lover’s) own beauty’, then the referent of which in the line following cannot be ‘the Sun’, which is however the referent implied by the rest of that line. If his beauty in line 448 does indeed refer to the sleeping lover’s own beauty, then the simile is analogous to e.g. lines 265–7 above, where the Spirit of the Earth’s lips move Amid the changing light of their own smiles. This quasi-Platonic notion of a thing irradiated by its own essence, which does occur elsewhere in S., is assumed by Wasserman in his subtle effort of paraphrase (Wasserman 352–3), which nevertheless strains to reconcile all the elements in the simile. GM proposes, ‘The shadow the lover lies under is the dark security of sleep which his lover’s vigilant ever-present love affords him: just as the dark segment of Earth sleeps because the sun invests the rest of Earth with light’. S.’s draft suggests that he hesitated over the terms of the simile, which seems at first to have involved a female sleeper (see Nbk 12 f. 23r). 444. Pliny, Nat. Hist. II vii describes the conical shadow cast by the earth, pointing away from the sun into space. 445. heavens,] Heavens, Nbk 7; heavens 1820, 1839. 447. love-dreams,] Nbk 7; love-dreams 1820, 1839. 448. lying] Nbk 7; lying, 1820, 1839.

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The Moon As in the soft and sweet eclipse, When soul meets soul on lovers’ lips, High hearts are calm, and brightest eyes are dull; So, when thy shadow falls on me, Then am I mute and still, by thee 455 Covered; of thy love, Orb most beautiful, Full, oh, too full! 450

460

465

470

Thou art speeding round the sun, Brightest world of many a one, Green and azure sphere, which shinest With a light which is divinest Among all the lamps of heaven To whom life and light is given; I, thy crystal paramour, Borne beside thee by a power Like the polar paradise, Magnet-like, of lovers’ eyes; I, a most enamoured maiden, Whose weak brain is overladen With the pleasure of her love, Maniac-like around thee move, Gazing, an insatiate bride, On thy form from every side, Like a Mænad, round the cup

450. The Moon picks up and adapts the Earth’s simile from the preceding stanza. 455. S. was familiar with the Elizabethan sexual sense of ‘covered’ (see e.g. Merchant of Venice III v 50–3, Donne, ‘On his Mistress Going to Bed’ 48). 457. sun,] Sun Nbk 7. 458. world] World Nbk 7. one,] one Nbk 7; one; 1820, 1839. 459. sphere,] Nbk 7; sphere 1820, 1839. 461. heaven] Heaven Nbk 7, 1820, 1839. 465. paradise,] Paradise Nbk 7; Paradise, 1820, 1839. 467–70. Perhaps referring to the apparently eccentric ‘libration’ of the moon on its axis (caused by the dual gravitational influence of the sun and earth). 470. move,] Nbk 7; move 1820, 1839. 471–2. ‘The moon, in circling the earth, always keeps the same side toward the earth because the period of its rotation exactly equals that of its revolution’ (Reiman (1977)). 473–5. S. associates the abandonment of Dionysian possession with the fertility of revolutionary upheaval, but retains an awareness of its disturbing and destructive character. The reference is to Euripides, Bacchae 1051ff.: Agave was the daughter of Cadmus and mother of Pentheus; together with a group of maenads she unwittingly kills her son in a Bacchic frenzy. Cp. II iii 7–10 and note, and 44 and note, III iii 124–47 and note, OL (Longman iii, no. 322; published with PU in 1820) 91, 171. See S.’s ‘Notes on Sculptures in Rome and Florence’, describing a painting of Agave and the maenads: ‘Their hair loose and floating seems caught in the tempest of their own tumultuous motion, their heads are thrown back leaning with a strange inanity upon their necks, and looking up to Heaven, while they totter and stumble even in the energy of their tempestuous dance. One — perhaps Agave with the head of Pentheus — has a human head in one hand and in the other a great knife; another has a spear with a pine cone, which was their thyrsus; another dances with mad voluptuousness; the fourth is dancing to a kind of tambourine’ (Prose 349).

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Which Agave lifted up In the weird Cadmæan forest. Brother, wheresoe’er thou soarest I must hurry, whirl and follow Through the heavens wide and hollow, Sheltered by the warm embrace 480 Of thy soul from hungry space, Drinking from thy sense and sight Beauty, majesty, and might, As a lover or chameleon Grows like what it looks upon, 485 As a violet’s gentle eye Gazes on the azure sky Until its hue grows like what it beholds, As a grey and watery mist Glows like solid amethyst 490 Athwart the western mountain it enfolds When the sunset sleeps Upon its snow — 475

The Earth And the weak day weeps That it should be so. 495 O gentle Moon, the voice of thy delight Falls on me like thy clear and tender light Soothing the seaman, borne the summer night Through isles forever calm; O gentle Moon, thy crystal accents pierce

478. heavens] Heavens Above Cavens [sic] canc. Nbk 7; the change ‘underscores how closely these lines echo the “follow, follow” lyrics of Act 2’ (BSM ix 532). 483–4. Cp. An Exhortation, published with PU in 1820. 483. or chameleon] or a chameleon Nbk 7, 1820, 1829; the a has been added later in Nbk 7, not very clearly, and S. may have changed his mind about its insertion and deleted it on the errata list. 484. looks upon,] gazes on Nbk 7; almost certainly altered at the same time as the inclusion of the following 10 lines, which would have introduced a repetition of gazes. 485–94. These lines do not appear in Nbk 7, and were either added in the press transcript or sent later. There is an alternative version in draft in Nbk 12 f. 27v rev, which Mary published in 1839 iv 123 as A Fragment (see Fragments connected with PU: I; Longman ii 653). 487. Cp. I 450 and note. 491–4. The Earth completes the Moon’s quatrain, and in so doing responds directly to her words for the first time. 492. snow —] snow. 1820, 1839. 495. gentle Moon] Gentle moon Nbk 7. 498. forever] Nbk 7; for ever 1820, 1839. 499. gentle] Gentle Nbk 7.

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500 The caverns of my pride’s deep universe, Charming the tiger Joy, whose tramplings fierce Made wounds which need thy balm. Panthea I rise as from a bath of sparkling water, A bath of azure light, among dark rocks, 505 Out of the stream of sound. Ione Ah me! sweet sister, The stream of sound has ebbed away from us, And you pretend to rise out of its wave, Because your words fall like the clear soft dew Shaken from a bathing wood-nymph’s limbs and hair. Panthea 510 Peace! peace! a mighty Power, which is as darkness, Is rising out of Earth, and from the sky Is showered like night, and from within the air Bursts, like eclipse which had been gathered up Into the pores of sunlight — the bright Visions, 515 Wherein the singing spirits rode and shone, Gleam like pale meteors through a watery night. Ione There is a sense of words upon mine ear — Panthea An universal sound like words . . . O list! 500. pride’s deep universe,] Pride’s deep Universe Nbk 7. 501. Joy,] Nbk 7; joy, 1820, 1839. 503–9. ‘Panthea says, “I arise out of the sound.” Ione replies, “The sound has gone, it could only have been your own accents which made you think it was still here.” ’ (Hughes). 510–14. Demogorgon rises from the Earth. His attributes and effects are again emphasised as volcanic. 510. darkness,] 1820; Darkness Nbk 7; darkness 1839. 512. night,] Night, Nbk 7. 514. sunlight —] Nbk 7; sunlight: 1820, 1839. The phrase pores of sunlight (pores of light in the draft, Nbk 12 f. 32v reverso) suggests that ‘the necessitarian power resides in the elemental units of matter’ (Cameron (1974) 558); Darwin, Walker and other contemporary scientific sources use ‘pores’ to designate the minute spaces between the particles of matter, in which the superfine ether resides (cp. note to lines 270–9 above). Visions,] Visions Nbk 7; visions, 1820, 1839. 515. This seems to indicate that the preceding sequence of the Earth and Moon has been sung by the spirits described in lines 194–318; but see note to line 319 above. 517. ear —] Nbk 7; ear. 1820, 1839. 518. An] Nbk 7, 1820; A 1829, 1839. Presumably carried over by Mary from her copy text in Galignani; modern eds preserve the 1839 reading, but Victorian eds preferred 1820, and it is S.’s usual practice to use an before a vowel. words . . . O list!] Nbk 7; words: Oh, list! 1820, 1839.

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Demogorgon Thou Earth, calm empire of a happy soul, 520 Sphere of divinest shapes and harmonies, Beautiful orb! gathering as thou dost roll The Love which paves thy path along the skies: The Earth I hear: I am as a drop of dew that dies! Demogorgon Thou Moon, which gazest on the nightly Earth 525 With wonder, as it gazes upon thee, Whilst each to men, and beasts, and the swift birth Of birds, is beauty, love, calm, harmony: The Moon I hear: I am a leaf shaken by thee! Demogorgon Ye Kings of suns and stars, Daemons and Gods, 530 Etherial Dominations, who possess Elysian, windless, fortunate abodes Beyond Heaven’s constellated wilderness: A Voice from Above Our great Republic hears: we are blest, and bless.

519–53. Demogorgon addresses in turn the Earth (519–23), the Moon (524–8), the stars (529–33), the dead (534–8), the atomic constituents of all things (539–43), all living things and active phenomena (544–9), and mankind (549–53). 519. Thou] Nbk 7; Thou, 1820, 1839. empire] Empire Nbk 7. soul,] Soul, Nbk 7. 522. Love] Nbk 7; love 1820, 1839. 523. dies!] Nbk 7; dies. 1820, 1839. 524. Thou] Nbk 7; Thou, 1820, 1839. Earth] Nbk 7; earth 1820, 1839. 525. thee,] thee Nbk 7; thee; 1820, 1839. 526. birth] I.e. race, nation (from Lat. natio). 529–30. Cp. Paradise Lost v 600–1: ‘Hear, all ye Angels, Progeny of Light,/Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers’. 529. Kings] Nbk 7; kings 1820, 1839. stars,] Nbk 7, 1820; stars! 1839. 530. Dominations,] Nbk 7, 1820; Dominations! 1839. 533. hears:] hears . . . Nbk 7; hears, 1820; hears; 1839.

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Demogorgon Ye happy Dead, whom beams of brightest verse 535 Are clouds to hide, not colours to portray, Whether your nature is that universe Which once ye saw and suffered — A Voice from Beneath Or as they Whom we have left, we change and pass away. Demogorgon Ye elemental Genii, who have homes 540 From man’s high mind even to the central stone Of sullen lead; from Heaven’s star-fretted domes To the dull weed some sea-worm battens on: A Confused Voice We hear: thy words waken Oblivion. Demogorgon Spirits whose homes are flesh; ye beasts and birds; 545 Ye worms and fish; ye living leaves and buds; Lightning and wind; and ye untameable herds, Meteors and mists, which throng air’s solitudes: A Voice Thy voice to us is wind among still woods. Demogorgon Man, who wert once a despot and a slave; 550 A dupe and a deceiver; a decay;

534. Dead,] Nbk 7, 1820 (no cap.); dead! 1839. 536–8. S. preserves his characteristic sceptical reserve about existence after death; i.e. we do not know whether or not the dead continue to exist and change as living people do, or whether they have simply become reassimilated to the material universe. The whole address to the dead in lines 534–8 anticipates Adonais. 536. universe] Universe Nbk 7. 539. elemental Genii] See note to I 42. 544. Spirits] Nbk 7; Spirits, 1820; Spirits! 1839. flesh;] flesh — Nbk 7; flesh: 1820, 1839. birds;] birds Nbk 7; birds, 1820, 1839. 546. wind:] Wind — Nbk 7. 547. throng] throng is canc. in Nbk 7, with feed written above. The original reading was either restored in the press transcript, or Mary failed to notice the change; or the change may have been made after despatch of the transcript. air’s] Airs Nbk 7. 550. and] or Nbk 7; presumably a change to the press transcript, but or is smudged and could have been misread. decay;] Decay Nbk 7.

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A traveller from the cradle to the grave Through the dim night of this immortal day: All Speak: thy strong words may never pass away. Demogorgon This is the day, which down the void abysm 555 At the Earth-born’s spell yawns for Heaven’s despotism, And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep; Love, from its awful throne of patient power In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep, 560 And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs And folds over the world its healing wings. Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance, — These are the seals of that most firm assurance

551. traveller] Traveller Nbk 7. 552. day:] Day Nbk 7. 554. This is the day,] 1820, 1829; This is the Day Nbk 7; This the day, 1839; presumably a misprint (uncorrected in Mary’s subsequent eds). Cp. Psalm cxviii 24: ‘This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it’. abysm] Abysm Nbk 7. 555. Earth-born] I.e. Prometheus, who as a Titan was the son of Earth and Heaven. spell] Cp. I 61 and note. despotism] Despotism Nbk 7. 556. Conquest] conquest Nbk 7. deep;] Deep; Nbk 7; deep: 1820, 1839. Cp. Landor, Gebir (1798) vi 301–8: Time, — Time himself throws off his motley garb Figur’d with monstrous men and monstrous gods, And in pure vesture enters their pure fanes, A proud partaker of their festivals. Captivity led captive, War o’erthrown, They shall o’er Europe, shall o’er Earth extend Empire that seas alone and skies confine, And glory that shall strike the crystal stars. See also Ephesians iv 8: ‘Wherefore he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men’, and cp. Psalm lxviii 18, and Paradise Lost x 188. 557. throne] home Nbk 7; presumably a change to the press transcript. 559–60. Cp. Cenci III i 247–55 and note. 559. dread] Nbk 7, 1839; dead 1820, 1829. Probably on S.’s errata list. 560. agony,] Agony Nbk 7. 562–9. Cp. Revelation xx 1–3: ‘And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.’ 562. Endurance, —] Nbk 7; Endurance, 1820, 1839.

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Which bars the pit over Destruction’s strength; 565 And if, with infirm hand, Eternity, Mother of many acts and hours, should free The serpent that would clasp her with his length, These are the spells by which to re-assume An empire o’er the disentangled Doom. 570 To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; 575 Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent: This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

16  Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation The date of composition has been disputed. S. stated in a letter to Hunt on 15 August 1819 that the poem ‘was composed last year at Este’ (L ii 108); Mary added the date ‘Rome, May, 1819’ to the poem’s first publication in 1824 (26). S. dated The Cenci to the same period in his dedication of the play to Leigh Hunt. (See Cenci headnote, Longman ii 655–60, for the possible significance of the date.) In 1839, Mary placed the poem among the ‘Poems written in 1820’ at the end of vol. iii, following LMG. In 1840 she moved it into the poems of 1818. This uncertainty is largely resolved by two pieces of evidence which establish terminal dates: first, S. included a fair copy of the poem, with instructions for publication, in his letter to Hunt on 15 August 1819; secondly, the meeting with Byron which is recalled in the poem’s opening occurred on 23 August 1818 (L ii 35–6). S. lived at Byron’s villa near Este between 25 or 26 August and 5 November 1818 (see headnote to PU). He may have completed the poem by the latter date though Mary’s initial dating of May 1819 and S.’s delay before sending it to England in August 1819 both suggest it was begun at Este and not completed until the following year. 565–9. S. does not envisage that history will ever be at an end; like Huttonian evolution, the processes at work are cyclic and assumed to operate over a vast time-scale, and the overthrow of Jupiter will doubtless eventually need to be repeated. 569. the] that Nbk 7; presumably a change to the press transcript. Doom.] Doom Nbk 7; doom. 1820, 1839. 571. Death or Night,] Death or Night Nbk 7; death or night; 1820, 1839. 572. omnipotent;] Omnipotent; Nbk 7. 573–4. See I 450 and note, and Athanase, cancelled sequence 10 and note (Longman ii 323, no. 146). 573. hope,] Nbk 7; hope 1820, 1839. 574. contemplates;] 1820; contemplates Nbk 7; contemplates: 1839. On S.’s distinctively powerful use of the word own, here and elsewhere, see G. R. Hamilton, ‘Shelley’s Own’, English v (1945) 149–53. 575. falter,] Nbk 7, 1839; flatter, 1820, 1829; probably on S.’s errata list. repent:] repent Nbk 7; repent; 1820, 1839. Cp. Paradise Lost i 94–6: ‘Yet not for those,/Nor what the potent Victor in his rage/Can else inflict, do I repent or change’.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-16

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A draft survives in Nbk 6 ff. 62–117 (BSM xv). This includes the bulk of the poem apart from 150 lines of the Maniac’s soliloquy (lines 287–93, 300–36, 377–83, 408–510 of the printed text do not appear.) Donald H. Reiman dates the composition of the missing lines to the period after the death of William S. on 7 June 1819 (SC vi 865). This cannot be proven. Reiman is too clear-cut when he identifies (Reiman (1977) 112) two phases of composition — in early 1819 and June–August 1819. GM’s analysis of the nbk reveals that parts of the poem must have been composed after Stanzas Written in Dejection — December  1818, near Naples (which can confidently be dated to December 1818; see headnote) and PU II (probably begun at the same period (see headnote to PU)). GM concludes from his study of the nbk draft that the ‘likelihood is . . . that substantial additions were still being made to Julian and Maddalo as late as March 1819’ (‘ “Julian and Maddalo”: The Draft and the Meaning’, Studia Neophilologica 35 (1963) 57–84 (67)). The sections of the poem not included in the nbk draft may have been written later still, though whether before or after William S.’s death cannot be decided. The manuscript that S. sent to Hunt in August 1819 did not provide the text for the poem’s first publication in 1824. It is probable that Mary used a fair copy of her own, made either later in the autumn or in spring 1820. Harvard Nbk lists ‘Maddalo and Julian’ on the contents page, but the transcript has been removed, probably to provide press-copy for 1824. A transcript of lines 1–107 (in Mary’s hand and again entitled ‘Maddalo and Julian’) survives in Nbk 11 ff. 170– 7. The fair copy S. sent to Hunt (Hunt MS) became the property of S. R. Townshend Mayer at Hunt’s death. Mayer made it available to H. B. Forman who used the MS as copy text in Forman 1876–7. Some time after Mayer’s death in 1880, Forman purchased the MS, and in 1920, it was bought by J. Pierpont Morgan, in whose library it still remains (Morgan Library & Museum MA 974; see MYRS viii 194–6). Hunt MS does not include either the preface or the epigraph from Virgil that appeared in 1824. It is a strikingly finished version otherwise, although punctuated lightly. Substantive differences between 1824 and Hunt MS are relatively minor, though where they occur, Hunt MS usually seems superior. S. must have had a copy of the poem in Italy from which Mary made her transcripts in 1819–20 (see SC vi 860). The question for the editor is whether S. continued to revise the poem after August 1819 (as he did with the fair copy of PU; see headnote). Mary perhaps suggests this when in 1824 she describes the poem ‘as having received the author’s ultimate corrections’ (1824 p. vii). If later revision is accepted, 1824 gains priority over the earlier version of the poem surviving in Hunt MS. Differences between 1824 and Hunt MS may be the result of Mary’s editorial changes and errors in transcription, but it is possible they show S.’s revision. On the other hand, S.’s letters of 1819–20 concerning the poem repeatedly urge his London friends to publish it in the form he had sent in August 1819 (S. to Ollier 23 December 1819 (SC vi 554) and 14 May 1820 (L ii 196)). In transcribing Hunt MS from his intermediate fair copy, S. may have made changes, which represent his final decisions. If so, and if Mary was transcribing the same intermediate fair copy, then her versions become in substance earlier than Hunt MS despite being made a few months later. Mary may mean by ‘ultimate corrections’ the addition of the preface and epigraph, or she may be claiming authority for her text over other MSS she knew to be in existence (including Hunt MS and others as well: Medwin possessed a version which he read to Washington Irving on 1 February 1824). However, Mary’s omission of line 218 suggests she was censoring the poem a little, and she may have wished to present these changes as ‘ultimate corrections’ made by S. There is no supporting evidence for the idea that S. continued to work on the poem itself after August 1819, although he certainly composed the preface after that date, perhaps in response to the Quarterly Review’s attack on RofI which he first read in October 1819. The reversed form of the title in Harvard Nbk and Nbk 11 may derive from the intermediate fair copy or from revision later and so does not help to decide whether or not Mary’s transcripts are superior to Hunt MS.

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The present edition uses Hunt MS as the copy text because it is an exceptionally good fair copy which S. intended for publication. As far as possible, the punctuation of Hunt MS has been preserved, but a small amount has been added (often at the ends of lines — Hunt MS is written in a tiny nbk, and longer lines in the text are sometimes crushed into the margins). Because later revision (between August 1819 and Mary’s transcriptions in 1819–20) remains a possibility, all substantive variants from 1824 have been noted and considered as perhaps indicating later changes made by S. The preface appears only in 1824; the epigraph appears only in 1824 and Nbk 11. S. initially hoped for anonymous publication in The Examiner. When this proved impossible, he suggested a separate volume for the poem plus several shorter pieces. When discussions began for 1820, S. saw the poem as incompatible with PU and requiring anonymous publication ‘in the first edition of it, in any case’ (L ii 196). It was announced as being in the press in 1820 but did not appear until 1824 (June 1824), at the head of the volume. In December 1819, S. told Ollier: ‘I mean to write three other poems [similar to J&M], the scenes of which will be laid at Rome, Florence, and Naples, but the subjects of which will all be drawn from dreadful or beautiful realities, as that of this was’ (L ii 164); arguably such poems were written but, if so, there is no sign of S. continuing to have in mind a group. In May 1820, S. suggested Athanase: ‘I would not print [J&M] with “Prometheus”. It would not harmonize . . . If you print “Julian and Maddalo”, I wish it to be printed in some unostentatious form, accompanied with the fragment of “Athanase” ’ (L ii 196). Six months later, again to Ollier, S. mentions ‘accompanying poems’ once more, almost apologetically: ‘The Julian & Maddalo & the accompan[y]ing poems are all my saddest verses raked up into one heap. — I mean to mingle more smiles with my tears in future.’ (L ii 246). Neil Fraistat has shown which poems S. intended to publish with Julian and Maddalo (see headnotes to Stanzas written in dejection and Misery — A Fragment, Longman ii 701–3, no. 202). In January 1821, S. assured Claire Clairmont that he had never intended to publish the poem; in February, he wrote to Ollier: ‘I suppose “Julian and Maddalo” is published. If not, do not add the “Witch of Atlas” ’ (L ii 254, 269). He sounds willing to let the piece drop for the moment, and no more is heard of it in his correspondence. The location of the poem in Venice, and its portrayal of figures reminiscent of S. and Byron, explicitly recall S.’s and Claire Clairmont’s visit to the city (21–25 August  1818). S. went there in order to mediate between Byron and Claire Clairmont about their daughter, Allegra, whom Claire had given into Byron’s care in April 1818. Claire regretted the decision and sought some degree of access to the child. Byron refused to speak to her directly on the matter: ‘I declined seeing her for fear that the consequence might be an addition to the family’ (Byron to Augusta Leigh, 21 September 1818, Byron L&J vi 69). S. told Mary: ‘he [Byron] often expresses his extreme horror of her [Claire’s] arrival, & the necessity it would impose on him of instantly quitting Venise [sic]’ (L ii 36). Byron agreed, however, to lend S. and his family the villa, ‘I Capuccini’ at Este, about forty miles southwest of Venice, which he had on lease. By this arrangement, Allegra would remain with Byron but be able to visit Claire at the villa. When this plan was accepted, S. asked Mary to travel at once to Este, bringing with her their two children, Clara and William. S. had told Byron that Mary and Claire were both in Padua already, waiting for news of the outcome; in fact, Claire was in Venice (staying with the Hoppners), and Mary was still in Lucca. S.’s family arrived on 5 September 1818, and on 24 September, Clara died (L ii 40–1). There is some evidence that Mary blamed Clara’s death on the hurried journey, and therefore on S.’s concern to placate Byron and arrange things for Claire. S. and the family remained at Este until 5 November, then travelled to Rome and Naples, returning to Rome on 5 March 1819 where William S. died on 7 June. Mary suffered from serious depression after his death, and again there is evidence of marital unhappiness. The two deaths and the difficulties in S.’s marriage have been linked, in particular, with the Maniac’s speeches; there is probably some connection though not as specific or legible as biographical criticism has tried to argue.

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The draft in Nbk 6 reveals that the poem was conceived as a whole: blank pages were left in the nbk for the Maniac’s speeches with the frame-narrative drafted before and after. GM remarks: ‘the draft shows clear evidence of careful structural planning and of a Soliloquy subordinated to a preconceived overall design’ (‘The Draft and the Meaning’, 63). Although the Maniac voices anguish that may well be linked to S.’s marriage, his speeches should also be seen in the context of the debate between the two other characters. The draft suggests the importance of S.’s friendship with Byron to the poem as a whole (see Robinson 91–100). In Venice, the friendship was under strain not only from the tussle over Allegra. S. disapproved of Byron’s life in Venice and the poetry he was writing there. Byron recited to S. passages from Childe Harold iv, and S. wrote to Peacock about it: The spirit in which it is written is, if insane, the most wicked & mischievous insanity that ever was given forth. It is a kind of obstinate & selfwilled folly in which he hardens himself. I remonstrated with him in vain on the tone of mind from which such a view of things alone arises . . . He associates with wretches who seem almost to have lost the gait & phisiognomy [sic] of man, & who do not scruple to avow practices which are not only not named but I believe seldom even conceived in England. He says he dissaproves [sic], but he endures. (17 or 18 December 1818, L ii 58) S.’s disgust with Byron’s life in Venice and his belief that it was destroying Byron’s poetic gift underlies much in the Maniac’s speech about the endurance of suffering and, in particular, the hardening of the heart that comes from either inflicting or bearing pain (see 350–7, 438–60). The same context informs the debate between Julian and Maddalo and the reader’s shifts in sympathy between them. Biographical readings of the poem have gradually been replaced by ones that emphasise its conversational aspects, seeing in the characters not identifiable persons but projections of personas or aspects of S. and Byron. The biographical context and Julian’s skilful deployment of Byronic opinions (see lines 174–84) support a view of the poem as poised and ambivalent. Neither character is exempt from either criticism or sympathy, and neither wins out decisively over the other; in relation to the Maniac, both seem liable to disregard him, either through over-confidence (Julian) or fatalistic resignation (Maddalo). The poem has no single source; R&H, completed in Italy in summer 1818, is similarly structured around a conversation, and in Lionel has a character close to the Maniac (see 337–43 and note). ‘Conversation’ was a frequent topic of eighteenth-century discussion in poetry and prose (Pope, ‘The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated’ (1733); Swift, A Collection of Polite and Ingenious Conversation (1738); Fielding, ‘An Essay on Conversation’ (c. 1741–49); Cowper, ‘Conversation’ (1781); Coleridge, ‘The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem’, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798)). S.’s subtitle recalls this tradition of refined yet colloquial exchange, in particular as it was employed by Wordsworth in The Excursion (1814); there, the aftermath of political revolution, personal despondency and human tragedy are debated through conversations held in scenes of natural grandeur. S. read The Excursion in 1814 and again the following year. He may also have been influenced by Peacock’s novels — particularly Melincourt (1817) and Nightmare Abbey (1818) — which proceed via pseudo-intellectual conversation and mock the conventions of romantic feeling. S. read and praised the novels in 1818–19 (see L i 517, 538, ii 29, 98). Torquato Tasso (1544–95) wrote many poetic dialogues; J&M does not draw on them directly but is in part a reflection on Tasso’s life and achievement. S. read Tasso’s Aminta and Gerusalemme liberata first in 1815 and began, when he arrived in Italy in 1818, a more systematic study of him, including his biography. He wrote to Peacock, 20 April 1818: ‘I have devoted this summer & indeed the next year to the composition of a tragedy on the subject of Tasso’s madness, which I find upon inspection is, if properly treated, admirably

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dramatic and poetical’ (L ii 8). Scenes of this were written (see Longman ii 365–70 and BSM xv 160–7) and a scenario (see BSM iii 165); they include a character named Maddalo, proving the link between projected drama and poem, but the play itself never advanced very far. S. may have been drawn to write on Tasso by Byron’s ‘The Lament of Tasso’ (July 1817), which he read in September 1817. Carlos Baker sees the Maniac’s story as ‘a semifictionalized treatment of the poet Tasso’s imprisonment for real or alleged madness in the year 1579’, having ‘nothing probable to do with S.’s domestic affairs’ (Baker 127, 291). The links between the Maniac and Tasso are convincing, but they do not prevent the poem from also having biographical content; Tasso was interesting to S. and Byron as a figure of the unjustly persecuted poet, susceptible and possibly driven mad. Their identification with him allowed them to explore their own condition via dramatic monologues either explicitly in Tasso’s voice (as in ‘The Lament of Tasso’) or tacitly so (as in the Maniac’s speeches). S.’s Tasso was in part the product of contemporary images of him. Between 1750 and 1850, Tasso became: a prototype of the Romantic poet, loving passionately but hopelessly and beyond his station, the victim of political oppression, maintaining his dignity and essential nobility of heart through intense and prolonged suffering, the hypersensitive artist at odds with society, wandering restlessly from court to court or chained in a lunatic’s cell. (C. P. Brand, Torquato Tasso (1965) 205) He is portrayed in S.’s lifetime as a paragon of poetic virtue: All his historians concur in their praise of his candour, his inviolable fidelity to his word, his courtesy, his frankness, his freedom from the least tincture of revenge or of malignity . . . his purity of life and manners, his fervent and sincere piety. What was most irksome in his temper was a strange fear he had of being slighted, and a certain suspicious and mistrustful disposition. (J. H. Wiffen, ‘The Life of Tasso’, The Jerusalem Delivered of Torquato Tasso (1826, 1872) xlix) S.’s most lengthy discussion of Tasso occurs in a letter to Peacock (6 November 1818) written after S. had visited the prison in Ferrara where Tasso was incarcerated. S. sees Tasso as someone of ‘delicate susceptibilities and elevated fancies’ and ‘an intense & earnest mind exceeding at times its own depth, and admonished to return by the chillness of the water of oblivion striking upon its adventurous feet’ (L ii 48, 47). Here, as in the Maniac, S. accepts the conventional image of Tasso and develops it into something closer to himself (see line 385 and note). The poem is written in couplets, in what S. called ‘a certain familiar style of language to express the actual way in which people talk with each other whom education and a certain refinement of sentiment have placed above the use of vulgar idioms’ (L ii 108). The style squares with eighteenth-century and Romantic ideals of ‘conversation’ (see above); it attracts comparison with Leigh Hunt’s The Story of Rimini (1816) and Keats’s Endymion (1818), both of which use couplets in a similar way. All three are drawing on the Della Cruscan poetry of the 1780s and 1790s; S.’s choice of style is appropriate for Julian, therefore, whose behaviour and language are frequently characteristic of eighteenth-century sensibility. The poem is a companion piece to the more optimistic and idealised poetry of PU and a precursor of The Cenci’s concern with familial turmoil and ‘dreadful realities’. Formally, it is nearest to LMG and Epipsychidion among S.’s other works. Text from the Morgan Library & Museum MA 974 (=Hunt MS), except for epigraph and preface from 1824. First published in 1824.

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Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation The meadows with fresh streams, the bees with thyme, The goats with the green leaves of budding spring, Are saturated not — nor Love with tears.

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Count Maddalo is a Venetian nobleman of ancient family and of great fortune, who, without mixing much in the society of his countrymen, resides chiefly at his magnificent palace in that city. He is a person of the most consummate genius; and capable, if he would direct his energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country. But it is his weakness to be proud: he derives, from a comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human life. His passions and his powers are incomparably greater than those of other men, and instead of the latter having been employed in curbing the former, they have mutually lent each other strength. His ambition preys upon itself, for want of objects which it can consider worthy of exertion. I say that Maddalo is proud, because I can find no other word to express the concentered and impatient feelings which consume him; but it is on his own hopes and affections only that he seems to trample, for in social life no human being can be more gentle, patient, and unassuming than Maddalo. He is cheerful, frank, and witty. His more serious conversation is a sort of intoxication; men are held by it as by a spell. He has travelled much; and there is an inexpressible charm in his relation of his adventures in different countries. ¶ 16. Epigraph.] S.’s translation of Virgil, Eclogues x 29–30; see Longman ii 361–2. The Latin reads: ‘nec lacrimis crudelis Amor nec gramina riuis/nec cytiso saturantur apes nec frondae capellae.’ Cp. Tasso, Aminta I ii 13–15: Pasce l’agna l’erbette, il lupa l’agne; Ma il crudo amor di lagrime si pasce, Nè se ne mostra mai satollo Pref. 1. Count Maddalo] To some extent, a portrait of Lord Byron. S. remarked to Leigh Hunt of the poem, ‘two of the characters you will recognize’ (L ii 108), presumably Byron and S. himself as Maddalo and Julian. Byron was living at the Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice when S. visited. Cp. Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell (Princeton, 1966), 119: ‘S., I remember, draws a very beautiful picture of the tranquil pleasures of Venice in a poem which he has not yet published, and in which he does not make me cut a good figure. It describes an evening we passed together.’ The name is used for a courtier in S.’s drafted scene for a drama on the life of Tasso (see Longman ii 365–9) and may be connected to the French matelot (seaman); S. often referred to Byron as Albe and to Allegra as Alba; pseudonyms and nicknames were often used (privately and publicly) by the S. circle. Pref. 3. if he would direct] Cp. S.’s letter to Byron, 29 September 1816, L i 507: ‘Is there nothing in the hope of being the parent of greatness, and of goodness, which is destined, perhaps, to expand indefinitely?’ Pref. 4. degraded] Modern sense of ‘corrupted, low, debased’ co-existing with earlier sense of ‘having lost rank or status, dishonoured’; a cliché of protest: soldiers in L&C III vi 9 are ‘degraded’ by tyranny; Venice in Childe Harold iv 134n is ‘the degraded capital’. Cp. lines 184, 345. Pref. 5–7. proud .  .  . life] Cp. S.’s less charitable account of Byron in a letter to Peacock, 17 or 18 December 1818 (L ii 58), in particular: ‘contemplating in the distorted mirror of his own thoughts, the nature & the destiny of man, what can he behold but objects of contempt & despair?’ Pref. 9. men, and instead] men; and, instead Forman 1876–7. Pref. 9–10. His ambition . . . exertion] Cp. Byron to John Murray, 3 November 1821, about the protagonist of Cain: ‘the inadequacy of his state to his Conceptions’ (Byron L&J ix 54). Pref. 11. concentered] ‘Focussed on self as a centre’. A notably Byronic word; see his Prometheus 55–8: ‘a firm will, and a deep sense,/Which even in torture can descry/Its own concentered recompense,/ Triumphant where it does defy’ and Childe Harold iii 833–5: ‘From the high host/Of stars, to the lull’d lake and mountain-coast/All is concenter’d in a life intense’.

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Julian is an Englishman of good family, passionately attached to those philosophical notions which assert the power of man over his own mind, and the immense improvements of which, by the extinction of certain moral superstitions, human society may be yet susceptible. Without concealing the evil in the world, he is for ever speculating how good may be made superior. He is a complete infidel, and a scoffer at all things reputed holy; and Maddalo takes a wicked pleasure in drawing out his taunts against religion. What Maddalo thinks on these matters is not exactly known. Julian, in spite of his heterodox opinions, is conjectured by his friends to possess some good qualities. How far this is possible, the pious reader will determine. Julian is rather serious. Of the Maniac I can give no information. He seems by his own account to have been disappointed in love. He was evidently a very cultivated and amiable person when in his right senses. His story, told at length, might be like many other stories of the same kind: the unconnected exclamations of his agony will perhaps be found a sufficient comment for the text of every heart. Pref. 16. Julian] Modelled on S. himself. The name may suggest treachery (because of the Roman Emperor, Julian the Apostate) and may have been suggested by the Julian Alps, visible from Venice and mentioned by S. in the letter describing his meeting with Byron (L ii 37). S. may also have had in mind ‘Count Julian . . . a powerful Lord among the Wisi-Goths, now a renegade’ from Southey’s epic, Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814). Scott in The Vision of Don Roderick (1811) and Walter Savage Landor in Count Julian: A Tragedy (1812) wrote versions of the same story in which Julian betrays his country to the Saracens because his daughter was seduced by Roderick, Julian’s King. Arguably, S.’s character similarly puts private interest before the general good when he blithely fails to be of any substantial help to the Maniac. GM suggests Giulio Segni as a possible source: ‘another of Tasso’s visitors during his madness, who was so impressed with him that he became his devoted friend’ (‘Draft and the Meaning’ 77). Pref. 18. may be yet susceptible] may yet be susceptible 1839. Pref. 23. the pious reader] Cp. the less clear-cut irony in S.’s Preface to Alastor: ‘The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men.’ Pref. 24. the Maniac] S. is coy about his identity in his letter to Hunt (15 August 1819) — he is ‘also in some degree a painting from nature, but, with respect to time and place, ideal’ (L ii 108) — and intended nobody actual. The Maniac has been seen as an aspect of S., distraught because of Mary’s coldness in 1818–19, either after the death of Clara S. (September 1818) or the following summer, after William S.’s death (June 1819) — cp. White ii 42–50; seen by J. H. Smith as expressing S.’s anguish at conducting an affair with Claire Clairmont (‘S. and Claire Clairmont’, PMLA 54 (September 1939) 785–815); linked by Peck to S.’s memories of Harriet Grove (Peck ii 104–7; cp. lines 273–4 note). The Maniac has also been connected with Byron, in his relations with his wife and Augusta (G. W. Knight, Lord Byron: Christian Virtue (1952) 251–4 and J. E. Saveson, ‘S.’s Julian and Muddalo’ K-SJ 10 (1961) 53–8). Ivan Roe, Shelley: The Last Phase (1953) 135–58, argues that Hogg’s relations with Mary provoked S. to write the Maniac’s speeches. News had reached S. of Harriet S.’s suicide on 15 December 1816; Byron reminded S. of the custody battle with Harriet S. when they met in Venice (L ii 37) to discuss custody again. The Maniac’s soliloquy may, therefore, be in part an expression of S.’s remorse about Harriet also (see H. S. Salt, ‘A Study of Shelley’s Julian and Maddalo’, The Shelley Society Papers, pt. II (1889) 326). None of the biographical connections is watertight or exclusive; S.’s figure draws on his interest in Tasso (see headnote) and on the literary conventions of sensibility. Contemporary medicine recognised different kinds of mania; Pinel in 1806 gave five: ‘Melancholia, or delirium upon one subject exclusively’, ‘Mania without delirium’, ‘Mania with delirium’, ‘Dementia’, and ‘Ideotism’, characterising ‘Melancholia’ as ‘Delirium exclusively upon one subject . . . in some cases, equanimity of disposition . . . in others, habitual depression and anxiety, and frequently a moroseness of character amounting even to the most decided misanthropy, and sometimes to an invincible disgust with life’ (Ph. Pinel, A Treatise on Insanity, trans. D. Davis (1806) ix — x, 149). Cp. Gordon Spence, ‘The Maniac’s Soliloquy in Julian and Maddalo’, K-SR iv (1989) 81–93. S.’s maniac seems melancholic, by this definition (though see 424–6 and note). The literature of sensibility used ‘maniac’ to describe such melancholics, not raving but fixated, and usually gave as the cause heart-break or unrequited love; they were predominantly deserted women, later men as well; the protagonist of Alastor and ‘Lionel’ in R&H both fit the

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I rode one evening with Count Maddalo Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow Of Adria towards Venice: — a bare strand Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand, Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,

type. Where distress is coupled with disgust, however, a revolutionary aspect to the maniac can be found. See Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution (1989) 198: ‘The contrast between Julian and the maniac dramatizes opposed aspects of sensibility — the fashionable assumption of a feeling attitude on the one hand, and the revolutionary political force on the other.’ Cp. Robert Merry, ‘The Pains of Memory’ (1796) 329–36: By sharp sensation wounded to the soul, He ponders on the world . . . abhors the whole; While black as night, his gloomy thought expands O’er life’s perplexing paths, and barren sands. In the dire workings of his wakeful dreams The human race a race of demons seems, All is unjust, discordant and severe, He asks not mercy’s smiles or pity’s tear Pref. 26–7. the unconnected . . . heart] Possibly linked with John Taylor Coleridge’s review of RofI in the Quarterly Review (April 1819), which attacked S.’s private morals: ‘if we might withdraw the veil of private life, and tell what we now know about him, it would be indeed a disgusting picture that we should exhibit, but it would be an unanswerable comment on our text’. S. drafted a letter to William Gifford, as editor of the Quarterly picking up on this phrase, ‘ “an unanswerable comment[”] on the text, either of his review or my poem’ (October 1819, L ii 130 and note). John Coleridge’s personal attack may have encouraged S. to write the preface, which distances the poem from himself and Byron; adapting Coleridge’s phrase would make the preface a pointed rejoinder to biographical criticism. S. continued to be angered by the review, believing it to be written by Southey and writing to him about it on 26 June 1820. No evidence exists to give a date of composition for the preface (see headnote). 1. I rode one evening] For S’s account of the visit to Venice that suggested the poem, see L ii 36: ‘So he [Byron] took me in his gondola — much against my will for I wanted to return to Clare at Mrs. Hoppners who was anxiously waiting for me — across the laguna to a long sandy island which defends Venise [sic] from the Adriatic. When we disembarked, we found his horses waiting for us, & we rode along the sands of the sea talking.’ 2. the bank of land] The ‘Lido di Malamocco’ that acts as a coastal defence for Venice. Clara was buried on the Lido on 25 September 1818. Cp. Marino Faliero IV i 13–15: ‘the Adrian wave/Rose o’er the city’s murmur in the night,/Dashing against the outward Lido’s bulwark’. 3. Adria] The Adriatic Sea. 3–7. a bare strand . . . Is this] Meaning the Lido but applicable to Venice in decline. Cp. Byron, ‘Ode on Venice’ 8–10, 12: ‘as the slime,/The dull green ooze of the receding deep,/Is with the dashing of the spring-tide foam . . . Are they to those that were’; and cp. Marino Faliero II ii 111–13: ‘Our fathers did not fly from Attila/Into these isles, where palaces have sprung/On banks redeem’d from the rude ocean’s ooze/To own a thousand despots’. Cp. below lines 219, 275. 5. Matted with thistles] ‘Covered with tangled growth’ but also, perhaps, ‘dulled, deprived of lustre’ (OED def. 2). Cp. Goldsmith, The Deserted Village 349: ‘Those matted woods, where birds forget to sing’, and Dryden’s Virgil’s Pastorals iv 36: ‘Through the Matted Grass the liquid Gold shall creep’. amphibious] frequently applied to plants: ‘the amphibious tribe as willow, sallow, withy, osier’ (C. Marshall, Gardening (1813).) Cp. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ch. 1: ‘the moderns [sacrifice passion] to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning’.

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shelley: selected poems Such as from earth’s embrace the salt ooze breeds Is this: — an uninhabitable sea-side, Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried, Abandons, and no other object breaks The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes A narrow space of level sand thereon, Where’twas our wont to ride while day went down. This ride was my delight. — I love all waste And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be: And such was this wide ocean, and this shore More barren than its billows; — and yet more Than all, with a remembered friend I love To ride as then I rode; — for the winds drove The living spray along the sunny air Into our faces; the blue heavens were bare, Stripped to their depths by the awakening North, And from the waves, sound like delight broke forth Harmonizing with solitude, and sent Into our hearts aërial merriment. So, as we rode, we talked; and the swift thought, Winging itself with laughter, lingered not, But flew from brain to brain, — such glee was ours — Charged with light memories of remembered hours,

7–12. Cp. Lines Written among the Euganean Hills 45–52: On the beach of a northern sea Which tempests shake eternally, As once the wretch lay there to sleep, Lies a solitary heap, One white skull and seven dry bones, On the margin of the stones, Where a few grey rushes stand, Boundaries of the sea and land: 7. uninhabitable] uninhabited 1824, Forman 1876–7. 23–4. The simplicity of these lines was achieved by considerable redrafting. In Nbk 6 p. 64, they are heavily corrected, reading first: ‘And that divinest depths of Heaven laid bare/To its profoundest Blue by the keen North’. 24. North,] North Hunt MS; north; 1824. 27. aërial merriment.] ‘High spirits’, ‘elevated cheerfulness’. Cp. Euganean Hills 142–6: ‘Those who alone thy towers behold/Quivering through aërial gold . . . would imagine not they were/Sepulchres’; cp. PU I 778: ‘Dream visions of aërial joy, and call the monster Love’; and III ii 17: ‘the aërial ice clings over it’. merriment.] merriment . . . Reiman (1977). This ellipsis is recorded in the transcript of Hunt MS in MYR viii 215, but its existence in the MS is doubtful. 30. glee] ‘Mirth, joy, rejoicing’. The word was revived in the late eighteenth century after falling out of use. Cp. Goldsmith, Deserted Village 201: ‘Full well they laugh’d with counterfeited glee’. Bowles uses the word frequently as does William Hayley, especially in his ballads. The word has overtones, therefore, of sentimentalism and Della Cruscan poetry, and is reminiscent of Leigh Hunt; cp. Hunt, Hero and

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None slow enough for sadness; till we came Homeward, which always makes the spirit tame. This day had been cheerful but cold, and now The sun was sinking, and the wind also. Our talk grew somewhat serious, as may be Talk interrupted with such raillery As mocks itself, because it cannot scorn The thoughts it would extinguish: — ’twas forlorn Yet pleasing, such as once, so poets tell, The devils held within the dales of Hell Concerning God, freewill and destiny: Of all that earth has been or yet may be, All that vain men imagine or believe, Or hope can paint or suffering may achieve, We descanted, and I (for ever still Is it not wise to make the best of ill?)

Leander 116: ‘breathed with glee’ and R&H 88–9: ‘laughed with the glee/Of light and unsuspecting infancy.’ ours —] ours, 1824. According to the punctuation of 1824, ‘glee’ is ‘Charged with light memories’; in Hunt MS, ‘the swift thought’ or the characters’ brains are ‘charged’. The dash is very clear in Hunt MS. In Nbk 6 p. 64, the draft reads ‘But flew from brain to brain/Charged’ suggesting that ‘such glee was ours’ was inserted as a parenthesis. 32. None slow] None deep Nbk 6, Nbk 11. 36–9. Our talk . . . extinguish] ‘Our talk grew quite serious, as may be the case when talk is interrupted by the sort of humour which turns its ironies against itself, finding that humour cannot dismiss the thoughts which it is trying to banish from the mind.’ In Nbk 6, ‘Our talk . . . mocks itself ’ is drafted in pencil and a version of the remainder of line 39 added in pen: ‘rather than that it scorns’. The passage is redrafted in pen on the same page. 38. mocks itself] Cp. PU I  260: ‘Such despair as mocks itself with smiles’. scorn] Frequent in S. and ambivalent. ‘Scorn’ is both tyrannical and a possible means of resisting tyranny. Cp. lines 354–6 and To a Skylark 91–2: ‘Yet if we could scorn/Hate, and pride, and fear’. 40. tell,] 1824; tell Hunt MS. 41. dales] vales Nbk 11. 41–5. The devils held . . . may achieve] Cp. Paradise Lost ii 555–61: In discourse more sweet (For eloquence the soul, song charms the sense) Others apart sat on a hill retired, In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost. 42. destiny:] destiny. 1824. Mary’s punctuation clarifies the syntax, beginning a new sentence at line 43, whose main verb is ‘We descanted’. Hunt MS is less accurate and more fluid — ‘Of all that earth’ follows ‘freewill and destiny’ as a further subject; its relation to ‘We descanted’ emerges only as one reads on. 44. At this point in Nbk 6, the draft overlaps with drafts of Stanzas Written in Dejection — December 1818, near Naples; Stanzas must have been drafted before J&M, which is written around them. See GM, ‘The Draft and the Meaning’, 65–6, arguing from this for a later date of composition, after December 1818. Cp. lines 525–47 and note. 45. may] can 1824. 46. descanted] Meaning ‘discussed freely’; more usually ‘descanted upon’, not ‘descanted of ’. 46–7. still . . . ill] Cp. lines 203–4.

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shelley: selected poems Argued against despondency, but pride Made my companion take the darker side. The sense that he was greater than his kind Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind By gazing on its own exceeding light. — Meanwhile the sun paused ere it should alight, Over the horizon of the mountains; — Oh How beautiful is sunset, when the glow Of Heaven descends upon a land like thee, Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy! Thy mountains, seas and vineyards and the towers Of cities they encircle! — it was ours To stand on thee, beholding it; and then Just where we had dismounted the Count’s men Were waiting for us with the gondola. — As those who pause on some delightful way Though bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood Looking upon the evening and the flood Which lay between the city and the shore Paved with the image of the sky . . . the hoar

50. sense . . . kind] Cp. Preface 6ff.: ‘he derives, from a comparison’ etc. 51. struck . . . blind] Cp. S.’s description of Coleridge in LMG 202–8: he who sits obscure In the exceeding lustre and the pure Intense irradiation of a mind Which, with its own internal lightning blind, Flags wearily through darkness and despair — A cloud-encircled meteor of the air, A hooded eagle among blinking owls. Cp. also Apollo’s speech in PU III ii 13–14: ‘his eyes/Which gazed on the undazzling sun, now blinded’; and Byron, ‘The Lament of Tasso’ 1–2: ‘Long years! — It tries the thrilling frame to bear/And eaglespirit of a child of Song’. 53. alight,] alight 1824. In Nbk 6, line 53 first read: ‘And some such thought I spoke while the [?sunlight]’. 54. Oh] Oh! 1824. MYR viii 215 transcribes ‘oh’, but the MS reading (Hunt MS 3, line 16) appears to be ‘Oh’. 57. Paradise of exiles] S. remembered the phrase; see his letter to Ollier, 6 March 1820 (L ii 174). 60. To . . . and] Nbk 6 first read: ‘To stand beneath the dome for ever’. 63–4. As those . . . we stood] The brief, elegant simile recalls Dante; see Purgatorio ii 10–12: ‘Noi eravam lunghesso mare ancora,/come gente che pensa a suo cammino,/che va col cuore e col corpo dimora.’ Cary translates: ‘Meanwhile we linger’d by the water’s brink,/Like men, who, musing on their road, in thought/Journey, while motionless the body rests.’ (Cary, The Vision (1814), ‘Purgatory’ ii 10–12). 67. Paved with the image of the sky] Cp. L ii 42: ‘Venice is a wonderfully fine city . . . the silent streets are paved with water’, Lines Written among the Euganean Hills 97–9: ‘Amphitrite’s destined halls/Which her hoary sire now paves/With his blue and beaming waves’ and Ode to Naples (Longman iii, no. 343) 106–7: ‘The Sea/Which paves the desert streets of Venice’. Other travellers to Venice saw similar effects: ‘gliding over the Lagune, whose surface unruffled by the slightest breeze, was as smooth as the most

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And aery Alps towards the North appeared Through mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark reared Between the East and West; and half the sky Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew Down the steep West into a wondrous hue Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent Among the many-folded hills: — they were Those famous Euganean hills, which bear As seen from Lido through the harbour piles The likeness of a clump of peaked isles —

polished glass’ (Eustace i 64); ‘There is a glorious City in the Sea./The Sea is in the broad, the narrow streets,/Ebbing and flowing; and the salt sea-weed/Clings to the marble of her palaces’ (Samuel Rogers, Italy, ‘Venice’ 1–4). Lady Morgan sees in Venice ‘a gorgeous construction of marble, resting on the undulating surface of the ocean, whose waves impress the tesselated pavements of its mightiest fabrics’ (Italy, 2 vols (1830) ii 452). sky . . .] Ellipses are frequent in Hunt MS, especially in the Maniac’s speeches. S. uses three dots on most occasions, sometimes four and sometimes only two. This text standardises ellipses to three dots; where S.’s MS variants seem significant, they have been noted. 67–70. the hoar . . . West] The Alps stretch from the eastern to the western horizon. Julian’s is a familiar ‘station’ for the educated traveller; cp. line 87. S. may be suggesting a meeting of contradictory qualities in ‘hoar’ and ‘aery’; cp. W. L. Bowles, ‘Shakspeare’ 7–8: ‘Called by thy magic from the hoary deep,/ Aërial forms should in bright troops ascend’. 70–9. and half the sky . . . peakèd isles] Julian turns to the west, towards the setting sun that appears to sink among the ‘famous Euganean Hills’. They are a famous tourist attraction because Petrarch is buried there. Cp. the descriptions of sunrise in PU II i 18–19: ‘the orange light of widening morn/Beyond the purple mountains’ and in Lines Written among the Euganean Hills 76–82: till th’eastern heaven Bursts, and then, as clouds of even, Flecked with fire and azure, lie In the unfathomable sky, So their plumes of purple grain, Starred with drops of golden rain, Gleam above the sunlight woods, 71. emblazonry] In the period, with a heraldic and military sense; cp. Wordsworth, The White Doe of Rylstone iii 91: ‘The Banner in all its dread Emblazonry’ and Paradise Lost ii 511–13: ‘him [Satan] round/A globe of fiery seraphim enclosed/With bright emblazonry, and horrent arms’; also with the sense of ‘Verbal amplification or embellishment’. The more usual modern sense, ‘Display of brilliant colours; brilliant pictorial representation’, is first cited by OED in 1827. 76. many-folded] Nbk 11, Locock 1911; many folded Hunt MS, 1824, Forman 1876–7. In Nbk 6, the second word is unclear, but there is no hyphen. See, however, PU II i 201: ‘Through the many-folded mountains’. 79. peakèd] Two syllables. A commonplace of eighteenth-century fine writing; cp. Mrs Radcliffe, The Italian, ch. 13: ‘Its peaked head towered far above every neighbouring summit’; and Caroline Oliphant, ‘The Boat Song o’ the Clyde’: ‘How soft an’ grand in azure hue/Arran’s peakèd hills we view’. The word perhaps creates a clash of register with ‘clump’.

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80

And then — as if the Earth and Sea had been Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen Those mountains towering as from waves of flame Around the vaporous sun, from which there came The inmost purple spirit of light, and made 85 Their very peaks transparent. ‘Ere it fade,’ Said my companion, ‘I will show you soon A better station’ — so, o’er the lagoon We glided, and from that funereal bark I leaned, and saw the city, and could mark 90 How from their many isles in evening’s gleam Its temples and its palaces did seem Like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven. I was about to speak, when — ‘We are even Now at the point I meant,’ said Maddalo, 95 And bade the gondolieri cease to row. ‘Look, Julian, on the West and listen well If you hear not a deep and heavy bell.’ I looked, and saw between us and the Sun A building on an island; such a one 100 As age to age might add, for uses vile;

83. vaporous] Cp. Lines Written among the Euganean Hills 91–2: ‘The waveless plain of Lombardy/ Bounded by the vaporous air’. Common in S. and generally without derogatory connotation; cp. Coleridge ‘Ode to the Departing Year’ 160–1: ‘the vaporous passions that bedim/God’s Image’ and Bacon The Advancement of Learning II viii §3: ‘high and vaporous imaginations . . . shall beget hopes and beliefs of strange and impossible shapes’. 87. station] ‘A point at which one stands or may stand to obtain a view’ (OED def. 7c). 88. that funereal bark] that most ghastly bark Nbk 6. Cp. L ii 42: ‘The gondolas themselves are things of a most romantic and picturesque appearance; I can only compare them to moths of which a coffin might have been the chrysalis.’ 91–2. Its temples . . . enchantment] Cp. Tempest IV i 151–2: ‘the baseless fabric of this vision,/The cloudcapp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces’. 93–5. We . . . row] Byron seems to have been fond of showing visitors impressive views of Venice: ‘I shall take him [Charles Hanson] to ride at the Lido . . . I will show him the Lazaretto which is not far off you know — & looks nearer than it is’ (Byron to Hobhouse, 11 November 1818, Byron L&J vii 77). 96. Julian] Yorick Nbk 6. Probably, more closely related to Sterne than Hamlet; Mary Jnl records S. re-reading Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey in 1818; cp. L ii 114, ‘On Love’ (drafted July 1818), and Nbk 6, p. 9: ‘Sterne says that if he were in a desart he would love some cypress’. Sterne evoked sensibility; cp. J. Scott, ‘An Essay on Painting’, Poetical Works (1782) 293, addressing a painter: ‘To Sterne’s soft Maniac let thy hand impart/The languid cheek, the look that pierc’d his heart,/When to her Virgin Saint the vesper song she rais’d,/Or earnest view’d him as he sat and gaz’d.’ Scott refers to the chapter ‘Maria’ in Sterne, A Sentimental Journey vol. ii where Yorick (like Julian and Maddalo) searches out and is moved by a ‘disorder’d maid’ who pipes an evening hymn to the Virgin. Cp. Preface 31, The Maniac and note. 99. such a one] such an one 1824, Nbk 6. 100. as age to age might add] Meant literally: ‘as one age might bequeath to the next’. In Nbk 6, the draft read first, ‘As age on age might build’. uses vile] See Childe Harold iv 91–135.

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A windowless, deformed and dreary pile And on the top an open tower, where hung A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung. We could just hear its hoarse and iron tongue. 105 The broad sun sunk behind it, and it tolled In strong and black relief . . . ‘What we behold Shall be the madhouse and its belfry tower,’ Said Maddalo, ‘and ever at this hour Those who may cross the water hear that bell 110 Which calls the maniacs each one from his cell To vespers.’ — ‘As much skill as need to pray In thanks or hope for their dark lot have they To their stern maker,’ I replied. ‘O ho! You talk as in years past,’ said Maddalo. 115 ‘’Tis strange men change not. You were ever still Among Christ’s flock a perilous infidel, A wolf for the meek lambs — if you can’t swim Beware of Providence.’ I looked on him, But the gay smile had faded in his eye. 101. windowless] The hospital on San Servolo (see line 214) has many windows; Robert Browning suggested S. was referring to the penitentiary on the islet of San Clemente, lying west of Venice (see Locock 1911 i 586). Perhaps the uncertainty corresponds to S.’s elision of madness and criminal punishment in J&M; cp. The Tower of Famine (Longman iv 35–43, no. 370) 5–7: ‘built/Upon some prison-homes, whose dwellers rave/For bread, and gold, and blood’. pile] Meaning a ‘lofty mass of buildings, a large building or edifice’ (OED sb 3, def. 4a) but drawing attention to Venice’s foundations (OED sb 1 def. 3a). Cp. 78, 92 for S.’s use of the word and its cognates in different senses. 103–4. bell . . . tongue] Cp. Wordsworth, Excursion viii 167, 169–7, describing a factory: ‘an unnatural light/. . . Breaks from a many-windowed fabric huge;/And at the appointed hour a bell is heard,/Of harsher import than the curfew-knoll’. 105. sunk] sank 1824. Hunt MS, Nbk 6 and Nbk 11 all read ‘sunk’; the vowel echoes not only ‘sun’ but the rhyme-words ‘hung’, ‘swung’ and ‘tongue’ of lines 102–4. 106. relief . . .] MYR viii 217 transcribes ‘relief. — ’. The MS is unclear but appears to have an ellipsis in which two of the dots have run together, forming what looks like a dash. This occurs again at line 357 (Hunt MS 15, MYR viii 221). An ellipsis suggests a pause, and this suits Maddalo’s desire to create an effect. 107. Shall] The tense is colloquial (‘That’ll be the madhouse’) and portentous-sounding, as if Maddalo is inviting Julian to imagine it was a madhouse. Cp. lines 120–2. 108. ever] even 1824. Probably Mary’s misreading of S.’s hand. 115. Tis strange] Maddalo was more absolute in Nbk 6: ‘Men never change — and you were ever still’. 117–18. A wolf . . . Providence] Cp. John x 12: ‘But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep’, Lycidas 114–15: ‘such as for their bellies’ sake,/Creep and intrude, and climb into the fold’ and Shephearde’s Calendar May 126–7: ‘Tho, under colour of shepeheards, somewhile/There crept in Wolves, ful of fraude and guile’. Maddalo is teasing Julian with the thought that even such a ‘wolf ’ as he might have to be careful, that his defiance of orthodoxy requires a degree of self-sufficiency he may not possess. This is an autobiographical joke as well because Byron could swim and Shelley could not. In Nbk 6, 118 is the last on page 79; the bottom of the sheet is filled with a sketch of a sailing-boat. 119. in] from 1824.

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120 ‘And such, — ’ he cried, ‘is our mortality, And this must be the emblem and the sign Of what should be eternal and divine! — And like that black and dreary bell, the soul Hung in a heaven-illumined tower, must toll 125 Our thoughts and our desires to meet below Round the rent heart and pray — as madmen do; For what? they know not, till the night of death, As sunset that strange vision, severeth Our memory from itself, and us from all 130 We sought and yet were baffled.’ I recall The sense of what he said, although I mar The force of his expressions. The broad star Of day meanwhile had sunk behind the hill And the black bell became invisible, 135 And the red tower looked grey, and all between, The churches, ships and palaces were seen Huddled in gloom; — into the purple sea The orange hues of heaven sunk silently. We hardly spoke, and soon the gondola 140 Conveyed me to my lodgings by the way. The following morn was rainy, cold and dim; Ere Maddalo arose, I called on him — And whilst I waited, with his child I played: A lovelier toy sweet Nature never made, 145 A serious, subtle, wild, yet gentle being, Graceful without design and unforeseeing;

120. mortality,] mortality Hunt MS; mortality; 1824. 124. heaven-illumined] Cp. James Thomson, ‘Seraphina’ 13–16: ‘[her] eyes dispense/A mild and gracious influence;/Such as in visions angels shed/Around the heaven-illumined head.’ toll] In a transitive sense, ‘to summon’; cp. Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ 71–2: ‘like a bell/To toll me back’. 126. rent] ‘Torn or ragged’; cp. R&H (Longman ii, no. 144) 790–1: ‘like flowers delicate and fair,/On its rent boughs’. do;] 1824. do Hunt MS, Forman 1876–7. In Hunt MS, the line is too long for the page width and ‘do’ is inserted below ‘madmen’; hence, probably, the lack of punctuation. 137. Huddled in gloom] Cp. Byron, Childe Harold iv 112–14: ‘Venice, lost and won . . . Sinks, like a seaweed, into whence she rose’. 140. lodgings] lodging 1824. 143. with . . . played] romped in his saloon canc. Nbk 6. The child is usually identified with Allegra, Byron’s daughter by Claire Clairmont, whose custody was the reason for S.’s visiting Venice in August 1818. Allegra died on 19 April 1822 of typhus fever, aged five. 145. serious,] 1824, Forman 1876–7; serious Hunt MS. S. may have intended a double epithet: ‘serious-subtle’. The mixture of qualities recalls S.’s description of Allegra, 15 August 1821: ‘she has a contemplative seriousness which, mixed with her excessive vivacity, which has not yet deserted her, has a very peculiar effect in a child’ (L ii 334). See PU II i 114–17 and note.

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With eyes — oh speak not of her eyes! — which seem Twin mirrors of Italian heaven, yet gleam With such deep meaning, as we never see But in the human countenance. With me She was a special favourite: I had nursed Her fine and feeble limbs when she came first To this bleak world; and she yet seemed to know On second sight her ancient playfellow, Less changed than she was by six months or so — For after her first shyness was worn out We sat there, rolling billiard balls about, When the Count entered. — Salutations past, ‘The words you spoke last night might well have cast A darkness on my spirit — if man be The passive thing you say, I should not see Much harm in the religions and old saws (Though I may never own such leaden laws) Which break a teachless nature to the yoke: Mine is another faith’ — thus much I spoke And noting he replied not, added: ‘See This lovely child, blithe, innocent and free;

147. eyes] S. often admired Allegra’s eyes: ‘She yet retains the beauty of her deep blue eyes’ (L ii 334). 151. She . . . favourite] Dear was she as mine own canc. Nbk 6. Cp. Nbk 5: ‘[Allegra] better with me than him — Infants dont know their father from a stranger’ (BSM iii 27). 154. her ancient playfellow] S.’s fondness for and success with children is well-documented; see Peck ii 237. 155. Six months or so] Allegra had been sent from Milan to Venice in April 1818. 155–6. Less . . . out] These lines do not appear in Nbk 6, which reads at this point: and now she seemed to know On second sight her ancient play fellow We sate there rolling billiard balls about And as they struck she laughd with sudden shout When the Count entered The fourth line is crossed out. 157. about,] 1824; about Hunt MS; about. Reiman (1977). 157–8. Hunt MS and Nbk 6 leave the exact syntax uncertain. Reiman (1977) makes 158 the start of a new sentence; 1824 and Locock 1911 delay the new sentence until after ‘entered’. The Reiman (1977) punctuation shifts emphasis from the Count’s interruption to his dilatoriness: when, finally, he appears, Julian can begin the long-delayed discussion. Line 142 has already indicated Julian’s sense of being the earlier riser. The disadvantage of Reiman (1977) is a loss of drama; Maddalo’s entrance is no longer sudden and unannounced. 158. entered. —] entered — Hunt MS; entered. 1824, Locock 1911 past,] Locock 1911; past Hunt MS; past: 1824; o’er canc. Nbk 6. In contemporary usage, ‘past’ was a possible spelling of ‘passed’, but S.’s meaning is clarified by the nbk’s cancelled draft: once salutations were over, Julian spoke. 163. I] I 1824, Locock 1911.

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She spends a happy time with little care While we to such sick thoughts subjected are 170 As came on you last night — it is our will That thus enchains us to permitted ill — We might be otherwise — we might be all We dream of happy, high, majestical. Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek 175 But in our mind? and if we were not weak Should we be less in deed than in desire?’ ‘Aye, if we were not weak — and we aspire How vainly to be strong!’ said Maddalo, ‘You talk Utopia.’ ‘It remains to know,’ 180 I then rejoined, ‘and those who try may find How strong the chains are which our spirit bind, Brittle perchance as straw . . . We are assured

170. As came on you] As you described Nbk 6, canc. Hunt MS. 170–3. it is . . . We dream of] A recurrent thought in S.; cp. PU III iv 198–9: ‘Passionless? no — yet free from guilt or pain/Which were, for his will made, or suffered them’ and OL 241–5: He who taught man to vanquish whatsoever Can be between the cradle and the grave Crowned him the King of Life. Oh, vain endeavour! If on his own high will, a willing slave He has enthroned the oppression and the oppressor. 173. We dream of happy, high] That we can think high canc. Nbk 6 We dream of, happy, high 1824; We dream of happy — high Nbk 6. Punctuation in Nbk 6 suggests the sense: ‘all which we dream of when happy’; 1824 clarifies the lines so they mean: ‘all the things we dream of being: happy, high, majestic’. Hunt MS punctuation leaves room for the sense suggested by cancelled Nbk 6 wording that our dreams of happiness, like high thoughts, help create happiness for us. majestical] Kelvin Everest points out the contradictions inherent in Julian’s using this word: ‘calling into radical service the vocabulary of the very social structure that obstructs the realization of his ideals’ (Shelley Revalued 74). Cp. Lines Written among the Euganean Hills 73: ‘The sun’s uprise majestical’. 174–5. Where . . . mind?] Echoing Byron in Childe Harold iv 37–43: ‘The beings of the mind are not of clay;/Essentially immortal, they create/And multiply in us a brighter ray/And more beloved existence’. S. and Byron had discussed the poem at the meeting, which prompted the poem: ‘We talked of literary matters, his fourth Canto which he says is very good, & indeed repeated some stanzas of great energy to me’ (L ii 37). Julian is answering Maddalo with Maddalo’s (Byron’s) own opinions, and this fits, perhaps, with S.’s desire at the time that Byron should live up to his professed ideals. See headnote. 175. mind] minds 1824. 176. less . . . desire] Cp. Lady Macbeth: ‘Art thou afeard/To be the same in thine own act and valour/As thou art in desire?’ (Macbeth I vii 39–41). 177. if we were not] 1824; if were not Hunt MS. 179. You talk] This is canc. Nbk 6. Utopia.’ ‘It] 1824 inserts a paragraph break between the two speeches here and, from this point on, wherever there is a change of speaker (except lines 544–6). Earlier conversational exchanges remain (in 1824) within verse-paragraphs. Neither Hunt MS nor Nbk 6 include paragraph breaks within the poem’s passages of dialogue. know] 1824; see Hunt MS.

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Much may be conquered, much may be endured Of what degrades and crushes us. We know That we have power over ourselves to do And suffer — what, we know not till we try; But something nobler than to live and die — So taught those kings of old philosophy Who reigned, before Religion made men blind; And those who suffer with their suffering kind Yet feel their faith, religion.’ ‘My dear friend,’ Said Maddalo, ‘my judgment will not bend To your opinion, though I think you might Make such a system refutation-tight As far as words go. I knew one like you Who to this city came some months ago With whom I argued in this sort, and he Is now gone mad, — and so he answered me, — Poor fellow! but if you would like to go We’ll visit him, and his wild talk will show How vain are such aspiring theories.’ ‘I hope to prove the induction otherwise, And that a want of that true theory, still Which seeks a “soul of goodness” in things ill, Or in himself or others has thus bowed

183. endured] As in lines 174–5, Julian may be echoing Childe Harold; cp. iv 186–9: ‘if they . . . Endure and shrink not, we of nobler clay/May temper it to bear’, and iii 649–66. 184–9. We know . . . blind] Julian’s rousing speech recalls Ulysses’ ‘orazion picciola’ in Dante’s Inferno xxvi 118–20: ‘Considerate la vostra semenza:/fatti non foste a viver come bruti,/ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza’ (‘Call to mind from whence ye sprang:/Ye were not form’d to live the life of brutes,/But virtue to pursue and knowledge high’ Cary, The Vision (1814), ‘Hell’ xxvi 115–17). 184. degrades] Cp. Preface 4, degraded and note, line 345, The Cenci III ii 64, and Guido Cavalcanti to Dante Alighieri (Longman i 453–4, no. 110) 9. Apart from these, S. nowhere uses the word as a verb. 186. what] what 1824. 188. those] the 1824. 190–1. And those .  .  . religion] Ambiguous. The principle sense is: ‘The same teaching is given by those who are compassionate, even if such people believe their faith in humanity has a religious basis.’ Julian claims that truly religious people agree with him and differ only in claiming particular religious beliefs to be the source of something universal. S. makes a similar argument about Christian poets in A Defence of Poetry: ‘The distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton have idealized, are merely the mask and the mantle in which these great poets walk through eternity.’ A secondary sense to the lines is made apparent by S.’s drafts: ‘To those who feel for their unhappy kind/This creed is as religion’ (canc. Nbk 6). 191. Yet feel their faith, religion] Find such faith religion Nbk 6. their] this 1824. 201. aspiring theories] Cp. the sarcastic use of a similar phrase in J. H. Frere’s reactionary poem, ‘New Morality’ 101–2: ‘Shall a name, a word, a sound, control/Th’aspiring thought, and cramp th’expansive soul?’ theories.’] Cp. line 179 and note. 204. “soul of goodness”] Alluding to Henry V IV i 3–4: ‘There is some soul of goodness in things evil/ Would men observingly distill it out’.

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His being — there are some by nature proud, Who patient in all else demand but this: To love and be beloved with gentleness, And being scorned, what wonder if they die 210 Some living death? This is not destiny But man’s own wilful ill.’ As thus I spoke Servants announced the gondola, and we Through the fast-falling rain and high-wrought sea Sailed to the island where the madhouse stands. 215 We disembarked. The clap of tortured hands, Fierce yells and howlings and lamentings keen And laughter where complaint had merrier been, Moans, shrieks and curses and blaspheming prayers

206–10. some . . . living death] Perhaps a memory of Coleridge; see his ‘The Pains of Sleep’ (1816), 51–2: ‘To be beloved is all I need,/And whom I love, I love indeed.’ Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ focuses on ‘The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH’ (193). 208–9. To love . . . scorned] Cp.: ‘To love, to be beloved suddenly became an insatiable famine of his nature which the wide circle of the universe . . . appeared too narrow and confined to satiate.’ (The Assassins ch. 1, Prose Works i 129). 210. This] 1824; this Hunt MS. 211. But man’s] Nbk 6 has at this point: ‘At least tho all the past cd. not have been/Other than as it was — yet things foreseen/Reason and Love may force beneath their yoke/Warned by a fate foregone — as [thus] [?I] spoke’. The exclusion of these lines produced the absence of any rhyme for ‘spoke’ (211). As] 1824; as Hunt MS. 214. the island] Identified with San Servolo (also known as San Servilio) used as an asylum from 1725 with a hospital and church built 1734–59. 215–19. The clap of tortured hands . . . Accosted us] Cp. Byron, The Lament of Tasso iii 3–4: ‘hark! the lash and the increasing howl,/And the half-inarticulate blasphemy’, and iv 9–10: ‘Where cries reply to curses, shrieks to blows,/And each is tortured in his separate hell’; cp. Dante, Inferno iii 22–8: quivi sospiri, pianti e alti guai risonovan per l’aere sanza stelle [. . . .] Diverse lingue, orribili favelle, parole di dolore, accenti d’ira, voci alte e fioche, e suon di man con elle facevano un tumulto Cary’s translation reads: Here sighs with lamentations and loud moans Resounded through the air pierc’d by no star [. . . .] Various tongues, Horrible languages, outcries of woe, Accents of anger, voices deep and hoarse, With hands together smote that swell’d the sounds, Made up a tumult (Cary, The Vision (1814) ‘Hell’ iii 21–7) 218. Moans . . . prayers] 1824 omits this line. Forman 1876–7 suggests the omission is a transcription error, but it may have been cautious censorship by Mary.

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Accosted us. We climbed the oozy stairs 220 Into an old court-yard. I heard on high Then, fragments of most touching melody, But looking up saw not the singer there — Through the black bars in the tempestuous air I saw, like weeds on a wrecked palace growing, 225 Long tangled locks flung wildly forth, and flowing, Of those who on a sudden were beguiled Into strange silence, and looked forth and smiled Hearing sweet sounds. — Then I: ‘Methinks there were A cure of these with patience and kind care 230 If music can thus move . . . but what is he Whom we seek here?’ ‘Of his sad history I know but this,’ said Maddalo, ‘he came To Venice a dejected man, and fame Said he was wealthy, or he had been so; 235 Some thought the loss of fortune wrought him woe; But he was ever talking in such sort As you do — far more sadly — he seemed hurt, Even as a man with his peculiar wrong, To hear but of the oppression of the strong, 240 Or those absurd deceits (I think with you In some respects, you know) which carry through The excellent impostors of this earth When they outface detection — he had worth, Poor fellow! but a humourist in his way.’ — 245 ‘Alas, what drove him mad?’ ‘I cannot say; 219. oozy] ‘Exuding moisture; damp with exuded or deposited moisture’ (OED def. 4). This line is cited. Cp. Milton, Lycidas 175: ‘With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves’; Keats, Isabella, 411–12, ‘divine liquids come with odorous ooze/Through the cold serpent-pipe’. S. is also stressing the amphibious quality of Venice; see line 5 and OWW 38–40: ‘while far below/The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear/The sapless foliage of the ocean’. 224. weeds . . . growing] Cp. Adonais 435–7: ‘where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise,/And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress/The bones’. 226–7. those . . . silence] Wordsworthian perhaps; cp. ‘There was a Boy’ 16–19: ‘when there came a pause/Of silence such as baffled his best skill:/Then sometimes, in that silence, while he hung/Listening’. 230. move . . .] move . . . Hunt MS. See line 67 and note. 236–9. But he . . . strong] Cp. Wordsworth, The Excursion ii 65–8, characterising the Wanderer: ‘the poor man held dispute/With his own mind, unable to subdue/Impatience through inaptness to perceive/General distress in his particular lot’. 237. far] but 1824. 238. peculiar] Not ‘odd’ but ‘personal, specific, unique’. 243. detection] Cp. Horatio plotting against Claudius: ‘If ’a steal aught the whilst this play is playing,/ And scape detecting, I will pay the theft’ (Hamlet III ii 88–9). worth,] 1824; worth Hunt MS. 244. humourist] Either someone ‘subject to humours . . . fantastical or whimsical’ or someone ‘facetious or comical’ (OED). After Maddalo’s emphasis on the Maniac’s seriousness and sensitivity, ‘humourist’ concedes that he had a sense of humour (though ‘in his way’ suggests a hint of condescension). 245. Alas,] 1824; Alas Hunt MS. 1824 places Julian’s speech on a separate line; see lines 179, 191, 201.

290

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shelley: selected poems A Lady came with him from France, and when She left him and returned, he wandered then About yon lonely isles of desert sand Till he grew wild — he had no cash or land Remaining, — the police had brought him here — Some fancy took him and he would not bear Removal; so I fitted up for him Those rooms beside the sea, to please his whim, And sent him busts and books and urns for flowers Which had adorned his life in happier hours, And instruments of music — you may guess A stranger could do little more or less For one so gentle and unfortunate, And those are his sweet strains which charm the weight From madmen’s chains, and make this hell appear A heaven of sacred silence, hushed to hear.’ — ‘Nay, this was kind of you — he had no claim, As the world says.’ — ‘None — but the very same Which I on all mankind were I as he Fallen to such deep reverse; — his melody Is interrupted now — we hear the din

250. Remaining, —] Remaining: — 1824. Mary’s punctuation here (and at line 252) makes Maddalo more coolly rational whereas Hunt MS suggests his kindness is an impulsive reaction to a mass of factors. 251. Some] 1824; — Some Hunt MS. 252. Removal;] Removal, 1824. 252–8. I fitted up . . . unfortunate] Cp. Epipsychidion 515–24: And I have fitted up some chambers there Looking towards the golden Eastern air [. . .] I have sent books and music there, and all Those instruments with which high spirits call The future from its cradle, and the past Out of its grave Cp. also Glenarvon’s kindness (also modelled on Byron’s) in Lady Caroline Lamb, Glenarvon, 3 vols (1816) ii 88–9: ‘when a singular and terrific inmate appeared also at the Priory — a maniac! who was however welcomed with the rest of the strange assemblage, and a room immediately allotted for his reception’. 253. whim,] Forman 1876–7; whim Hunt MS; whim; 1824. 263. None — but] None but 1824; None, but Nbk 6. 265. deep] sad Nbk 6. 266–7. we hear . . . begin] Cp. Cowper, The Task ii 662–5: ’tis a fearful spectacle to see So many maniacs dancing in their chains. They gaze upon the links that hold them fast With eyes of anguish, execrate their lot, Then shake them in despair, and dance again!

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Of madmen, shriek on shriek again begin; Let us now visit him; after this strain He ever communes with himself again, And sees nor hears not any.’ Having said These words we called the keeper, and he led To an apartment opening on the sea. — There the poor wretch was sitting mournfully Near a piano, his pale fingers twined One with the other, and the ooze and wind Rushed through an open casement, and did sway His hair, and starred it with the brackish spray; His head was leaning on a music book And he was muttering, and his lean limbs shook; His lips were pressed against a folded leaf In hue too beautiful for health, and grief Smiled in their motions as they lay apart — As one who wrought from his own fervid heart The eloquence of passion, soon he raised His sad meek face and eyes lustrous and glazed

270. nor hears] and hears 1824. 273–4. sitting . . . piano] Cp. Hogg ii 549–50: ‘[in 1813, S.] played several times on the piano . . . an exceedingly simple air, which . . . his earliest love was wont to play for him’. Peck suggests from this that in J&M, ‘we have interblended with memories of his first marriage and its tragic consummation, other reminiscences of that earlier love affair [with Harriet Grove], which never wholly faded from his thought’ (Peck ii 104). 275. ooze] rain canc. Nbk 6. Cp. lines 3–7, 219, and Don Juan II xxv 7–8: ‘The waves oozing through the port-hole made/His berth a little damp, and him afraid.’ 279. shook;] Nbk 6 inserts ‘I could not see his face, but [?thro] dark [?hair]/There gleamed a bloodless cheek, yet it was fair’. 280. a folded] the music Nbk 6. 280–2. lips . . . motions] Cp. S.’s self-portrait in Adonais 291–7: a light spear . . . Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart Shook the weak hand that grasped it; of that crew He came the last, neglected and apart; A head-abandoned deer struck by the hunter’s dart. 281–2. Echoing Twelfth Night II iv 111–14: She pin’d in thought; And with a green and yellow melancholy She sat like Patience on a monument, Smiling at grief. 282–4. Hunt MS makes the simile connect both forward and back: the smiling grief visible in the Maniac’s lips expresses his passion, and so does his raising his eyes and speaking.

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And spoke — sometimes as one who wrote and thought His words might move some heart that heeded not If sent to distant lands; and then as one Reproaching deeds never to be undone 290 With wondering self-compassion; then his speech Was lost in grief, and then his words came each Unmodulated, cold, expressionless, — But that from one jarred accent you might guess It was despair made them so uniform: 295 And all the while the loud and gusty storm Hissed through the window, and we stood behind Stealing his accents from the envious wind Unseen. I yet remember what he said Distinctly: such impression his words made. 300

‘Month after month,’ he cried, ‘to bear this load And as a jade urged by the whip and goad To drag life on, which like a heavy chain Lengthens behind with many a link of pain! — And not to speak my grief — O not to dare 305 To give a human voice to my despair, But live and move, and wretched thing! smile on As if I never went aside to groan

287–94. His . . . uniform:] Not in Nbk 6. 289–90. Reproaching . . . self-compassion] Cp. Wordsworth, The Borderers 1542: ‘’Tis done, and in the after vacancy/We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed’. 292. Unmodulated, cold, expressionless, —] Locock 1911; Unmodulated, cold, expressionless; Hunt MS; Unmodulated and expressionless, — 1824. 297. wind] wind, 1824. 298–9. I yet . . . made] such impression his words made / That I remember them as if just said Nbk 6. 299. made.] 1824, Forman 1876–7 and Reiman (1977) all introduce a line-break here. Hunt MS is so small, it is hard to be certain that a space has been left. At lines 319–20 and 343–4 in Hunt MS, the gap is clearer. The first word is indented however as at lines 320 and 482. In Nbk 6, the draft is interrupted at this point; the next two pages are blank, and the poem resumes with a version of line 337 (BSM xv 97–101). 302–3. To drag . . . pain] Cp. Q Mab v 50–2: Commerce brings to an early death ‘all that shares the lot of human life,/Which, poisoned body and soul, scarce drags the chain/That lengthens as it goes and clanks behind’; see also PU II iv 19–23: terror, madness, crime, remorse, Which from the links of the great chain of things, To every thought within the mind of man Sway and drag heavily Medwin reports that S. (in Pisa, 1818) was ‘very much affected by the sight of the convicts fettered two and two, who, escorted by soldiers, sweep the streets, and still more so by the clank of their chains’ (Locock 1911 i 587).

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293

And wear this mask of falsehood even to those Who are most dear — not for my own repose — 310 Alas, no scorn or pain or hate could be So heavy as that falsehood is to me — But that I cannot bear more altered faces Than needs must be, more changed and cold embraces, More misery, disappointment and mistrust 315 To own me for their father . . . Would the dust Were covered in upon my body now! That the life ceased to toil within my brow! And then these thoughts would at the least be fled; Let us not fear such pain can vex the dead. 320

‘What Power delights to torture us? I know That to myself I do not wholly owe What now I suffer, though in part I may. Alas, none strewed sweet flowers upon the way Where wandering heedlessly, I met pale Pain 325 My shadow, which will leave me not again — If I have erred, there was no joy in error, But pain and insult and unrest and terror; I have not as some do, bought penitence With pleasure, and a dark yet sweet offence, 330 For then, — if love and tenderness and truth Had overlived hope’s momentary youth,

309–12. not for . . . But that] The intervening lines (‘Alas . . . to me’) are parenthetical; the Maniac says he wears a mask of falsehood not for his own peace of mind but because he could not bear the response of his loved ones to his fully-revealed misery. 310. Alas,] Alas Hunt MS; Alas! 1824. 316. covered in] OED gives ‘cover in’ as a distinct usage: ‘To complete the covering of (anything) by adding the upper layer or part; . . . to fill in the earth in a grave’ (v1 def. 18; first use 1726; this line is cited). 318. least] last 1824. 320. What . . . torture us?] Cp. Asia’s question to Demogorgon, PU II iv 100–5: but who rains down Evil, the immedicable plague, which, while Man looks on his creation like a God And sees that it is glorious, drives him on, The wreck of his own will, the scorn of Earth, The outcast, the abandoned, the alone? 323. Alas,] Alas Hunt MS; Alas! 1824. sweet] fresh 1824. S. or Mary may have emended ‘sweet’ to ‘fresh’ or vice versa because ‘sweet’ is repeated at line 329, and ‘sweetest’ used at line 336. 330–7. Cp. the distress in Mary’s ‘The Fields of Fancy’ (1819): ‘I saw a wanton malignity in many parts & particularly in the mind of man that baffled me. If knowledge is the end of our being why are passions & feelings implanted in us that hurries [sic] us from wisdom to self-concentrated misery & narrow selfish feeling? Is it as a trial?’ (MSW ii 356–7).

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My creed should have redeemed me from repenting, But loathèd scorn and outrage unrelenting, Met love excited by far other seeming 335 Until the end was gained . . . as one from dreaming Of sweetest peace, I woke, and found my state Such as it is. —— ‘O Thou, my spirit’s mate Who, for thou art compassionate and wise, Wouldst pity me from thy most gentle eyes 340 If this sad writing thou shouldst ever see — My secret groans must be unheard by thee, Thou wouldst weep tears bitter as blood to know Thy lost friend’s incommunicable woe. ‘Ye few by whom my nature has been weighed 345 In friendship, let me not that name degrade By placing on your hearts the secret load

332–5. My creed . . . gained] Cp. the Maniac’s beliefs to Julian’s (lines 195ff., 236–7). The Maniac speaks here as a rejected lover: if, he says, he had been rejected in such a way that tenderness for the loved one survived, then he would not regret having fallen in love nor look back on it as a mistake; however, his love was met by such violent and unexpected rejection that it was destroyed. By its destruction, he says, ‘the end was gained’, the aims achieved, of the person whom he loved. Cp. Julian and Maddalo’s discussion at lines 525–31. 334. far other seeming] A quite different appearance. 335–7. one from dreaming . . . as it is] Cp. Keats, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ 43–4: ‘And I awoke and found me here/On the cold hill’s side.’ 337. Such as it is.] Cp. Julian at lines 15–17. 337–43. O Thou . . . woe] The Maniac’s grief at broken love recalls Lionel in R&H 759–79: there were found . . . These mournful verses on the ground, By all who read them blotted too. . . . [‘]l wake to weep, And sit through the long day gnawing the core Of my bitter heart, and, like a miser, keep, Since none in what I feel take pain or pleasure, To my own soul its self-consuming treasure.’ Biographical criticism has taken the Maniac to be addressing two women, his ‘spirit’s mate’ here and the ‘mockery’ of lines 385ff., and then found different identities for these figures from S.’s and Byron’s personal lives. N. I. White argues that both are Mary ‘turned temporarily into a strange antagonistic personality by her grief ’ with whom S. is pleading for reconciliation (White ii 48). GM, from the evidence of the draft, suggests that the Maniac addresses four or more different women in turn, each of whom is initially conceived as a figure from Tasso’s life (‘The Draft and the Meaning’, 77–82). 341. thee,] thee; 1824. 342–3. Thou wouldst weep . . . woe] Cp. the situation reversed in Epipsychidion 19–20: ‘I weep vain tears: blood would less bitter be,/Yet poured forth gladlier, could it profit thee.’ 344. Ye] 1824 does not begin a new paragraph here.

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350

355

360

365

295

Which crushes mine to dust. There is one road To peace and that is truth, which follow ye! Love sometimes leads astray to misery. Yet think not though subdued — and I may well Say that I am subdued — that the full Hell Within me would infect the untainted breast Of sacred nature with its own unrest; As some perverted beings think to find In scorn or hate a medicine for the mind Which scorn or hate have wounded — O how vain! The dagger heals not but may rend again . . . Believe that I am ever still the same In creed as in resolve, and what may tame My heart, must leave the understanding free Or all would sink in this keen agony — Nor dream that I will join the vulgar cry, Or with my silence sanction tyranny, Or seek a moment’s shelter from my pain In any madness which the world calls gain, Ambition or revenge or thoughts as stern

350. Yet think not] Lines 344 to 350 appear in Nbk 6. Here the draft diverges, reading ‘Yet think not thou subdued, as [?I] [?]/That I make peace with the worlds [tyranny]’. In the final version, the Maniac vows instead that he will not project his suffering onto the blameless, external world. subdued] frequent in S.; cp. Cyprian (Longman vi, no. 441) iii 135–6: ‘Woman, thou hast subdued me,/Only by not owning thyself subdued.’ Cp. Wordsworth, The Excursion i 283–4: ‘by the turbulence subdued/Of his own mind’ and 795 (of Margaret in the ‘Ruined Cottage’ section): ‘Her body was subdued. In every act/. . . appeared/The careless stillness of a thinking mind/Self-occupied’ and Byron, Childe Harold iv 199–200: ‘But ever and anon of griefs subdued/There comes a token like a scorpion’s sting’. 351. full] deep canc. Hunt MS. 354–6. S.’s view that ridicule or satire were intrinsically ineffective is expressed in A Satire Upon Satire (Longman iii 269–76, no. 290) 37–8: ‘Suffering makes suffering — ill must follow ill;/Harsh words beget hard thoughts’. Cp. James Woodhouse (1735–1820), ‘Ridicule’ (1787) 331–4: True wisdom knows no raillery can restrain Or conquer error, by inflicting pain. True policy perceives that jibe and joke Never conciliate, constantly provoke. See 38–9 and note. Cp. Nora Crook and Derek Guiton, S.’s Venomed Melody (1986) 137: ‘S. refers here to the homeopathic principle, but warns against a single-minded application of it.’ 356. have] hath 1824. 357. again . . .] again. . . . Hunt MS. 361. in this keen] under this 1824. 362. cry] eye 1824. 365. gain,] gain; 1824. Ambition, revenge and stern thoughts (366) are other kinds of ‘madness’, no different essentially from ‘gain’.

296

370

375

380

385

shelley: selected poems As those which make me what I am, or turn To avarice or misanthropy or lust . . . Heap on me soon O grave, thy welcome dust! Till then the dungeon may demand its prey, And poverty and shame may meet and say — Halting beside me on the public way — That love-devoted youth is ours — let’s sit Beside him — he may live some six months yet. Or the red scaffold, as our country bends, May ask some willing victim, or ye, friends! May fall under some sorrow which this heart Or hand may share or vanquish or avert; I am prepared: in truth with no proud joy To do or suffer aught, as when a boy I did devote to justice and to love My nature, worthless now! . . . ‘I must remove A veil from my pent mind.’Tis torn aside! O, pallid as death’s dedicated bride, Thou mockery which art sitting by my side,

366–7. thoughts as . . . what I am] Recalling lines 333–7. The Maniac will not adopt the same sternness or harshness as his lover displayed. 368. lust . . .] lust. . . . Hunt MS. 371. poverty and shame] Poverty and Shame 1824. Cp. Nbk 6: ‘I seem to [wander] linger on the public way/And hear Oblivion whisper Death, & say/That love-devoted youth’. The first half of both lines are cancelled; S. seems to have kept the rhyme but changed the personifications. Cp. R&H 473–9: Thou knowest what a thing is Poverty Among the fallen on evil days: ’Tis Crime, and Fear, and Infamy, And houseless Want in frozen ways Wandering ungarmented, and Pain, And, worse than all, that inward stain Foul Self-contempt 372. on] in 1824. 375. bends] The country tends or inclines towards capital punishment, and this tendency is a decline, a yielding or giving way to ignoble tendencies (see OED definitions 10, 14). 376. ye, friends!] 1824; ye friends Hunt MS. 380–2. as when . . . My nature] S. describes a similar act of self-dedication in the ‘Dedication to Mary — — ’, 31–3, prefaced to L&C: ‘So without shame, I spake: — “I will be wise,/And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies/Such power. . . .” ’ Cp. Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, text B 59–72 and note. 384. death’s dedicated bride] Nbk 6, heavily corrected, reads here: ‘And [o] thou Laura, sitting at my side?/[Pale] [?are] [You] deaths dedicated bride’ (BSM xv 103). The reference to Laura supports the connection between the poem and the life of Tasso (see headnote). Cp. Romeo and Juliet V iii 102–9: Shall I believe That unsubstantial Death is amorous,

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297

Am I not wan like thee? at the grave’s call I haste, invited to thy wedding-ball To greet the ghastly paramour, for whom Thou hast deserted me . . . and made the tomb 390 Thy bridal bed . . . but I beside your feet Will lie and watch ye from my winding-sheet — Thus . . . wide awake though dead . . . yet stay O stay! Go not so soon — I know not what I say — Hear but my reasons . . . I am mad, I fear, 395 My fancy is o’erwrought . . . thou art not here . . . Pale art thou,’tis most true . . . but thou art gone, Thy work is finished . . . I am left alone! — *  *  *  *  *  * ‘Nay, was it I who wooed thee to this breast Which, like a serpent, thou envenomest 400 As in repayment of the warmth it lent? Didst thou not seek me for thine own content? Did not thy love awaken mine? I thought

And that the lean abhorred monster keeps Thee here in dark to be his paramour? For fear of that I still will stay with thee, And never from this palace of dim night Depart again. Here, here will I remain With worms that are thy chambermaids. 385. Tasso was subject while in prison to delusions that a familiar spirit was beside him whom he could address. ‘And it was no wonder, both from the injured state of his nerves, and the long over-activity which the direction of his studies had given to the faculty of fiction, that with Tasso illusions should have become stronger than external impressions, and that he should have mistaken realities for his own diseased perceptions.  .  .  . he was employed at leisure in the frequent composition of Socratic dialogues, and his mischievous sprite was converted into a familiar spirit’ (John Black, Life of Torquato Tasso 2 vols (1810) ii 242). 386. at] At 1824. 388. greet] meet 1824. 389–90. made . . . bed] Cp. Romeo & Juliet III v 202–3: ‘make the bridal bed/In that dim monument where Tybalt lies.’ The phrase intervenes into the speech like a murmured quotation, recalling Ophelia in Hamlet IV v 21–74. Ophelia was a frequent example of madness in the poetry of sensibility; cp. Bowles, ‘Shakspeare’ 45–6: ‘A maid, a beauteous maniac, wildly sings:/They laid him in the ground so cold’. 394. reasons . . .] reasons . . . Hunt MS. In Hunt MS lines 394–6, two-dot ellipses may be being used to suggest the Maniac’s increasing agitation. See line 434. 395. o’erwrought . . .] o’erwrought . . . Hunt MS. 396. true . . .] true . . . Hunt MS. 397–8. The asterisks here and below are indicated in Hunt MS by a row of crosses between the lines. 398. Nay,] 1824; Nay Hunt MS. 399. Which,] Which 1824. serpent,] serpent Hunt MS, 1824.

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shelley: selected poems

That thou wert she who said “You kiss me not Ever, I fear you cease to love me now” — 405 In truth I loved even to my overthrow Her, who would fain forget these words: but they Cling to her mind, and cannot pass away. *  *  *  *  *  * ‘You say that I am proud — that when I speak My lip is tortured with the wrongs which break 410 The spirit it expresses . . . Never one Humbled himself before, as I have done! Even the instinctive worm on which we tread Turns, though it wound not — then with prostrate head Sinks in the dust and writhes like me — and dies? 415 No: wears a living death of agonies! As the slow shadows of the pointed grass Mark the eternal periods, his pangs pass Slow, ever-moving, — making moments be As mine seem — each an immortality! *  *  *  *  *  * 420

‘That you had never seen me — never heard My voice, and more than all had ne’er endured The deep pollution of my loathed embrace — That your eyes ne’er had lied love in my face — That, like some maniac monk, I had torn out 425 The nerves of manhood by their bleeding root 404. cease to] do not 1824. 407. pass away] Cp. Adonais 432: ‘And of the past are all that cannot pass away.’ This line ends the fragmentary drafts of the Maniac’s speech in Nbk 6; it is followed by line 511 (BSM xv 107). 412–14. Cp. Goethe, Faust I 653–5: Dem Wurme gleich’ ich, der den Staub durchwühlt, Den, wie er sich im Staube nährend lebt, Des Wandrers Tritt vernichtet und begräbt. (‘I am like the worm tunnelling through soil which, while it lives nourished by dust, is crushed and buried by the foot of a passer-by.’) 414. dies?] dies: 1824. 416–19. slow shadows . . . immortality] Cp. S. to Godwin, 7 December 1817: ‘I find the very blades of grass & the boughs of distant trees present themselves to me with microscopical distinctness’ (L i 572), Alastor 528–9: ‘tall spires of windlestrae/Threw their thin shadows down the rugged slope’ and PU I 13–14: ‘And moments, aye divided by keen pangs/Till they seem years’. 417. his] its 1824. 420–8. ‘That . . . these] The Maniac remembers in these lines what he later terms ‘those curses’ (line 435); each of these possibilities is something his lover wished for and told him that she wished for. The punctuation of Hunt MS clarifies this syntax. 424–6. Self-castration was observed as a symptom of mania; cp. Cabanis, ‘Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme’, Oeuvres Complètes 5 vols (Paris 1823–25) iii 343: ‘On voit souvent ces malheureux

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299

With mine own quivering fingers, so that ne’er Our hearts had for a moment mingled there To disunite in horror — these were not With thee, like some suppressed and hideous thought 430 Which flits athwart our musings, but can find No rest within a pure and gentle mind . . . Thou sealedst them with many a bare broad word And ceredst my memory o’er them, — for I heard And can forget not . . . they were ministered 435 One after one, those curses. Mix them up Like self-destroying poisons in one cup, And they will make one blessing, which thou ne’er Didst imprecate for, on me, — death. *  *  *  *  *  *

[maniacs] s’arracher les testicules’ (‘These patients are often observed gouging out their testicles’). 428. disunite] Cp. R&H 984: ‘[two strains of harmony] slowly disunite’; and cp. Southey’s Wat Tyler II i: ‘They will use every art to disunite you . . . Whom in a mass they fear’. horror — these] horror! These 1824; horror: — These Locock 1911. 429–30. some . . . musings] Cp. Lament of Tasso v 8–10: ‘The vivid thought still flashes through my frame,/And for a moment all things as they were/Flit by me; they are gone — I am the same.’ 432–4. Cp. Adonais 453–5: ‘and if the seal is set,/Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind,/Break it not thou!’ and Childe Harold ii 73–6: There, thou! — whose love and life together fled, Have left me here to love and live in vain — Twined with my heart, and can I deem thee dead When busy Memory flashes on my brain? 433. ceredst my memory o’er] cearedst my memory oer Hunt MS; seard’st my memory o’er 1824; searedst my memory o’er Forman 1876–7. Cp. line 614 where Hunt MS reads ‘ceared over their memory’ and 1824 ‘cered over their memory’. S.’s spelling ‘ceared’ is an alternative for both seared and cered. Emendation has obscured the parallel between the two lines. To cere means to anoint with spices, to embalm; to shut up (a corpse in a coffin), to seal up in lead. To sear means to dry up; to wither or blight; or to cauterize (cp. 1 Tim. iv 2 where St Paul warns of those ‘whose consciences are seared with a hot iron’). This meaning for ‘cear’ is reinforced by the rhyme with ‘sere’. The Maniac complains that his memory has been forcibly restricted to his lover’s curses: ‘for I heard/And can forget not’. It is a context more appropriate to cere than to sear. His imprisonment suggests blight and dryness, but ‘cere’ gives a more precise sense of living death (see lines 206–10). Editors may have emended the word to ‘sear’ because of the sealing process referred to in 432. Cp. Cymbeline I i 116–17: ‘Seare up my embracements from a next,/With bonds of death’ and Alastor 248–9: ‘his scattered hair/Sered by the autumn of strange suffering’. 434. not . . .] not. . . . Hunt MS. S. may be using four dots to indicate a fractionally longer pause. ministered] This rhyme closes one of the few triplets in the poem; cp. lines 102–4, 447–9. 438. imprecate for] Meaning to pray for or call down (OED def. 1); OED does not give ‘for’ as a preposition for imprecate. 438–42. It were . . . me] The Maniac says that his treatment would be a cruel punishment if inflicted on a cruel person (supposing such a person could love at all) but is even worse when dealt out to him.

300

440

445

450

455

shelley: selected poems ‘It were A cruel punishment for one most cruel If such can love, to make that love the fuel Of the mind’s hell — hate, scorn, remorse, despair: But me — whose heart a stranger’s tear might wear As water-drops the sandy fountain-stone, Who loved and pitied all things, and could moan For woes which others hear not, and could see The absent with the glance of fantasy, And with the poor and trampled sit and weep, Following the captive to his dungeon deep; Me — who am as a nerve o’er which do creep The else unfelt oppressions of this earth And was to thee the flame upon thy hearth When all beside was cold — that thou on me Shouldst rain these plagues of blistering agony — Such curses are from lips once eloquent With love’s too partial praise — let none relent Who intend deeds too dreadful for a name Henceforth, if an example for the same They seek . . . for thou on me lookedst so, and so — And didst speak thus . . . and thus . . . I live to shew How much men bear and die not! *  *  *  *  *  *

441. hell —] 1824; hell; Hunt MS. 443. Cp. R&H 721–3: ‘Many then wept, not tears, but gall/Within their hearts, like drops which fall/ Wasting the fountain-stone away.’ 444. Cp. SP 70–4: But the Sensitive-plant which could give small fruit Of the love which it felt from the leaf to the root, Received more than all — it loved more than ever, Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver. Peck compares the whole paragraph (lines 438–60) to the later poem (Peck ii 104–7). 446. glance] glass 1824. 447. with] near 1824. 449. creep] This rhyme-word completes another triplet; cp. lines 432–4. 450. else unfelt] else-unfelt 1824. 450. Cp. Ecclesiastes iv 1: ‘So I returned, and considered all the oppression’s that are done under the sun’. 452–5. that thou . . . let none] This punctuation follows Hunt MS; it has been variously edited. Hunt MS’s pointing gives a sense of hectic and relentless speed in the Maniac’s train of thought and emphasises the pause in line 458, ‘They seek . . .’ 459. speak thus . . .] speak thus . . . Hunt MS. Cp. lines 394–6.

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301

460

‘Thou wilt tell With the grimace of hate how horrible It was to meet my love when thine grew less; Thou wilt admire how I could e’er address Such features to love’s work . . . this taunt, though true, 465 (For indeed nature nor in form nor hue Bestowed on me her choicest workmanship) Shall not be thy defence . . . for since thy lip Met mine first, years long past, since thine eye kindled With soft fire under mine, I have not dwindled 470 Nor changed in mind or body, or in aught But as love changes what it loveth not After long years and many trials. ‘How vain Are words! I thought never to speak again Not even in secret, — not to my own heart — 475 But from my lips the unwilling accents start And from my pen the words flow as I write, Dazzling my eyes with scalding tears . . . my sight Is dim to see that charactered in vain On this unfeeling leaf which burns the brain 480 And eats into it . . . blotting all things fair And wise and good which time had written there.

‘Those who inflict must suffer, for they see The work of their own hearts and this must be

467. lip] life 1824. 467–70. lip . . . body] Cp. PU II v 48–51: Life of Life! thy lips enkindle With their love the breath between them And thy smiles before they dwindle Make the cold air fire 471. ‘Except as Love alters those whom it does not favour’. 471. not] not, Locock 1911. The comma stresses that the Maniac has ‘not dwindled’ after the long years and many trials; without the comma, emphasis falls on how love through many years alters the unloved. 472. Echoed by Julian at lines 583–4. Cp. PU II v 45–6: ‘those who feel it most/Are happier still, after long sufferings’. 472. trials.] 1824 inserts a row of asterisks here. 481. there.] 1824 does not insert a line break. In Hunt MS, the gap is small, but the first word of line 482 is indented. Cp. line 299. 482. ‘Those] Those 1824. 483. this] that 1824.

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Our chastisement or recompense — O child! 485 I would that thine were like to be more mild For both our wretched sakes . . . for thine the most Who feelest already all that thou hast lost Without the power to wish it thine again; And as slow years pass, a funereal train 490 Each with the ghost of some lost hope or friend Following it like its shadow, wilt thou bend No thought on my dead memory? *  *  *  *  *  * ‘Alas, love! Fear me not . . . against thee I would not move A finger in despite. Do I not live 495 That thou mayst have less bitter cause to grieve? I give thee tears for scorn and love for hate And that thy lot may be less desolate Than his on whom thou tramplest, I refrain From that sweet sleep which medicines all pain. 500 Then, when thou speakest of me, never say He could forgive not. Here I cast away All human passions, all revenge, all pride; I think, speak, act no ill; I do but hide Under these words like embers, every spark 505 Of that which has consumed me — quick and dark The grave is yawning . . . as its roof shall cover My limbs with dust and worms under and over So let oblivion hide this grief . . . the air 490. lost] dead canc. Hunt MS. S. may have wished to avoid echoing ‘dead memory’ (492). See line 323 and note. 493. I would] I’d 1824. 496. hate] hate; 1824, Forman 1876–7. 498. tramplest] Frequent in S.: see line 447, Preface and TL 387–8: ‘and she, thought by thought/ Trampled its fires into the dust of death’. Cp. Byron, ‘Ode on Venice’ 131–3: ‘For tyranny of late is cunning grown,/And in its own good season tramples down/The sparkles of our ashes.’ 501–5. In idea and imagery, cp. Rousseau’s speech in TL 199–204: Before thy memory I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did, and died, And if the spark with which Heaven lit my spirit Earth had with purer nutriment supplied Corruption would not now thus much inherit Of what was once Rousseau 503–5. hide . . . consumed me] Reminiscent of Ulysses in Dante’s Inferno xxvi 48 who ‘si fascia di quel ch’elli è inceso’ (‘is wrapped or swathed in what burns him’). 504. words] words, 1824. ‘The sense of course being “as embers hide sparks” ’ (Locock 1911).

16  julian and maddalo: a conversation

303

Closes upon my accents, as despair 510 Upon my heart — let death upon despair!’

515

520

525

530

He ceased, and overcome leant back awhile Then rising, with a melancholy smile Went to a sofa, and lay down, and slept A heavy sleep, and in his dreams he wept And muttered some familiar name, and we Wept without shame in his society. I think I never was impressed so much; The man who were not, must have lacked a touch Of human nature . . . then we lingered not, Although our argument was quite forgot, But calling the attendants, went to dine At Maddalo’s; yet neither cheer nor wine Could give us spirits, for we talked of him And nothing else, till daylight made stars dim; And we agreed his was some dreadful ill Wrought on him boldly, yet unspeakable, By a dear friend; some deadly change in love Of one vowed deeply which he dreamed not of; For whose sake he, it seemed, had fixed a blot Of falsehood on his mind which flourished not But in the light of all-beholding truth, And having stamped this canker on his youth

510. despair] my care 1839. 511. awhile] awhile; 1824, Locock 1911 awhile, Forman 1876–7. 518. were] was 1839. 525. his] it 1824, Nbk 6. 525–47. Lines 525–6 occur at the foot of p. 103 of Nbk 6; a version of lines 527–30 is written, very small, at the foot of the preceding, facing page. The section (lines 525–33) is redrafted on p. 109, continued (lines 533–46) on p. 116. Lines 547ff. begin at the top of p. 104 (BSM xv 107, 113, 121, 109). This suggests S. wrote lines 547ff. first, before the Maniac’s speeches, and left blank pages (perhaps pp. 94–103) in the nbk for the Maniac. When these were full, he added to the Maniac’s speeches on later pages; first, on p. 109, a blank page opposite the concluding lines of the draft; later on p. 116 — the drafts on this page are closer to the printed text. Moreover, pp. 110–15 contain drafts of PU II i 163–208, which must, therefore, have been written before the drafts of J&M 525–46 were complete, though not necessarily before J&M 547ff. GM dates the PU stanzas after March 1819 (‘The Draft and the Meaning’, 63, 66). Cp. headnote, line 44 and note. 525–6. his was . . . Wrought] ‘that it was secret love/Inflicted’ canc. Nbk 6. 527. some deadly change] some unrequited Nbk 6. 528. vowed] perhaps ‘loved’ in Nbk 6, but the MS is unclear. 529. he, it seemed,] he it seemed Hunt MS. 529–31. fixed a blot . . . truth,] ‘The Maniac had practised falsehoods against his own mind which could remain healthy only if it remained candid’. 530. on] in 1824.

304

535

540

545

550

555

shelley: selected poems She had abandoned him . . . and how much more Might be his woe, we guessed not — he had store Of friends and fortune once, as we could guess From his nice habits and his gentleness; These were now lost . . . it were a grief indeed If he had changed one unsustaining reed For all that such a man might else adorn. The colours of his mind seemed yet unworn For the wild language of his grief was high Such as in measure were called poetry, And I remember one remark which then Maddalo made. He said: ‘Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong, They learn in suffering what they teach in song.’ If I had been an unconnected man I, from this moment, should have formed some plan Never to leave sweet Venice, — for to me It was delight to ride by the lone sea; And then, the town is silent — one may write Or read in gondolas by day or night Having the little brazen lamp alight, Unseen, uninterrupted; books are there, Pictures, and casts from all those statues fair Which were twin-born with poetry, and all

537. were now] now were 1824. 539. adorn.] 1824; adorn: Hunt MS. 540. unworn] unworn; 1824, Forman 1876–7. Because in Hunt MS, the lower dot of the colon after ‘adorn’ (line 539) stands above the upstroke of ‘n’ in ‘unworn’, there seems to be a semicolon. 542. ‘Such as would have been called poetry if it had been in metre’ (GM, ‘Draft and the Meaning’, 75). One draft reads: ‘As writers who transcribe call poetry’ (BSM xv 113), recalling Dante, Purgatorio xxiv 52–3: ‘un che, quando/Amor mi spira, noto’, translated by Cary: ‘but as one/Who am the scribe of love; that, when he breathes,/Take up my pen, and, as he dictates, write’ (Cary, The Vision (1814), ‘Purgatory’ xxiv 52–4). 544–6. Most .  .  . song.] There are several versions in Nbk 6, some at a distance separate from their context in the final version: ‘And learn in suffering what they speak in song’ (p. 69) and ‘It is because they act the parts themselves/And learn through suffering what they speak in song’ (p. 156; BSM xv 71, 159). Within drafts of this section, there are three versions; 1: ‘[For] this is what to poets shall belong/ They learn in suffering what they’; 2: ‘Poets he said are men whose [nurse] is wrong/They learn by suffering what they teach in song’; 3: ‘Their minds are made sublime & keen [by] wrong/They learn [thro]’; (BSM xv 111, 113, 120). It is impossible to know the order of composition. See GM, ‘Draft and the Meaning’, 68–9. 547. If I] All eds begin a new paragraph here. Hunt MS begins a new page with this line which is indented. Cp. lines 300, 320 and 511. 551–3. write . . . alight] Another triplet; cp. lines 432–4, 449–51. 554. Unseen,] Unseen Hunt MS.

16  julian and maddalo: a conversation

560

565

570

575

305

We seek in towns, with little to recall Regrets for the green country. I might sit In Maddalo’s great palace, and his wit And subtle talk would cheer the winter night And make me know myself, and the firelight Would flash upon our faces, till the day Might dawn and make me wonder at my stay. But I had friends in London too: the chief Attraction here, was that I sought relief From the deep tenderness that maniac wrought Within me — ’twas perhaps an idle thought — But I imagined that if day by day I watched him, and but seldom went away And studied all the beatings of his heart With zeal, as men study some stubborn art For their own good, and could by patience find An entrance to the caverns of his mind, I might reclaim him from his dark estate: In friendships I had been most fortunate — Yet never saw I one whom I would call More willingly my friend; and this was all

558. Regrets] Regret 1824. I might] One might Nbk 6. 561. me know myself] one know oneself Nbk 6. Cp. Adonais 415–16: ‘come forth/Fond wretch! and know thyself and him aright’ and TL 211–12: ‘their lore/Taught them not this — to know themselves’. 563. stay.] 1824; stay: Hunt MS. 564. in London] elsewhere canc. Nbk 6. too:] too. 1824. 565. here,] here 1824. In Nbk 6, ‘Attraction here was’ is cancelled; S. may have felt ‘here’ was a little confusing if set against ‘London’ instead of ‘elsewhere’ (line 564). The word jars also with ‘there’ (line 554). 568. that if day by day] that, if day by day Nbk 6; that if, day by day, 1824. The Nbk 6 comma begins the parenthesis ending at line 574. 569. and but seldom] and seldom 1824. 570. beatings of his heart] Cp. R&H 1026–34: You might hear the beatings of his heart, Quick, but not strong; and with my tresses . . . Alas! the unquiet life did tingle From mine own heart through every vein And cp. Mary Robinson, ‘The Maniac’ 79–84, Poetical Works (1806): Oh! tell me, tell me all thy pain, Pour to mine ear thy frenzied strain And I will share thy pangs and soothe thy woes! Poor Maniac! I will dry thy tears And bathe thy wound and calm thy fears, And with soft Pity’s balm enchant thee to repose. 571. stubborn] difficult Nbk 6. ‘secret’ and ‘stubborn’ are inserted above ‘difficult’. 573. mind,] mind Hunt MS. 574. Cp. Athanase 34: ‘Pitying the tumult of their dark estate.’ his] this Forman 1876–7.

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Accomplished not; such dreams of baseless good Oft come and go in crowds and solitude 580 And leave no trace — but what I now designed Made for long years impression on my mind. The following morning urged by my affairs I left bright Venice.

585

590

595

600

After many years And many changes I returned; the name Of Venice, and its aspect was the same; But Maddalo was travelling far away Among the mountains of Armenia. His dog was dead. His child had now become A woman; such as it has been my doom To meet with few, a wonder of this earth Where there is little of transcendent worth Like one of Shakespeare’s women: kindly she And with a manner beyond courtesy Received her father’s friend; and when I asked Of the lorn maniac, she her memory tasked And told as she had heard the mournful tale: That the poor sufferer’s health began to fail Two years from my departure, but that then The Lady who had left him, came again. ‘Her mien had been imperious, but she now

578. Accomplished not;] Vain imagery — Nbk 6. ‘talk’ is inserted above the dash. 579. crowds and] crowds or 1824. 582. The] — The 1824. 583–4. The draft reads: ‘Venice I left for five & twenty years/After this period I returned, & found/That Maddalo’. ‘& . . . Maddalo’ is cancelled and replaced by ‘the name/Of Venice’. 584. changes] In Hunt MS, ‘wanderings’ is cancelled and ‘changes’ inserted above. 587. mountains of Armenia] mountains tribes of India Nbk 6. ‘tribes of India’ is cancelled; ‘of Armenia’ inserted above. The ‘s’ of ‘mountains’ was probably added when S. altered the line. 588–92. An early draft of these lines appears on p. 115 of Nbk 6, after the drafted stanzas of PU II i. This implies that the frame-narrative of the poem (as well as the Maniac’s speeches) was completed after the PU stanzas. Cp. lines 525–47 and note. 588. His child] Peck suggests that Thomas Medwin connected the grown-up child with Harriet Grove, S.’s early love (Peck ii 106). Cp. lines 273–4 and note. 591. transcendent] uncommon Nbk 6. 595. lorn] poor Nbk 6. 596–606. tale: . . . him’] It is unclear where precisely the text changes from indirect to reported speech. Hunt MS places quotation marks before lines 598ff. This does not resolve the difficulty of ‘my departure’ (line 598) — which must refer to Julian — unless direct speech is seen as beginning at ‘but’ or ‘then’ (line 598). Locock 1911 begins direct speech at line 602: ‘ “Her coming”; other eds follow 1824 in beginning direct speech at line 597. Nbk 6, followed here, begins direct speech at line 600. Cp. lines 608, 610. 596. tale:] 1824. Hunt MS is unclear. 597. That] “That 1824, Forman 1876–7. 598. Two] “Two Hunt MS. 599. again.] 1824; again Hunt MS. 600. ‘Her] Nbk 6 begins direct speech here.

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Looked meek — perhaps remorse had brought her low. Her coming made him better, and they stayed Together at my father’s — for I played As I remember with the lady’s shawl — 605 I might be six years old — but after all She left him.’ . . . ‘Why, her heart must have been tough: How did it end?’ ‘And was not this enough? They met — they parted.’ — ‘Child, is there no more?’ ‘Something within that interval which bore 610 The stamp of why they parted, how they met: Yet if thine agèd eyes disdain to wet Those wrinkled cheeks with youth’s remembered tears, Ask me no more, but let the silent years Be closed and cered over their memory 615 As yon mute marble where their corpses lie.’ I urged and questioned still, she told me how All happened — but the cold world shall not know.

17  To Night S.’s exercise on a conventional lyric theme, in a highly unusual stanza, was published by Mary in 1824. She took her text directly from his holograph fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1, and there are no differences of substance between the two. S. drafted the lines in Nbk 12 on the front cover pastedown and on ff. 1r–2v, 3v in proximity to material datable to summer–autumn 1819 (MYRS vi 81). This, together with the poem’s affinities to the series of erotic lyrics that he wrote between mid-November and late December of the year inspired by his acquaintance with Sophia Stacey (see headnote to Thou art fair, and few are fairer [To Sophia]; Longman iii 234–6) would support a date of composition in that period. In 1839 (iv 110–11), Mary placed the poem among those written in 1821, a date inconsistent with both the position of the draft in Nbk 12 and of the fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1.

607. was] is Nbk 6. 608. more?’] more? Hunt MS. 609–10. These lines are assigned in all eds to Maddalo’s daughter. They would sound just as appropriate coming from Julian, however. In Hunt MS, the speaker remains uncertain because ‘met’ (line 610) runs into the join of the notebook, leaving any punctuation obscure. 611–12. Cp. line 31 and a similar caution in R&H 592–4: ‘Weep not at thine own words, though they must make/Me weep. What is thy tale? I fear ’twill shake/Thy gentle heart with tears.’ 611. Yet] In Hunt MS and Nbk 6, ‘Yet’ replaces a cancelled ‘But’. If lines 609–10 were assigned to Julian, ‘Yet’ (rhyming with the preceding word, ‘met’) might enforce a pause and help suggest a change of speaker. disdain] Frequent in S.; cp. PU I 51–3: ‘these pale feet, which then might trample thee/If they disdained not such a prostrate slave./Disdain? Ah no! I pity thee’ and TL 204–5: ‘nor this disguise/Stain that within which still disdains to wear it.’ The word has some of the ambiguity of ‘scorn’ in S.’s lexicon; cp. line 38 and note. 614. cered] ceared Hunt MS, cered 1824. Cp. line 433 and note.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-17

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To Night is a generic hybrid, directly or indirectly deriving from a number of literary models. Kurt Schlueter has shown (SiR xxxvi 2 (1997) 239–60) that it displays in condensed form the tripartite rhetorical structure (invocation, praise, supplication) of a classical prayer-hymn appealing to a divine being to appear in the human world. Schlueter traces the various representations of Night as originary deity in ancient Gk literature, maintaining that Hesiod’s Theogony and Aeschylus’ Oresteian trilogy and Prometheus Bound in particular are likely to have furnished aspects of Night which are revised significantly in the poem. But within this broad generic framework, the tone of S.’s lyric is more familiar than that of an ancient hymn while the nature of the boon (l. 32) it asks of Night is conspicuously elusive. Its eroticism, at once urgent and artfully concealed, recalls Juliet’s appeal to Night to hasten to bring on her and Romeo’s wedding night at the opening of Romeo and Juliet III ii. A number of major motifs appear clearly to be borrowed from Ovid’s celebrated description (Met. xi 592 ff.) of the cave of Somnus (Sleep): the misty cave itself, a storehouse of dreams; the dark mantle; the poppies from which Night extracts the drowsiness that she spreads over the earth; the wings that carry Somnus’ son Morpheus on his errand among mortals. Forman gives an attentive and revealing account of the drafts in Huntington Nbks i 108–18. Chernaik’s acute exegesis considers the poem as a lyric of aspiration and desire in which the element of personal longing is controlled by the conventions of the epithalamium (Chernaik 144–6). For Harold Bloom (Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959) 5–8), To Night embodies a strain of ‘primitive mythopoeic’ verse whose tenor is the composition of verse itself. Text from Harvard Nbk 1 69–70. S.’s fair copy, though finished and legible, is not punctuated for the press. Some additions to and modifications of the Harvard and 1824 punctuation have been made. Published in 1824; Huntington Nbks i 108–18; MYRS vi 4–13, 16–17 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

To Night

5

10

Swiftly walk o’er the western wave, Spirit of Night! Out of the misty eastern cave Where, all the long and lone daylight Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear, Which make thee terrible and dear, — Swift be thy flight! Wrap thy form in a mantle grey, Star-inwrought! Blind with thine hair the eyes of day, Kiss her until she be wearied out,

¶ 17. To Night 1. o’er] over 1824, 1839. 4–6. An alternative version of the three lines is drafted on the front pastedown of Nbk 12 facing the main draft: ‘Where with the shadow of thy might/Thou coverdst, as with joy & fear/An how much?[envied] hemisphere’. 10. S. is retrieving an image from his A Summer-Evening Churchyard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire (Longman i 451–3): ‘And pallid evening twines its beaming hair/In duskier braids around the languid eyes of day’ (3–4 and see note), which he used again in Alastor 337–9. Cp also MA 123. 11. her . . . she] See note to l. 19.

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Then wander o’er city and sea and land Touching all with thine opiate wand — Come, long-sought! 15

20

25

30

35

When I arose and saw the dawn I sighed for thee; When Light rode high, and the dew was gone And noon lay heavy on flower and tree, And the weary Day turned to his rest Lingering like an unloved guest, I sighed for thee. Thy brother Death came, and cried, Wouldst thou me? Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed, Murmured like a noontide bee, Shall I nestle near thy side? Wouldst thou me? And I replied, No, not thee! Death will come when thou art dead, Soon, too soon — Sleep will come when thou art fled; Of neither would I ask the boon I ask of thee, belovèd Night — Swift be thine approaching flight, Come soon, soon!

14. The line is canc. in Nbk 12 but restored in Harvard Nbk 1. 19. his] Rossetti 1870 altered the word to her for consistency with l. 11 in which the day is feminine (and, by implication, night masculine, contrary to classical usage in which night is represented by the Gk goddess Nyx). Eds have commented variously on the discrepancy between ll. 11 and 19. It seems probable that in l. 11 S. means to personify the Day as either of the Gk deities Hemera (Day) or Eos (Dawn), daughters of Erebus and Night, and in this line as either of the male deities Helios (the Sun) or Apollo. Although the rationale of the gender assigned to Night and Day is far from clear in the poem, it is possible to understand the apparent inconsistency as S.’s exploitation of the ambiguity of the classical tradition. The male Night in l. 11 wearies the female Day with kisses until she dissolves into darkness, while in l. 19, the exhausted male Day lingers like a guest who has outworn his welcome. It appears likely that S. intends Night to reassume her traditional female identity from l. 22 where Sleep is named as her child. 22–4. Death . . . Sleep] S. is altering the received classical tradition in which the winged deities Death and Sleep are brothers, the children of Night. See Q Mab i 1–2 and n. 28. Following this stanza is a series of rejected lines which include: ‘Some call thee, because thou [seemest]/Deaths calm ghost — ’; ‘Charm to sleep the envious eye alt. canc. Argus eye/[Of all]?[] Suns slaves’; and on f. 3v: ‘Thou who makest darkness Day,/Mother of Dreams’.

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18  The Mask of Anarchy Written On the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester Occasion, Composition, Texts. The Mask of Anarchy (MA), as the subtitle makes clear, is a direct response to a specific event, the notorious and bloody confrontation between mounted troops and demonstrators for reform which took place on 16 August 1819 and which rapidly became known as ‘Peterloo’. By about noon on that day, a crowd estimated by modern historians at between 60,000 and 80,000 men, women and children had gathered on St Peter’s Field, an open space near the centre of Manchester, to protest against the distress of the agricultural and manufacturing poor as a result of low wages, high prices and widespread unemployment. The demonstrators also aimed to make a mass show of support for reform of parliamentary representation and the extension of the electoral franchise. Their leading demands of annual parliaments and adult male suffrage they regarded not only as just in themselves but as the necessary first step towards altering permanently the political and economic conditions that fostered the current hardship and the social inequality that guaranteed its continuance. The meeting in Manchester was the last in a series of such gatherings held that summer; the previous three were in Birmingham, Leeds and London. Manchester had been the scene of both social protest and civil disorder for several years previously, and the first six months of 1819 had witnessed much organised activity in the region for both relief of destitution and political reform. A meeting planned for 9 August on St Peter’s Field, at which the disenfranchised protesters intended to defy the law by ‘electing’ a Member of Parliament as a measure of protest, was declared illegal, and those planning to attend warned off by public notice. The replacement meeting set for 16 August, although its organisers advertised its purpose as only to adopt ‘the most legal and effectual means’ of achieving parliamentary reform, was viewed with keen apprehension by the local authorities as a potential occasion for disturbance; but the Manchester magistrates, having decided on Home Office advice several days earlier that they could not legally prevent such a gathering, had no choice but to allow it to go forward. Once the crowd was assembled, however, some thirty citizens swore affidavits that they believed the town to be in danger from the mass meeting. Warrants for the arrest of the principal speaker (the radical Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt) and other reform leaders present were issued, and constables were ordered to arrest them. But because the demonstrators were tightly compacted, particularly around the hustings where the speakers were stationed, the constables were unable to take them through the crowd and into custody. So the magistrates called for the aid of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry Cavalry, a corps of local volunteers largely drawn from the commercial and landowning middle class, which had been mustered and was mounted at the ready. (Uniformed members of this local militia had been seen drinking in public houses in the hours before they were called to intervene.) Advancing into the dense crowd, the inexperienced yeomanry appeared unable either effectively to assist the constables or to conduct themselves with restraint towards the unarmed demonstrators. Believing both constables and militiamen to be in danger, the magistrates then called for the aid of the 15th Hussars, regular light cavalry whose presence they had requested, and instructed them to disperse the meeting; their order was carried out in about fifteen minutes with the aid of further volunteer cavalry and some regular infantry. The consensus of reliable witnesses was that in the confusion of quickly unfolding events, acts of unwarranted and violent aggression were first committed by the armed cavalrymen, and that bricks, stones and staves were only then resorted to by sections of the crowd in self-defence

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-18

18  the mask of anarchy

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and retaliation. Some were convinced that, with the collusion of the civil authority, the yeomanry had acted with disproportionate force because both were opposed to the aims the reformers were seeking. The result was the loss of between six and a dozen (perhaps more) lives and some hundreds of injuries. The dead and wounded included women and children. Eyewitness accounts differ on important matters, from the size of the demonstration (the numbers were claimed to be as high as 150,000 and as low as 30,000), to the conduct of the actors, to the number of dead and injured; while contemporary reports in the press, often reflecting the political bias of the reporter, variously lay direct or implicit blame on the crowd, the leaders of the reform movement, the speakers, the Government, the magistrates and the militia. Such party differences notwithstanding, a broad consensus of impartial witnesses affirmed that the intentions of the demonstrators were peaceful, their behaviour temperate and disciplined, and that the militia especially acted with unnecessary ferocity. In consequence, consternation, alarm and disapproval were widely expressed that armed English troops should have killed and injured English civilians who had gathered in an orderly manner for a legitimate purpose. Later historians have variously located the principal springs of the day’s events in class conflict, Government collusion, or fearful, prejudiced and impetuous local magistrates. On 21 August, the Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth conveyed the ‘satisfaction’ of the Prince Regent to the civil authorities in Manchester at their ‘prompt, decisive and efficient measures for the preservation of the public tranquillity’, as well as his ‘high approbation of the support and assistance to the civil power afforded’ by the commander, officers and men of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry Cavalry. The disastrous encounter of the afternoon rapidly acquired the mocking title of ‘Peterloo’, in ironic allusion to the recent victory at Waterloo, where some of the regular troops involved in the dispersal had served. In a letter of 6 September 1819 from Leghorn (Livorno) to Charles Ollier, S. writes that the news of Peterloo had reached him the previous day, adding: ‘the torrent of my indignation has not yet done boiling in my veins. I wait anxiously [to] hear how the Country will express its sense of this bloody murderous oppression of its destroyers. “Something must be done .  .  . What yet I  know not” ’ (L i 116). S. borrows his motto from his own not-yet-published play, The Cenci, quoting a bewildered outburst from Beatrice Cenci after her father has forced incest upon her (Longman ii 781: III i 86–7 and note); she goes on to anticipate a dreadful revenge. Three days later, S. sends thanks to Peacock for newspapers ‘which contain the terrible and important news of Manchester. These are, as it were, the distant thunders of the terrible storm which is approaching. The tyrants here, as in the French Revolution, have first shed blood. May their execrable lessons not be learnt with equal docility!’ (L ii 119). In this mood of mixed outrage and foreboding S. quickly began to draft MA, possibly as early as 5 September, but perhaps a week or even more later. He clearly wished to appeal without delay to a broad popular audience of those who stood to gain directly from fundamental reform at what appeared to be a decisive juncture in English political life, and on 23 September the 372 lines of the finished poem were posted to Leigh Hunt (Mary Jnl i 298) for publication in the Examiner. (As Mary remarks in a letter to Hunt of 24 September, S. was much occupied with personal affairs during the month, including regular reading of Spanish literature with Charles Clairmont who was staying with the Shelleys, so he must have composed MA very rapidly in such time as was available to him before setting off to Florence on the 23rd, the day it was posted.) Hunt prudently held back the MS, no doubt fearing the legal consequences of publishing so inflammatory an address to the people in late 1819, a time of strict vigilance by Government over both the press and collective action for reform. He may also have been unwilling to appear to

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endorse the call for a general rising of the people in ll. 151–5, 372–6. By mid-November, having had no word from him, S. enquired after his poem (L ii 152), and Mary renewed the enquiry about ten days later (Mary L i 113). But Hunt, who had been imprisoned and fined seven years previously for a forthright attack on the Prince Regent in the Examiner, could ill afford another such punishment; MA was not to appear in print until 1832, ten years after S.’s death. Having decided not to include MA in 1824, in November  1826, Mary sent several of her late husband’s MSS, among them S.’s holograph fair copy of MA, from which she had transcribed the press-copy sent to Hunt, to the editor of the newly established Westminster Review, John (later Sir John) Bowring, who had shown an interest in S.’s work (Mary L i 513). Although she does not say so, she may have hoped that Bowring would either place the poem in the Westminster Review or help her to find another publisher. Her indirect appeal, if such it was, came to nothing. For his part, and like Hunt before him, Bowring kept the MS that he was sent, which was sold by his son to T. J. Wise in 1887 and is now in the British Library (Ashley MS. 4086; hereafter Ashley). When MA was eventually published, it was in a single volume (London: Edward Moxon, 1832) with a Preface by Hunt in which he defended withholding the poem until he judged that the public was ready to receive it with the discernment that S.’s own writings had in the interval helped to create. The title-page of the first edition carried an epigraph from S.’s RoI (the revised title of L&C; see Longman ii 30) 777–8: ‘Hope is strong:/Justice and Truth their winged child have found.’ Drafts of seventy-nine of the ninety-two stanzas that comprise the text of MA as presented here are known to survive, seventy-seven in Nbk 10 and two in Nbk 11 (205). (Drafts of rejected stanzas and lines of particular interest are included in the notes.) Drafts of the remaining stanzas, most of them from about the first quarter of the poem, would seem to have been lost. The state of the drafts varies from very rough to finished and cleanly written; some stanzas in the latter category have the appearance of transcriptions from earlier drafts, perhaps from the nbk(s) or loose paper that also held those of the missing early stanzas. From these materials, S. transcribed a fair copy of ninety-three stanzas (Ashley). One of these is cancelled, another was omitted (apparently inadvertently) from Mary’s transcription for the press-copy (MMC-1399, Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; hereafter LC): see notes to ll. 201–4, 278. S. went over Mary’s careful transcription, supplying the title and subtitle only at this point, filling in a few lines he had left blank in his fair copy, making minor verbal substitutions and adding or altering punctuation. It is not always possible to distinguish his interventions in the MS from hers, but those that appear clearly to be his are not extensive, perhaps some three dozen in total. The most important alterations to the MS are recorded in the notes below. A second fair copy was transcribed, probably later in the autumn, into Harvard Nbk 1, which the Shelleys used from about September 1819 to summer 1820 to keep copies of poems, many of which were sent to England for publication. The Contents at the back of Harvard Nbk 1 lists ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ as on pp. 30–8, but as the first forty pages of the nbk are missing it is impossible to know whether S. or Mary made the transcription. This missing copy was probably not transcribed until after the press-copy was sent to Hunt on 23 September because in the brief time in which the poem was drafted, copied fair, transcribed for the press and corrected it seems unlikely that another copy could also have been made, nor would S. and Mary have wished to delay posting MA to Hunt for that purpose, there being no obvious need for another fair copy at that moment. The third of the surviving fair copies was entered by Mary some time between 1822 and 1824 into Mary Copybk 2, which she used to garner texts for inclusion in 1824. Her transcription follows Ashley in a number of particulars which had previously been corrected in LC, for example reproducing

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incomplete stanzas which had been completed in the press-copy, and so clearly derives from S.’s Ashley holograph. That it was made before Mary gave that holograph MS to John Bowring in November 1826 may mean that she considered the Harvard Nbk 1 copy textually superior to it and/or that she herself had transcribed Harvard Nbk 1 and wished to present Bowring with an example of S.’s autograph. If transcribed by S., the Harvard Nbk 1 copy may have contained modifications that he introduced in the course of transcribing subsequent to those made in the press copy (LC); or, if Harvard Nbk 1 was Mary’s transcription, S. may have made alterations to it, as he did to the LC MS. In any case, Mary Copybk 2 includes a number of readings present in neither Ashley nor LC. As these may derive from the lost Harvard Nbk 1 pages, and if they do may carry S.’s authority, they have been recorded in the notes. In preparing press-copy for 1839, Mary evidently worked from both Hunt’s edition (1832) and her own transcription in Mary Copybk 2. Collation of these with 1839, and with Ashley and LC, shows that her text for 1839 is an eclectic one. Where there are differences between Mary Copybk 2 and Hunt’s edition of 1832 (which she knew had been printed from LC), she follows one about as often as the other. In those cases in which the Mary Copybk 2 reading differs from both Ashley and LC, she usually prefers Mary Copybk 2 (perhaps because it derived from S.’s modifications in Harvard Nbk 1) but not always — suggesting that her criteria for the text in 1839 were both adherence to what she may have considered authoritative MS readings as well as a degree of personal preference. Sources and Style. S. received news of Peterloo on 5 September 1819 (L ii 117). It seems probable that the news arrived in the articles from the English newspapers for which he thanks Peacock in a letter of 9 September. In the same letter, he requests him to ‘let me have the earliest political news which you consider of importance at this crisis’ (L ii 119). If Peacock had already anticipated this demand for speedy information and sent a second batch of newspaper clippings soon after 29 August (the day the weekly Examiner was published), S. could have received them by the middle of September, say by the 16th or 17th. In a letter of 21 September, S. informs him that ‘I have received all the papers you sent me, & the Examiners regularly, perfumed with muriatic [hydrochloric] acid. What an infernal business this of Manchester! What is to be done? Something assuredly. H. Hunt has behaved I think with great spirit & coolness in the whole affair’ (L ii 120). The first set of clippings seems certain to have included articles on Peterloo from the Examiner for 22 August and the second set from the 29 August issue, together with those from some other papers which remain unidentified. It is just possible that, allowing for the usual two-tothree-week passage of the overland post from London to Leghorn, S. also received from Peacock the Examiner for 5 September; but, if so, it cannot have arrived in time to have had any significant impact on MA, which was posted to Hunt on the 23rd. MA does not appear to incorporate any detail of the events of 16 August in Manchester or their immediate aftermath that S. could not have learned from the Examiners of 22 and 29 August. These two issues reprint from The Times a detailed narrative of the assembling of the reformers, the arrest of Henry Hunt and the other radical leaders, the intervention of the troops, the dispersal of the meeting and an estimate of the resulting deaths and injuries. Eyewitness accounts from the Manchester and other provincial newspapers are also given. Leigh Hunt furnished ample and outraged editorial commentary which directly contested the construction put on the events in the pro-government Courier, while an extract from a pamphlet published by William Hone entitled A Letter to Lord Sidmouth on the Recent Disturbances at Manchester further challenges the official interpretation: ‘these Reform Meetings, these outcries for Universal Suffrage, are produced, not as you would persuade the nation, by the acts of political incendiaries, but by the irritation of want, insult, and

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injustice. The wretches hunger; their wives and children waste with disease and penury’ (550). The Home Secretary Sidmouth’s letter to the Manchester magistrates and militia conveying the Prince Regent’s approbation of their actions was included, followed by a reprinting of Hazlitt’s essay ‘On the Regal Character’ which identified the essential and seldom-encountered faculty of the patriot king as ‘the power in imagination of changing places with his people’; so were letters from Henry Hunt defending his part in the day’s proceedings, and a letter from Sir Francis Burdett to the Electors of Westminster expressing his revulsion and fury at the ‘unparalleled and barbarous outrage’ — which was to earn him a fine of £2000 and a three-month prison sentence. From the summing-up in the Examiner of 29 August (reprinted from The Times of 19 and 24 August), S. would have gathered that the accounts of the day of 16 August at Manchester in the ‘Ministerial prints’ were distorted and biased, that Henry Hunt and the leaders of the meeting as well as the assembled reformers had all acted legally and with restraint, that the conduct of the Manchester magistrates had been precipitate and confused — in particular, that, contrary to their assertion, the Riot Act had not been read so as to be heard by most or all of the large assembly — that the behaviour of the inexperienced Manchester and Salford Yeomanry Cavalry was ‘violent and unwarrantable’ because they were ‘all of them inspired with the bitterest hatred against the Reformers’ in contrast to the Hussars who ‘behaved with great comparative coolness and moderation’. As for the constables of the civil power, they showed in many instances ‘a savage spirit of malice and revenge’. Drunkenness is suggested as aggravating the brutality of both yeomanry and constables, while numerous reliable witnesses affirmed that the crowd had only responded with bricks, staves and stones after they had been themselves attacked. Cameron (1974) adduces a number of parallels between the 22 and 29 August issues of the Examiner and MA. The most telling of these, together with some others, are signalled in the notes to the poem. If no one of them is decisive in itself, taken together they constitute a good case that S. draws upon both numbers of the Examiner for the poem. He appears therefore to have been provided not only with a detailed narrative of events but also with considerable commentary from a liberal and reformist point of view which deplored the unjustified use of force and expressed solidarity with the reformers and their cause. Both the narrative and the opinions, and in particular the heavy and comprehensive indictment of those who bore direct responsibility for the deaths and injuries, evidently lie behind a passage — heightened with touches of lurid colouring and a biblical allusion (Psalms cxxxvii 9) — in a letter of 3 November in defence of the radical bookseller Richard Carlile which S. sent to Leigh Hunt for publication in the Examiner: we hear that a troop of the enraged master manufacturers are let loose with sharpened swords upon a multitude of their starving dependents & in spite of the remonstrances of the regular troops that they ride over them & massacre without distinction of sex or age, & cut off women’s breasts & dash the heads of infants against the stones. (L ii 136) In framing his reaction to Peterloo as a ballad narrative, S. does not conform to any recognisable chronology of the events of 16 August in Manchester. Instead, he exploits the visionary’s licence he lays claim to in the first stanza to offer a metanarrative which begins with the triumphal pageant of three government ministers and Anarchy, their sovereign, an ironic fulfilment of the prophecy of the four horsemen in Revelation vi 2–8, evidently as a celebration of the ‘victory’ at Peterloo. This triumph is interrupted by the ‘Maniac

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maid’ of l. 86, then by the supernatural ‘Shape’ (110) whose appearance prompts a voice, as it were of the Earth of England, to deliver her discourse on Slavery and Freedom. The voice prophesies that another great assembly like that of the mass meeting in Manchester will gather; this time, rather than flee from their attackers, the people should stand their ground and allow their blood to be shed in order to inspire future reformers. The overall narrative movement of MA is therefore from the despair of defeat, broken in upon by an apparition of Hope, through an exposition of political and moral doctrine, to a reimagining of the original defeat, now with promise of success through virtuous sacrifice. As such, MA replicates in miniature the grander epic narrative of L&C, which begins with despair at the defeat of Revolutionary France and moves through the stages of supernatural intervention and moral-political education to re-enactment of the Revolution, ending in sacrificial defeat which nurtures hopeful prospects. Just as in L&C, S. restages a version of the French Revolution not as it was but as it ought to have been and might be, so does he propose in MA a revision of the Peterloo massacre which he intended to be morally exemplary and so a pattern of future action. The vehicle that S. constructs for this narrative revision is both generically and stylistically heterogeneous. It seems highly probable that he had read Leigh Hunt’s essay ‘Some Account of the Origin & Nature of Masks’, prefixed to Hunt’s own masque The Descent of Liberty (1815), which celebrates the recovered freedom of Europe after the abdication of Napoleon in spring 1814. From Hunt’s historical survey of the genre, S. would have learned that the Renaissance court masque had developed, originally in Italy, from double origins: in the masquerades mounted in the private houses of the gentry and nobility, and in the pageants and public shows that served to welcome princes and other distinguished visitors. Masques owed something too to the practice in fifteenth-century Florence of reminding the spectators at festivals of their mortality by a triumphal procession of citizens dressed as reanimated corpses, a practice that appears to lie behind S.’s evocation of ‘a rapid masque of death’ in Lines Written among the Euganean Hills 140. Curran (1975) detects in MA a debt both to such a triumph of death and to the antimasque which, in seventeenth-century examples such as those in Comus and Beaumont and Fletcher’s Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, parodied and challenged the solemnity of the main masque by introducing low and grotesque characters whose actions sought to subvert its values. Chief among these was an affirmation of the political status quo through the symbolic drama, no less than ‘a ritual enactment of the received order of society and . . . a recommitment to its structures of authority’ (88). Hunt’s own effort in the genre, The Descent of Liberty, conducted the tricky experiment of freeing the masque from its aristocratic and conservative bearings whilst taking for its topic and occasion a victory interpreted by the leaders of the victorious powers as warranting the restoration of aristocratic and conservative political principles. In his Preface, Hunt explains that he felt authorised to introduce into the drama the national genii of Great Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia to represent that popular spirit to which in contemporary circumstances the victory must finally be ascribed. This democratisation of both recent history and its symbolic commemoration is conspicuously affirmed in the mask by the prophetic address of the goddess Liberty to a harmonious mix of aristocratic and popular characters that stand for social Europe at large: ‘from this time forth/The few must know their service to the many’ (Scene iii 702–3; Hunt Works v 119), which may have elicited a more menacing echo in MA’s best-known line: ‘Ye are many, they are few’ (155, 376). Hunt’s revision of the masque form to accommodate his liberal vision of the times S. carries into the domain of radical satire. In MA, with bitter irony, he inverts the form’s

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affirmation of the existing order as divinely sanctioned by transforming it to a masquerade of treacherous impostors which celebrates a massacre of the people by those without legitimate title to rule and who enjoy the support of a hypocritical religious establishment. As principal divisions of his poem, he adopts from the masque tradition the allegorical procession of embodied virtues and vices (5–101), the decisive intervention of a supernatural being (102–46), the address to the audience combining exposition and exhortation (147–265), the vision of the future (266–376). That variations on this structural sequence are also to be found in the book of Revelation, which is parodied in ll. 5–77 particularly, as well as in S.’s own L&C, underlines the ramifications of MA’s generic pedigree. The parodic and millennial strains in contemporary reformist writing are brought together in S.’s adaptation of Revelation. They issue in the poem’s repeated call to the oppressed many to realise the power their numbers give them over the ruling few, S.’s culminating ironic revision of the later chapters of Revelation in which the few who are to be saved from the multitude of the unrighteous are mysteriously set apart. Commentators have frequently pointed out resemblances between MA and contemporary verbal and graphic satire. T. J. Wooler’s radical journal The Black Dwarf (ii 1818), for example, includes a fictional letter, ‘The Black Dwarf at the Masquerade’ (214–16), relating the disguises assumed at a masked fête by, among others, the Prince Regent (‘Nobody’), the quarrelsome and libidinous Duke of York (‘a Bishop’) and the Constitution, ‘a parchment skeleton, which when touched fell to pieces’ (215). In James Gillray’s satirical print ‘Presages of the Millenium’ (1795), to take another instance, a skeletal Pitt astride a wildly prancing white horse, at once an emblem of the Kingdom and house of Hanover and an allusion to Revelation vi 8, brandishes a fiery sword in one hand and a miniature winged dragon in the other. On the horse’s rump squats a sinister imp coiffed with the Prince of Wales’s feathers and holding a scroll with the words ‘Provision for the Millenium £125,000 pr Ann’. The horse and rider have spurned to the ground half a dozen figures holding petitions for peace and have trampled to death several of the herd of swine (alluding to Burke’s ‘swinish multitude’) that runs at the horse’s feet. For a number of other interesting parallels of theme and procedure between MA and contemporary satires, even in such unexpected forms as popular illuminated prints and dramatic pantomime, see Steven Jones, Shelley’s Satire (1994) 112–16. It is possible, though difficult to establish with certainty, that S. was acquainted with one or more of these works; clearly, however, both they and MA draw on a common fund of tropes, images, language and satirical targets originally elaborated in response to the French Revolution. The ballad stanzas of MA are consciously written in what Leigh Hunt describes in his Preface of 1832 as ‘a lax and familiar measure’ and Mary in her ‘Note on Poems of 1819’ in 1839 considered as ‘a more popular tone than usual . . . portions strik[ing] as abrupt and unpolished’. In a letter of mid-November 1819, S. reminds Hunt that ‘my lines on the Manchester affair . . . are of the exoteric species’ — that is, aimed at a broad readership encompassing those without the intellectual and literary sophistication demanded by his more usual ‘esoteric’ verse — and so intended for the Examiner which, so he judged, would provide the vehicle to reach them (L ii 152). Such were the readers of the large quantity of popular poetry taking Peterloo as its theme, which was produced in the weeks and months after the event. This effusion of verse includes Hunt’s own doggerel lines The Manchester Yeoman and The Chary Manchester Chairman, which appeared in the Examiner 610 (5 September  1819). As part of its popular address MA reiterates familiar reformist topics, adopting a style which approximates the sentimental-humanitarian lament of The Framework-knitters Petition (The Common Muse, ed. V. de Sola Pinto and A. E. Rodway (1967) 119) at one extreme:

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Could we obtain our food by work, Wou’d labour like the hardy turk; But all our hopes from thence are fled, And now we pine for want of bread. and at the other, the boisterous doggerel (carrying a shrewd political charge) of Cobbett’s parody in the Political Register for 21 November 1818 of the pious hymns taught to children in the schools of the National Society for the Education of the Poor in Accordance with the Principles of the Established Church, which Peacock copied out for S. in a letter of 15 December 1818 (Peacock L i 161; L ii 75): To hope for bread, to hope for beer, To hope for aught your hearts to cheer; To hope for clothes your backs to hide, Or screen your front or hinder side; To hope for these, in any way, Is hoping less of tax to pay; And hoping this, in acts or words, High treason is’gainst Borough-lords. But the greater part of MA, with its biblical allusions, elementary political theory and economy, and narrative motifs borrowed from S.’s own earlier verse and prose, adopts a more restrained idiom for its simple lyric stanza of three or four stresses to a line of seven or eight syllables. Moreover, S.’s poem stands out from the two examples cited above in imaginative scope and originality, skilful control of rhythm and rhyme, variety of tone and occasional lyric purity. It differs similarly from the run of Peterloo verse in reformist periodicals, nine examples of which are gathered in Poetry and Reform 1792–1824, ed. Michael Scrivener (1992). The draft MSS of MA are reproduced and analysed in Huntington Nbks ii and in MYRS iv, the fair copy MSS in the facsimile of Ashley edited by H. Buxton Forman for the Shelley Society (1887) and in MYRS ii. Both Leigh Hunt’s Preface to the first edition (1832) and Mary’s comments in Note on Poems of 1819 in 1839 are informative, though partisan, and have been frequently reprinted. There were few reviews of the 1832 edition. The Athenaeum 262 (3 November 1832), which had printed several pieces of S.’s unpublished writing during the year, takes the occasion to praise the ‘singularity and merit’ of MA as a welcome addition to the works of a poet ‘whose genius we reverence’ (707); while the London Literary Gazette 824 (3 November 1832) and 825 (10 November 1832) finds the poem’s denunciation of oppression to be ‘most injurious’: ‘We doubt much whether a writer like Shelley does not rather retard than advance any cause, however excellent, which he may advocate’ (709). Text from MMC-1399, Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC (LC). Substantive variants only are noted from S.’s drafts in Nbk 10 and Nbk 11, from his holograph fair copy, British Library Ashley MS 4086 (Ashley), from Mary’s transcription of Ashley in Mary Copybk 2, from the first printed edition (1832), edited by Leigh Hunt, and from 1839. Missing punctuation at the end of stanzas has usually been silently supplied; LC’s use of double inverted commas to mark reported speech has been regularised: in this edition, only the first line of a stanza of reported speech is preceded by a single inverted comma. Other significant departures from the copy-text have been recorded in the notes. Published in The Masque of Anarchy. A  Poem By Percy Bysshe Shelley. Now First Published, With a Preface By Leigh Hunt. London: Edward Moxon, 1832.

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The Mask of Anarchy Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester As I lay asleep in Italy There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me To walk in the visions of Poesy. 5

I met Murder on the way — He had a mask like Castlereagh — Very smooth he looked, yet grim; Seven bloodhounds followed him:

¶ 18. Title and subtitle. S. added both to LC, using the spelling ‘Mask’ as does Mary in letters (Mary L i 113, 513), in her transcription in Mary Copybk 2 and on the Contents page of Harvard Nbk 1. Hunt’s edition (1832) adopts the older spelling ‘Masque’, which S. had himself used in a letter to Hunt (L i 152), as do 1839 and 1840. Mask here signifies both (1) a dramatic pageant, allegorical and mythological in character, having its origins in Renaissance aristocratic and courtly entertainment, and (2) a disguise, both ceremonial (as at a masquerade) and morally deceptive. In the latter sense, S. may have been prompted by Leigh Hunt’s outburst in his leading article on Peterloo in the Examiner 608 (22 August 1819) against ‘these Men in Brazen Masks of power [who] dare to speak lamentingly of the wounds or even the death received by a constable or a soldier or any other person concerned against an assemblage of Englishmen irritated by every species of wrong and insult, public and private’ (530). On the proofs of the title-page for 1832 (MYRS ii 65) Hunt added an epigraph from RofI 777–8: ‘Hope is strong:/Justice and Truth their winged child have found’. The lines form part of a meditation in which a young modern Greek revolutionary, Laon, draws inspiration from the ruined ancient monuments of his country and pledges himself to enlighten and to liberate his countrymen from their Ottoman oppressors. Hunt had promoted RofI in three articles in the Examiner 527 (1 February 1818) 75–6; 530 (22 February 1818) 121–22; 531 (1 March 1818) 139–41, in which he had celebrated, among its other qualities, the beneficent character of S.’s poem; e.g. ‘To will them [‘the happy virtues’] with hope indeed is to create them; and to extend that will is the object of the writer before us’ (527: 75). He had also defended RofI and its author’s moral character from the strictures of the Quarterly Review in three further articles in the Examiner: 613 (26 September 1819) 620–1; 614 (3 October 1819) 635–6; 615 (10 October 1819) 652–3. In the Preface to 1832, Hunt claimed that ‘Mr. Shelley’s writings have since aided the general progress of knowledge in bringing about a wiser period’. The epigraph alerts the reader to the prophetic role of both the poet and his critical advocate, clearly intimating that now, in the year in which the First Reform Bill was passed, both have been vindicated. The provocative subtitle, entered in S.’s hand in LC, but cautiously omitted from both 1832 and 1839, was first printed in Forman 1876–7 with the comment: ‘there can be no use in any longer dropping the word massacre’. The word is used twice in relation to Peterloo in the Examiner for 22 August 1819 (535, 536). 1–4. Besides laying down the condition of the poetic dream-vision that ensues, the stanza alludes indirectly to the news of Peterloo that S. received in correspondence from England and may, as commentators have pointed out, hint at the author’s culpable lack of awareness of the political crisis at home. 7. smooth] affable, polite, amiable in appearance. Castlereagh was known for his courteous demeanour. 8. Seven bloodhounds] Seven is the principal symbolic number, frequently repeated, of the book of Revelation. The present line recalls the dragon or beast with seven heads and ten horns (xii 3, xvii 3, etc.), the heads and horns being identified as so many kings, as is the beast itself (xvii 9–12). Contemporary allusions have also been detected: (1) to the seven nations that joined England in postponing indefi-

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All were fat; and well they might Be in admirable plight, For one by one, and two by two, He tossed them human hearts to chew Which from his wide cloak he drew. Next came Fraud, and he had on, Like Eldon, an ermined gown;

nitely the abolition of the slave trade in 1815, Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, Portugal, Spain, Sweden (1964); (2) to the pro-war party in Pitt’s administration, known as ‘bloodhounds’ (Reiman (2002)). 10. plight] ‘Bodily or physical condition’ (OED n2 2.a). 11–13. Cp. the vision of the king in The Daemon of the World (Longman i 489–508) who ‘did gnaw/By fits, with secret smiles, a human heart/Concealed beneath his robe’ (i 274–6 and note). In the Examiner 472 (12 January 1817), Hazlitt concludes his article on ‘The Times Newspaper’ by evoking a dream vision in which the allusions to European politics and the book of Revelation, as well as the presence of contemporary public characters identified by their trappings, anticipate S.’s procedure in MA, which also shares the symbol of the human heart. And we saw three poets [Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge] in a dream, walking up and down on the face of the earth, and holding in their hands a human heart, which, as they raised their eyes to heaven, they kissed and worshipped; and a mighty shout arose and shook the air, for the towers of the Bastille had fallen, and a nation had become, of slaves, freemen; and the three poets, as they heard the sound, leaped and shouted, and made merry, and their voice was choaked with tears of joy, which they shed over the human heart, which they kissed and worshipped. And not long after, we saw the same three poets, the one with a receipt stamp in his hand, the other with a laurel on his head, and the third with a symbol which we could make nothing of, for it was neither literal nor allegorical, following in the train of the Pope and the Inquisition and the Bourbons, and worshipping the mark of the Beast, with the emblem of the human heart thrown beneath their feet, which they trampled and spit upon! (28) 12. hearts] Ashley, LC, 1832, 1839; soulls [sic] Mary Copybk 2. 15. Eldon] Lord Eldon Mary Copybk 2; Lord — 1832; 1839. In LC ‘Lord’, present in Ashley f. 1r, has been cancelled, apparently by S., no doubt for consistency with Castlereagh (6) and Sidmouth (24). John Scott, first Earl of Eldon (1751–1838), Lord Chancellor 1801–6, 1807–1827, was alive in 1832 when Hunt’s edition was published; he had recently been engaged in sustained though unsuccessful opposition to the First Reform Bill, passed in that year. When 1839 appeared, his death was still recent, which perhaps explains the absence of his name from that edition. In November 1820, Claire Clairmont recorded ‘Shelley’s three aversions’ as ‘God Almighty, Lord Chancellor & didactic Poetry’ (Claire Jnl 184). Apart from Eldon’s uncompromising political conservatism and rigid defence of the Church of England’s prerogatives, S. had two particular and personal reasons for detesting him with what was, according to Peacock, a settled abhorrence (Peacock Works viii 52): (1) Eldon, who had gained his BA and MA degrees at University College, Oxford and had held a college fellowship, had been appointed High Steward of the University in 1801. When S. took up residence at University College in October 1810, Eldon was its most distinguished and powerful member. Against expectation, he had been defeated earlier that year in the election for the Chancellorship of the University by the more progressive and tolerant Whig Lord Grenville (1759–1834), a defeat that was a continu-

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20

And the little children, who Round his feet played to and fro, Thinking every tear a gem, Had their brains knocked out by them. Clothed with the Bible, as with light,

ing embarrassment to the college. By both family connection and personal inclination the young S. was sympathetic to Grenville and his views, so that his expulsion in March 1811 over his authorship of the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism seemed ‘an affair of party’ to T. J. Hogg, who was expelled for the same offence. The Master of the college and those Fellows involved in expelling the two friends were certainly acting consistently with and in deference to Eldon’s religious dispositions and no doubt with an eye on the ecclesiastical patronage at the Lord Chancellor’s disposal: Hogg, Chapter viii; Medwin (1913) 86–7; L. G. Mitchell, ‘The Politics of the Young Shelley’, Shelley and Univ. 1810–1811 (University College, Oxford, 1992), 15–30. (2) S. was deprived of the custody of his two children by Harriet Westbrook by a decision of Lord Chancellor Eldon in the Court of Chancery on 27 March 1817. The judgement against him maintained the necessity of protecting his children from the consequences of his immoral principles: see note to L&C 70 and headnote to To —— [the Lord Chancellor]. The second paragraph of Hunt’s Preface to 1832 recalls Eldon’s judgement as cruel and biased, identifying an allusion to it in this stanza and the next. ermined] ermine Mary Copybk 2, 1839. The white fur of the ermine traditionally symbolised purity; in heraldry, ermine fur was spotted with black. Eldon was entitled to wear a gown trimmed with ermine both as a peer of the realm and as a judge. 16–21. The figure of tears turning to millstones and braining bystanders is repeated in OT (Longman iii 649–710) i 332–40 and in To —— [the Lord Chancellor] 47–8. Cp. the instructions given by Richard Duke of  Gloucester (later Richard III) to the murderers he has commissioned to despatch the Duke of Clarence: ‘Your eyes drop millstones when fools’ eyes fall tears’ (Richard III I iii 351; also I iv 234–5; Troilus and Cressida I ii 139–40). Eldon was notorious for weeping in court; see To —— [the Lord Chancellor] 47–8. 17. they] he Ashley. 18. children] ‘But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea’ (Matthew xviii 6; also Mark ix 42, Luke xvii 2). See note to ll. 16–21. 22. the Bible] the ** 1832, 1839. In LC, a cross has been placed at the end of line 22, and space ruled off at the bottom of f. 1, as if to accommodate a footnote, which was not entered. S. may have intended to disclaim any intention of mocking the Bible, then either thought better of it or forgot to enter the disclaimer; or he may have planned to point up the irony of the oppressive and pious Sidmouth’s association with the Bible. See note to l. 24. Neither the draft of this stanza (Nbk 10 f. 23v) nor S.’s fair copy (Ashley f. 1v) nor Mary’s transcription (Mary Copybk 2) includes a note or any sign that one was considered. S. ironically adapts biblical idiom in his presentation of Sidmouth as a religious hypocrite: ‘thou [the Lord] art clothed with honour and majesty. Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment’ (Psalms civ 1–2). The sense of ll. 22–5 is that beneath a show of biblical piety Sidmouth is an agent of darkness. Cp. S.’s accusation of the government prosecutors of the bookseller Richard Carlile on a charge of blasphemy, for whom religion ‘is the mask & the garment by which they are invested with the symbols of worldly power’ (L ii 143). In 1815 Sidmouth and Lord Liverpool planned to introduce a bill in Parliament to provide new churches for the increasing population in industrial areas, which was withdrawn for lack of funds; though in 1818, Sidmouth supported a similar and this time successful bill to raise £1,000,000 for the purpose. See note to ll. 238–41 and 240–41.

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And the shadows of the night, Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy On a crocodile rode by. And many more Destructions played In this ghastly masquerade, All disguised, even to the eyes, Like Bishops, lawyers, peers or spies.

30

Last came Anarchy: he rode On a white horse, splashed with blood; He was pale even to the lips,

23. shadows] shadow Mary Copybk 2, 1839. 24. Like Sidmouth] Like * * * 1832, 1839. Henry Addington, first Viscount Sidmouth (1757–1844), Prime Minister (1801–4), Home Secretary (1812–22) in the Liverpool administration, was still alive when 1832 and 1839 appeared, which may explain the withholding of his name in those editions. After the draft of this line in Nbk 10 f. 23v is a canc. attempt at the next two lines: ‘Singing “Hosannah” [sic]/With a cold tear in either eye’. As Home Secretary, Sidmouth promoted measures restricting freedom of expression and assembly, which liberal and radical opinion regarded as the repression of legitimate agitation for reform of Parliament (to which he, like Castlereagh and Eldon, was hostile), and opposed the relief of hardship among the poor. 25. crocodile] A figure of lethal deceitfulness because, according to legend, it imitated the groans of a person in distress in order to attract passers-by, then shed tears while devouring them. 26. Destructions] Agents of destruction: OED 1 d cites Scott, The Lady of the Lake III xi: ‘Quench thou his light, Destruction dark!’ 29. peers or] peers & Ashley. spies] At the Home Office, Sidmouth oversaw a network of government informers and spies who operated throughout the country and reported to him on radical activity for reform. The spies, who sometimes acted more like agents provocateurs, were widely despised. See notes to PB3 (Longman iii 70–152) 152, 671. 30–3. ‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth’ (Revelation vi 7). Rossetti 1870 noticed the discrepancy between S.’s pale Death and the Bible’s ‘pale horse’. Despite the comma in both Ashley and LC, it remains ambiguous whether it is Anarchy or the horse that is splashed with blood. S. may have remembered a stanza of The Devil’s Thoughts, jointly authored by Coleridge and Southey, which he imitated in The Devil’s Walk (Longman i 230–7, no. 83): An apothecary on a white horse, Rode by on his vocation, And the Devil thought of his old friend Death, in the Revelation. (1799 version) The stanza varies slightly in later versions of the ballad. Resemblances have been noted between ll. 30–53 and Benjamin West’s painting Death on the Pale Horse (reproduced as the jacket illustration to Longman iii), three versions of which were exhibited in London between 1784 and 1818: see Helmut von Erffa and Allen Stanley, The Paintings of Benjamin West (1986) 388–92. These include Death’s crown, the trampled crowd and horsemen wielding swords. Hunt and Hazlitt both knew the picture well (SC vi 894). Resemblances are also evident to John Hamilton Mortimer’s drawing Death on a Pale Horse (1775), etchings of which were published in 1784 and 1816. A running white horse featured on the coat of arms and flag of the Electorate and (from 1814) the Kingdom of Hanover; it became part of the Coat of Arms of the British monarch at the accession of George I (the Elector of Hanover) in 1714 until removed in 1837. See note to ll. 36–7 and headnote. 30. Anarchy] Anarchy here personifies not the breakdown of order which S., in a letter to Peacock of 24 August 1819, feared would be ‘the last flash before despotism’ (L ii 115), but rather that despotic

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35

40

And he wore a kingly crown, And in his grasp a sceptre shone; On his brow this mark I saw — ‘I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW.’ With a pace stately and fast, Over English land he passed, Trampling to a mire of blood The adoring multitude.

misrule which ensures fundamental disorder and injustice beneath the ‘legitimate’ appearance of sovereignty. The irony of the crown and sceptre of ll. 34–5 arises from the etymology of the word (from Gk ‘without a chief or head’). See note to L&C 86 and cp. TL 285–6: ‘The Anarchs old whose force and murderous snares/Had founded many a sceptre bearing line.’ 35. And in his grasp] LC, 1832; In his hand, Ashley, Mary Copybk 2, 1839; in LC S. has alt. ‘hand’ to ‘grasp’. 36–7. S. is adapting a motif from Revelation where the forehead is the place that bears the mark of either the Beast or the Lamb, i.e. of either abomination or of righteousness: e.g. xiii 16–17, xiv 1, 9. This allusion is here conflated with another to xix 11–16 describing a vision of a ‘white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True . . . and on his head were many crowns . . . and he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood . . . and on his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS’. See note to ll. 30–3. 36. On] And on 1832. 37. “I am king, and God, and Law”. Mary Copybk 2. 40–1. The crushing of an adoring crowd is a figure repeated in Q Mab vii 33–6, TL 155–62 — in both those poems, as here, signifying a superstitious prostration before the ceremonial display of power. In Nbk 10, S. drafted a stanza, apparently to include in the progress of Anarchy (31–54), which he did not transcribe into Ashley, but which Mary transcribed later into Nbk 10 (25v): A red mist like a steam of gore His quick footsteps rose before And the earth whereon he went A cry Like a trampled infant sent A piercing scream of loud lament. See MYRS p. xxvii and SC vi 892–5. The Examiner for 22 August included an article from The Times blaming the Yeomanry Cavalry for attacking indiscriminately, including women and children, in Manchester (542).

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And a mighty troop around, With their trampling shook the ground, Waving each a bloody sword, For the service of their Lord. And with glorious triumph, they Rode through England proud and gay, Drunk as with intoxication Of the wine of desolation.

50

55

O’er fields and towns, from sea to sea, Passed the Pageant swift and free, Tearing up, and trampling down; Till they came to London town. And each dweller, panic-stricken, Felt his heart with terror sicken Hearing the tempestuous cry Of the triumph of Anarchy. For with pomp to meet him came, Clothed in arms like blood and flame,

45. For] In Mary Copybk 2. 47. England] England, Mary Copybk 2, 1839. gay,] Mary Copybk 2, 1832, 1839; gay LC. 48–9. The lines draw upon Revelation xvii 1–6 which introduce the woman dressed in scarlet, ‘The Mother of Harlots’, sitting upon the scarlet beast, and ‘drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus’. There is a specific echo of xvii 2: ‘With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.’ Some of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry Cavalry which attacked the crowd at Peterloo had earlier that day been drinking in neighbouring public houses: ‘they in particular who charged and cut down women must either have been too dastardly to think or too drunk to see’: Examiner 609 (29 August 1819) 545; also ‘it is even affirmed that intoxication only could explain the wanton violence they committed’ (557). 51. the] that Ashley. 56. tempestuous] tremendous Mary Copybk 2, 1839. 57. triumph of Anarchy] In ancient Rome, a triumph was a celebratory procession granted to a general who had won an exceptional victory over foreign foes and was typically joined by magistrates, senators, victorious soldiers and captives. Passing through the Triumphal Gate, it made its way to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol. Curran (1975) points out that Leigh Hunt’s historical account of the masque prefixed to The Descent of Liberty (1815) links the mounted processions of the public masquerades on the theme of death in fifteenth-century Florence to the development of the Italian poetic form of the Triumph (190). See headnote to TL. 58. In LC, Mary transcribed only the first two words of the line as it stands in Ashley: ‘For from [] to meet him came’; S. first deleted her transcription, then wrote the line as given here. came,] Mary Copybk 2, 1832, 1839; came Ashley, LC. 59. Clothed . . . flame] Wearing the red coat of the British army, who are the hired murderers of the next line.

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shelley: selected poems The hired murderers, who did sing ‘Thou art God, and Law, and King. We have waited, weak and lone For thy coming, Mighty One! Our purses are empty, our swords are cold, Give us glory, and blood, and gold.’ Lawyers and priests, a motley crowd, To the earth their pale brows bowed; Like a bad prayer, not over loud, Whispering — ‘Thou art Law and God.’ —

70

75

Then all cried with one accord, ‘Thou art King, and God, and Lord; Anarchy, to thee we bow, Be thy name made holy now!’ And Anarchy, the Skeleton, Bowed and grinned to every one, As well as if his education Had cost ten millions to the nation. For he knew the Palaces Of our Kings were rightly his;

68. prayer,] LC only shows the comma. 70. accord,] Mary Copybk 2, 1832, 1839; accord; LC. 71. King, and God, and Lord;] king, and law, and God! Mary Copybk 2; King, and Law, and Lord; 1839. Ashley, LC and 1832 read as the present text. The 1839 reading, which renders Mary Copybk 2’s rhyme with accord more precise while retaining an acceptable substitute for God, may be an attempt to make the line conform to the trinity (heavenly and earthly sovereign plus Law) of lines 37 and 61, and also to repeat ‘Law’ from l. 69. Mary Copybk 2’s reading may derive from the lost Harvard Nbk MS; in 1839, Mary has adopted ‘Lord’, apparently from 1832. 73. Ironically echoing the ‘Hallowed be thy name’ of the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew vi 9, Luke xi 2). 76. Like a King who long has known canc. Nbk 10 f. 9v. education] upbringing, training, preparation for a defined social position rather than formal schooling alone. 77. ten millions] The expenses incurred by the seven sons of George III, and in particular the Prince Regent’s extravagant expenditure and notorious debts over many years scandalised reformers and the public generally. 79. rightly] Nbk 10 f. 22v, Ashley f. 3v, Mary Copybk 2; nightly LC, 1832, 1839. The word in Ashley is easily misread as ‘nightly’, which Mary probably mistranscribed in LC, though it remains possible that S., who corrected LC, accepted it. Rossetti 1878, though retaining ‘nightly’, thought rightly likely to be the correct reading, crediting the emendation to ‘B.V.’, i.e. the poet James Thomson (1834–82), with whom he corresponded about Shelley. See Thomson’s Shelley, A Poem, with other writings, 1884. Although ‘nightly’ makes sense in its way, rightly seems appropriate to the general meaning of the stanza: Anarchy, the figure of misrule that truly represents the present government of England, is therefore the rightful owner of the material prerogatives and symbols of royal power. The draft (Nbk 10 f. 22v) reveals the basis of Anarchy’s claim, as S. first conceived of it:

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His the sceptre, crown, and globe, And the gold-inwoven robe. So he sent his slaves before To seize upon the Bank and Tower, And was proceeding with intent To meet his pensioned Parliament, When one fled past, a Maniac maid, And her name was Hope, she said: But she looked more like Despair, And she cried out in the air:

Anarchy said the palaces Of our kings were rightly his — [For all his ancestors had reigned]’. 80. globe] A golden orb, part of the regalia of sovereignty used at a coronation — like the crown and sceptre. 83. Bank and Tower] I.e. the Bank of England and the Tower of London, the former the treasury and centre of financial administration for the country, the latter a fortress, garrison, arsenal, depository for the crown jewels and occasional state prison — institutional symbols of the gold and blood the soldiers call for in l. 65. Seizure of both was claimed by government witnesses at their respective trials to have been the object of both the revolutionary conspiracy of Colonel Despard in 1802 and of the Spa Fields rioters in 1816. In Chapter X of Nightmare Abbey, which S. read in June 1819 (L ii 98), Peacock mocks such conspiracy-hysteria: ‘Scythrop . . . concluded that he was sheltering an illuminée whom Lord S. [Sidmouth] suspected of an intention to take the Tower, and set fire to the Bank: exploits, at least, as likely to be accomplished by the hands and eyes of a young beauty, as by a drunken cobbler and doctor, armed with a pamphlet and an old stocking’ (Peacock Works iii 93). Peacock refers to Thomas Preston, a cobbler, and Dr James Watson the elder, two of the conspirators arrested in London in December 1816 for their part in the Spa Fields riots. At his trial, Watson was charged with plotting attacks on the Bank and the Tower; it was claimed that he carried ammunition for the purpose in an old stocking. 84. The legal language suggests criminal intent (OED n. 1). 85. Parliament,] eds, Parliament LC. pensioned] Many MPs, especially ministers, were in receipt of a pension, i.e. a stipend or annuity granted to a government office-holder as a reward for services and to ensure loyalty; hence, S. implies, they were paid for their compliance with established power. S. had been reminded, when he read Nightmare Abbey in June 1819, of Dr Johnson’s definition of Pension: ‘Pay given to a slave of state for treason to his country’, which is quoted in Chapter V: Peacock Works iii 38. 87–8. Hope . . . Despair] At the triumph of Anarchy, even Hope momentarily wears an aspect of Despair. The sudden appearance of a female figure who personifies Hope and who delivers instruction is common to Q Mab i 45–67 and L&C 262 (see note). Her double aspect, both despairing and hopeful, recalls the Woman Guide of L&C (262–342) whose dejection after the defeat of the Serpent (the material manifestation of the Spirit of Good and symbolic representation of the forces of Liberty in the French Revolution) turns to hope as she apprises the narrator of the true metaphysical and moral foundations of the world.

326 90

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shelley: selected poems ‘My father Time is weak and grey With waiting for a better day; See how idiot-like he stands, Fumbling with his palsied hands! ‘He has had child after child And the dust of death is piled Over every one but me — Misery, oh, Misery!’

Then she lay down in the street, Right before the horses’ feet, 100 Expecting, with a patient eye, Murder, Fraud and Anarchy. When between her and her foes A mist, a light, an image rose, Small at first, and weak, and frail, 105 Like the vapour of a vale: Till as clouds grow on the blast, Like tower-crowned giants striding fast, 90. In the ‘Note on Poems of 1819’ in 1839, Mary recalled: ‘I heard him repeat, and admired those [stanzas] beginning, — My Father Time is old [sic] and grey, before I knew to what poem they were to belong.’ 93. Fumbling] Trembling Mary Copybk 2, 1839. 97. The Maniac maid borrows her cry of despair from Martha Ray, the bereaved mother of an infant, in Wordsworth’s The Thorn (1798): ‘Oh misery! oh misery!/O woe is me! oh misery!’ (65–6). 102–25. The process given symbolic expression in these lines is ‘the rise and growth of the Public Enlightenment’ according to the second paragraph of Hunt’s Preface to 1832. H. S. Salt in A Shelley Primer (1887) considered the Shape of l. 110 ‘an apparition of Liberty’ (94). The Shape certainly recalls both the ‘glorious Phantom’, which is the resurrected ‘Spirit of Liberty’ of the final paragraph of An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte (1817; Prose Works i 239) and the ‘glorious Phantom’ evoked in England in 1819 13, as well as Liberty the ‘Immortal Queen’ of the first stanza of ‘God save the Queen!’ — all of which have affinities with the goddess Liberty in Leigh Hunt’s mask The Descent of Liberty (1815). Other values have been assigned to the Shape, which also recalls the warrior Britannia of popular prints; but, unlike the allegorical maiden Hope of l. 87, it appears that S. attaches no single signification to this mythical figure. 103. like the Angel of dawn arose Nbk 10 f. 10r. Cp. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798 and later versions): ‘A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist!’ (1805 version, 147). 105. a vale] the vale 1832, 1839. 106–7. Turner 279 compares Lucretius, De Re. Nat. iv 137–40: ‘For often giants’ countenances [formed by the clouds] appear to fly over and to draw their shadow afar, sometimes great mountains and rocks torn from the mountains to go before and to pass by the sun, after them some monster pulling and dragging other clouds’. 107. fast,] fast eds.

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And glare with lightnings as they fly, And speak in thunder to the sky, 110 It grew — a Shape arrayed in mail Brighter than the viper’s scale, And upborne on wings whose grain Was as the light of sunny rain: On its helm, seen far away, 115 A planet, like the Morning’s, lay; And those plumes its light rained through Like a shower of crimson dew. With step as soft as wind it passed O’er the heads of men — so fast 120 That they knew the presence there, And looked, — but all was empty air. As flowers beneath May’s footstep waken, As stars from Night’s loose hair are shaken,

110–17. In these lines, S. recombines language and images he had used to describe the struggle of the eagle and the serpent in L&C 175–207. Cp. also Lines Written among the Euganean Hills 80–81: ‘So their plumes of purple grain,/Starred with drops of golden rain.’ 110. Shape] Form canc. Angel Nbk 10 f. 8v. 115. A planet] Venus when it appears as the morning star. See L&C 308–10 and note, and cp. L&C 500–1: ‘A wingèd youth, his radiant brow did wear/The Morning Star’. The figure of Venus as Lucifer is repeated in the appearance of the Spirit of Good in L&C 622–30. 116. its] it 1832, 1839. 118–19. S. is adapting an image from a passage in Plato’s Symposium (195), which he translated in summer 1818, in which Agathon praises Love as the youngest of the gods: ‘He is young, therefore, and being young is tender and soft. There were need of some poet like Homer to celebrate the delicacy and tenderness of Love. For Homer says, that the Goddess Calamity is delicate, and that her feet are tender. “Her feet are soft”, he says, “for she treads not upon the ground, but makes her path upon the heads of men” . . . The same evidence is sufficient to make manifest the tenderness of Love’ (Notopoulos 435). See PU I 772–9 and note. 121. but all] Nbk 10 f. 8v, Ashley f. 4v; and all LC, 1832, 1839. 122–4. There are no commas in Nbk 10 f. 9r, Ashley f. 4v, or LC f. 1v. 122. May’s footstep] Ashley, LC; the footstep 1832; May’s footsteps Mary Copybk 2; 1839. In Nbk 10 ff. 8v–9r are three attempts at the phrase: ‘Aprils footstep’ canc., ‘Aprils footsteps’ canc., ‘Mays footstep’. Hesiod tells that when Aphrodite was born from the ocean: ‘She came forth, a reverend, beautiful goddess, and grass grew up around her beneath her slender feet’ (Theogony 190–5). Scott varies the image in The Lady of the Lake i 18: ‘E’en the slight harebell raised its head,/Elastic from her airy tread.’ It is possible that S. had heard and remembered Coleridge’s praise of Humphry Davy, ‘Every subject in Davy’s mind has the principle of vitality. Living thoughts spring up like turf under his feet’: Joseph Cottle, Reminiscences of S.T. Coleridge and R. Southey (1847) 329. Cp. SP ii 10–12 and note. 123. S. is recasting the imagery of Revelation vi 13: ‘And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.’

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As waves arise when loud winds call, 125 Thoughts sprung where’er that step did fall. And the prostrate multitude Looked — and ankle-deep in blood, Hope, that maiden most serene, Was walking with a quiet mien: 130 And Anarchy, the ghastly birth, Lay dead earth upon the earth; The Horse of Death tameless as wind Fled, and with his hoofs did grind To dust, the murderers thronged behind. 135 A rushing light of clouds and splendour, A sense awakening and yet tender Was heard and felt — and at its close These words of joy and fear arose As if their own indignant Earth 140 Which gave the sons of England birth Had felt their blood upon her brow, And shuddering with a Mother’s throe Had turned every drop of blood By which her face had been bedewed 145 To an accent unwithstood, — 125. where’er] wherein Ashley, Mary Copybk 2. 128. Hope, . . . serene,] Mary Copybk 2, 1832, 1839; Hope . . . serene Ashley, LC. 130–4. S. wrote only the first two lines of this stanza in Ashley f. 5r, leaving space for two more, and later completing the stanza with three additional lines in a blank space left by Mary in LC. Her transcription of the stanza in Mary Copybk 2 includes only ll. 130–1. 1832 and 1839 follow LC, though without the comma after dust in l. 134. 131. earth;] earth Ashley, LC. 133–4. The draft in Nbk 10 (10v) shows that S. first imagined a more elaborately melodramatic defeat for the forces of Anarchy: And Murder skulked out of the fray And near the [ ] in ambush [ ] And Fraud, less [quickly] to be known Threw off E____’s wig & gown. 136. awakening] rousing, stirring. 139–46. These two stanzas are enclosed in round brackets in 1832. They allude to and revise the curse laid upon Cain by God in Genesis iv 10–11: ‘And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand.’ 145. accent] A word, considered as distinctive or characteristic of the speaker. The associations with nature, popular education and social responsibility of the voice that speaks from l. 147 are elicited by

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As if her heart had cried aloud: ‘Men of England, heirs of Glory, Heroes of unwritten story, Nurslings of one mighty Mother, 150 Hopes of her, and one another; ‘Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to Earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you — 155 Ye are many — they are few.

Richard Cronin in The Politics of Romantic Poetry (2000) 178–9. unwithstood] OED defines as ‘Not withstood or hindered; unopposed’, citing this stanza as one example; but in the imagined scene introduced by ‘As if ’ in l. 139 the sense merges with ‘unwithstandable’, ‘irresistible’. 146. had cried] cried out Ashley f. 5v; Mary Copybk 2. Cp. L&C 3491: ‘Like earth’s own voice lifted unconquerably.’ 147–8. The common people of England, who rightfully inherit a share of the country’s glorious past, have the potential to be the heroes of that part of its history that is yet to be written. The place that S. reserves for them in that story is specified in An Ode (‘Arise, arise, arise!’) (Longman iii 162–8) ll. 22–8. 151. Rise . . . slumber] Rise . . . slumber, Mary Copybk 2; Rise, . . . slumber, 1832, 1839. This most celebrated stanza of the poem (repeated as the final stanza) draws upon the traditional analogy between warrior and lion, the latter a part of the British coat of arms and long current as symbol of British military prowess, in fashioning S.’s appeal to the people to act on the strength of their own numbers. Cp. Balaam’s prophecy in Numbers xxiii 24: ‘Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion, and lift up himself as a young lion: he shall not lie down until he eat of the prey, and drink the blood of the slain.’ Spenser likens the warrior Constantius in Faerie Queene III iii 30 (1–2) to ‘a Lyon, that in drowsie caue/ Hath long time slept, himselfe so shall he shake’, a simile indebted in its turn to Jacob’s description of his son Judah as ‘a lion’s whelp . . . he stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up?’ (Genesis xlix 9). Of more direct political relevance is Milton’s ‘methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep’ in Areopagitica (Complete Prose Works of John Milton (1959) ii 557–8), as well as Satan’s call to the legions of defeated angels lying entranced in hell in Paradise Lost i 330: ‘Awake, arise, or be forever fallen.’ S. had quoted this line at the end of his A Declaration of Rights (1812), which includes as its second article: ‘If these individuals [who delegate authority to their governors] think that the form of government which they, or their forefathers constituted is ill adapted to produce their happiness, they have a right to change it’ (Prose Works i 56). Cp. An Ode (Arise, arise, arise!) 1–7. 152. number,] number Nbk 10 f. 11r, Ashley f. 5v, LC f. 2r. Cp. Leigh Hunt’s supposition in the Examiner 608 (22 August 1819) on the likely conduct of the crowd at Peterloo had the radical Henry Hunt been ‘cut to pieces’ by the soldiers: ‘do we think that thousands and thousands of Englishmen would any longer have contented themselves with tamely looking on; or with execrations, or with brickbats and staves? No, most assuredly. They would have risen in the irresistible might of their numbers; and every soldier would have been dragged off his horse, and massacred on the spot’ (529). 155. Cp. the exhortation of the goddess Liberty in Leigh Hunt’s The Descent of Liberty (1815) iii 702–3: ‘from this time forth/The few must know their service to the many’ (Hunt Works v 119). The stanza finishes at l. 154 in 1832, though without asterisks to signal that l. 155 has been omitted. Inadvertently to overlook so resonant a line seems unlikely, yet its repetition at line 376 shows that neither Hunt nor Edward Moxon, the publisher, objected to including the sentiment expressed. See note to ll. 240–1.

330

shelley: selected poems ‘What is Freedom? — ye can tell That which slavery is, too well — For its very name has grown To an echo of your own.

160 ‘’Tis to work and have such pay As just keeps life from day to day In your limbs, as in a cell For the tyrants’ use to dwell, ‘So that ye for them are made, 165 Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade, With or without your own will, bent To their defence and nourishment. ‘’Tis to see your children weak With their mothers pine and peak, 170 When the winter winds are bleak, — They are dying whilst I speak. ‘’Tis to hunger for such diet As the rich man in his riot Casts to the fat dogs that lie 175 Surfeiting beneath his eye; ‘’Tis to let the Ghost of Gold Take from Toil a thousandfold

160–75. The miserable conditions endured by the manufacturing poor in Manchester were starkly evoked in the Examiner 609 (29 August 1819) in an extract from a pamphlet published by Joseph Hone and addressed to Lord Sidmouth: ‘The wretches hunger; their wives and children waste with disease and penury’ (550); and again in a description from a Manchester newspaper of the poorest district of the city: ‘no part of the metropolis presents scenes of more squalid wretchedness, or of more repulsive depravity, its natural concomitant, than this’ (558). See notes to ll. 225, 278. 163. dwell,] dwell: 1832, 1839; dwell LC. 164. made,] 1832, 1839; made Ashley, LC; made; Mary Copybk 2. 166. will, bent] Ashley, 1832, 1839; will bent, Mary Copybk 2; will bent LC. 169. pine and peak] languish, waste away. 173–5. Apparently a reference to the parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus in Luke xvi 19–31. 176–83. S. here condenses into two stanzas his conviction that national fiscal policy weighs heavily and unjustly on the labouring poor. In PVR, he notes that ‘the majority [of] the people of England are destitute and miserable, ill-clothed, ill-fed, ill-educated’ and argues that ‘the cause of this peculiar misery is the unequal distribution which, under the form of the national debt, has been surreptitiously made of the products of their labour and the products of the labour of their ancestors; for all property is the produce of labour’ (Julian vii 31). The situation he thus characterises issued, he felt, from a particular set of political and financial circumstances. In order to fund the American and Napoleonic wars (both unjust in S.’s view), the National Debt had grown to more than £900,000,000 by 1815 and the annual interest on it to over £30,000,000. Moreover, since 1797 the Bank of England had no longer been

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More than e’er its substance could In the tyrannies of old. 180 ‘Paper coin — that forgery Of the title deeds, which ye Hold to something of the worth Of the inheritance of Earth. ‘’Tis to be a slave in soul 185 And to hold no strong control Over your own wills, but be All that others make of ye. ‘And at length when ye complain With a murmur weak and vain 190 ’Tis to see the Tyrant’s crew Ride over your wives and you — Blood is on the grass like dew. ‘Then it is to feel revenge Fiercely thirsting to exchange 195 Blood for blood — and wrong for wrong — Do not thus when ye are strong.

required by law to exchange banknotes for gold; the gold standard would be restored only in 1821. In common with Cobbett, notably in the case set out in his Paper Against Gold (1815), S. was persuaded that the Bank had taken this measure because it could no longer pay the interest on the Debt in gold. It had nonetheless continued to issue paper currency which necessarily depreciated in value. Following the abolition of the wartime income tax in 1816, from which the poor and those with modest incomes were exempt, and its replacement by increased commodity taxes, the labouring population bore a disproportionate share of the heavy burden of taxation, a substantial part of which went to pay the interest on the Debt. The effect was to protect the well-off from the hardship such an imposition laid on the poor while stockholders in the government funds benefited from the return on their investment that was paid from the taxes, which also supported large numbers of government pensioners and placemen. Hence the position behind these lines is that the National Debt, a paper currency no longer guaranteed by gold, and regressive taxation have combined to defraud the rightful share of the national wealth of those whose very labour is the source of it. ‘The rich, no longer being able to rule by force, have invented this scheme that they may rule by fraud’ (Julian vii 25). See PVR chapter ii; K. N. Cameron, ‘Shelley, Cobbett and the National Debt’, JEGP 42 (1943) 197–209; Cameron (1974) 137–40. 179. tyrannies of old] Cp. PVR: ‘Neither the Persian monarchy nor the Roman empire, where the will of one person was acknowledged as unappealable law, ever extorted a twentieth part the proportion now extorted from the property and labour of the inhabitants of Great Britain’ (Julian vii 25). 182. of] from Nbk 10 f. 12r, Ashley. 183. Echoing Matthew v 5: ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.’ 186. wills] will Ashley, Mary Copybk 2. 190. Tyrant’s] tyrants Ashley, tyrants’ Mary Copybk 2, tyrant’s 1832, 1839. The apostrophe is ambiguously placed in LC, but its capital T requires the singular. 196. The line is printed in small capitals in 1832.

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‘Birds find rest, in narrow nest When weary of their wingèd quest; Beasts find fare, in woody lair 200 When storm and snow are in the air. ‘Horses, oxen have a home When from daily toil they come; Household dogs, when the wind roars, Find a home within warm doors. 205 ‘Asses, swine, have litter spread And with fitting food are fed; All things have a home but one — Thou, Oh, Englishman, hast none! ‘This is slavery — savage men, 210 Or wild beasts within a den Would endure not as ye do — But such ills they never knew. ‘What art thou Freedom? O! could slaves Answer from their living graves

198. their] the 1832. 201–4. This stanza, drafted in Nbk 10 f. 12v, transcribed into Ashley f. 7r and into Mary Copybk 2, was omitted from LC and so from 1832. It was restored by Mary in 1839. In the introduction to the facsimile edition of Ashley (The Mask of Anarchy . . . Facsimile of the Holograph Manuscript, London: The Shelley Society, 1887), Forman argues (21–4) that S. must deliberately have omitted the stanza from LC, a conclusion he had already reached (before he was able to consult Ashley) in Forman 1876–7. He maintains that earlier decision (which he later reaffirmed in Huntington Nbks ii 52) essentially on the ground that the omission is poetically effective. The evidence for inclusion or exclusion is ambiguous. The stanza is not cancelled in Ashley, and its transcription in Mary Copybk 2 and printing in 1839 would seem to be Mary’s recognition that she had mistakenly overlooked it when transcribing LC. In a letter to Leigh Hunt of 27 September  1819 (four days after sending LC for publication in the Examiner), S. wrote, then canc.: ‘I omitted in the transcription of my poem which you will have received, the following verse, which comes after the line.’ The reference is almost certainly to MA and either to this stanza or to that given in the note to l. 278; if to this one, it is unclear why S. stopped short of transcribing it for insertion into LC. He may simply not have wished to put himself or Hunt to further trouble for lines that are hardly indispensable, or he may have decided at the last moment that the poem read better without them. However that may be, the balance of evidence seems to call for the stanza’s inclusion. 205–8. Alluding to Matthew viii 20: ‘And Jesus saith unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head’; also Luke ix 58. 213–16. In this stanza, S. recombines the elements of L&C 1945–50, 1954. 213. What art thou Freedom?] What is Freedom? Mary Copybk 2.

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215 This demand — tyrants would flee Like a dream’s dim imagery: ‘Thou art not, as impostors say, A shadow soon to pass away, A superstition, and a name 220 Echoing from the cave of Fame. ‘For the labourer thou art bread And a comely table spread, From his daily labour come, In a neat and happy home. 225 ‘Thou art clothes, and fire, and food For the trampled multitude — No — in countries that are free Such starvation cannot be As in England now we see.

220. cave] caves 1832. Ashley, Mary Copybk 2 and 1839 read ‘cave’; Mary transcribed ‘caves’ in LC, then canc. the ‘s’. Fame] rumour, gossip (Latin fama). Ovid represents Rumour as living on a hill where earth, sea and sky meet, in a house of echoing brass. This has innumerable entrances and exits and constantly repeats words, which arrive as if on the winds, mixing false and true (Met. xii 39 ff). 221–4. The stanza is given as it appears in Ashley though with the punctuation of 1839. In LC, it reads: For the labourer thou art bread, And a comely table spread From his daily labour come To a neat & happy home. It would appear that in transcribing this from Ashley, which has a mark that might be read as a comma at the end of the first line but no other punctuation, Mary substituted ‘To’ for In as the first word of the fourth line because she understood the adverbial force of that line to relate to come in the third line. But in transcribing Mary Copybk 2, she added commas at the end of lines 2 and 3 and retained In (which is also the reading of the draft in Nbk 10 f. 14r) in line four, making line 3 parenthetical, and having line 4 qualify spread at the end of line 2, an arrangement that she reproduced in 1839. 223. labour] Nbk 10, LC, Mary Copybk 2, 1832, 1839, eds; labors Ashley. 225. clothes, and fire, and food] Webb (1995) cites Hunt’s leading article in the Examiner 608 (22 August 1819): ‘ “meat, clothes, and fire” [Pope, Moral Essays iii (Epistle to Allen Lord Bathurst) 82]. These are dear and valuable to the poor; and Reform is dear and valuable to them, in proportion as they think it will help to restore them’ (531). See notes to ll. 160–75, 278. 229. At this point in Nbk 10 S. drafted, then canc., a stanza: Love in his wife’s looks thou art And content within his heart When his children climb his knee On his child [] thy spirit deep’. (14r)

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230 ‘To the rich thou art a check; When his foot is on the neck Of his victim, thou dost make That he treads upon a snake. ‘Thou art Justice — ne’er for gold 235 May thy righteous laws be sold As laws are in England — thou Shield’st alike the high and low. ‘Thou art Wisdom — Freemen never Dream that God will damn for ever 240 All who think those things untrue Of which Priests make such ado. ‘Thou art Peace — never by thee Would blood and treasure wasted be

230. check;] Mary Copybk 2, 1839; the punctuation mark in LC may be a canc. comma, but cannot be confidently deciphered; Ashley’s punctuation could be either a full stop or a dash. 1832 places a comma after check (230) and a semicolon after victim (232), giving a different sense to the stanza. 233. Cameron (1974) 623 points out that the line may allude to the flags of Minutemen militias in the American Revolution, which featured a coiled rattlesnake and the motto ‘Don’t Tread on Me’. Some of them added ‘Liberty or Death’. During the Revolution, American ships also flew a flag showing a snake and the ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ motto. If S. intended the allusion, its revolutionary reference is a pointed one. See L&C 280, 368–9 and notes. 237. Shield’st alike the high and low] Sheldst alike both high & low Nbk 10 f. 14v; Shieldst alike both high & low Ashley 8r; Shieldest both the high and low Mary Copybk 2; Shieldest alike the high and low 1839. 238–41. S. considered that the alliance between the established Church of England and the unrepresentative political regime in the country in effect subjected religion to the interests of the ruling minority. Priestly injunctions to submit to lawful authority under threat of sanctions in a future life aimed to prevent any challenge to the prerogatives of that minority. True Freedom required the liberty of thought that followed from abandoning such religious superstitions as damnation to Hell. The theme is largely explored in both Q Mab and L&C, and is succinctly formulated in S.’s letter challenging the conviction of the bookseller Richard Carlile for publishing works judged to be blasphemous (L ii 143–4). Cp. the character Mammon, Arch-Priest of Famine in OT, and see OL (Longman iii 378–419) 226–40 and notes, and note to MA 22. 238. Freemen] Freedom 1832. 239. Dream] Dreams 1832; damn] Ashley, LC, 1832; doom Mary Copybk 2, 1839. It is possible that ‘doom’ in Mary Copybk 2 and 1839 derives from the lost Harvard MS and so may have S.’s authority, though it may instead represent Mary’s desire to attenuate the critical tone of the passage in respect of established religious doctrine. See the following note. 240–41. Hunt noted on the proofs for 1832: ‘If Mr. Moxon wishes these two lines omitted, their place can be supplied by asterisks’ (MYRS ii 104). In the event the lines were printed. See note to l. 155.

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As tyrants wasted them, when all 245 Leagued to quench thy flame in Gaul. ‘What if English toil and blood Was poured forth, even as a flood? It availed, Oh, Liberty! To dim, but not extinguish thee. 250 ‘Thou art Love — the rich have kissed Thy feet, and like him following Christ, Give their substance to the free And through the rough world follow thee, ‘Or turn their wealth to arms, and make 255 War for thy belovèd sake On wealth, and war, and fraud — whence they Drew the power which is their prey. ‘Science, Poetry and Thought Are thy lamps; they make the lot

244. tyrants] England’s tyrants Nbk 10 f. 15r. 245. In 1793 Britain joined with Prussia, Russia, Austria, Holland, Spain and Sardinia to form a military coalition against Revolutionary France. S. gives an imaginative version of such a league of despotism against a revolution for Freedom in L&C 3820–64. Cp. OL 173 and note. 250–3. In this stanza, S. combines elements from three passages in Luke’s Gospel. He made detailed notes on chapters  1–20 of the Gospel in Nbk 15 which BSM xiv p.  xxvii dates conjecturally to November–December 1819. The first passage is that of the woman who enters the Pharisee’s house in order to wash Christ’s feet with her tears, dry them with her hair, anoint them with ointment and kiss them, and who is forgiven her sins though they are greater than the Pharisee’s (vii 36–50). The second is Christ’s advice to the rich ruler who has kept the commandments from his youth and who asks what he must do to ‘inherit eternal life’, receiving the reply ‘sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me’ xviii 18–22. In Nbk 15, S. considers this ‘The divine passage about entire self devotion requisite to Heaven’ (7). There is also an allusion to Zaccheus the Publican and sinner who gives half his goods to the poor and recompenses fourfold those he has wronged (xix 1–10), in which actions S. sees ‘the wonderful effect of his [Christ’s] doctrines on Zaccheus’ (7). 252–3. Give . . . follow] Nbk 10 f. 15v, Ashley 8v, LC, 1832; Given . . . followed Mary Copybk 2, 1839. 253. thee,] thee Nbk 10 f. 15v, Ashley 8v, LC; thee. Mary Copybk 2, 1832, 1839. 254. Or] Nbk 10 f. 15v, Ashley 8v, LC f. 2v; Oh 1832; 1839. 255–6. In 1832 these two lines read: ‘War for thy beloved sake,/On wealth and war and fraud: whence they’ (Hunt’s italics). 256–7. whence . . . prey] ‘from which the rich drew the power which now they are seeking to overthrow’ (Locock 1911). Cp. L&C 3077–78: ‘make the woes/Of humankind their prey’. 258. Science,] Nbk 10 f. 16r, Ashley, LC, Mary Copybk 2; Science, and 1832, 1839. In LC, Mary first wrote a lower-case ‘p’, then canc. it in such a way that it could be misread as an ampersand, as Forman 1876–7 noted. This was apparently the source of the error in 1832, though why 1839 follows 1832 is not clear.

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260 Of the dwellers in a cot Such, they curse their Maker not. ‘Spirit, Patience, Gentleness, All that can adorn and bless Art thou — let deeds not words express 265 Thine exceeding loveliness. ‘Let a great Assembly be Of the fearless and the free On some spot of English ground Where the plains stretch wide around. 270 ‘Let the blue sky overhead, The green earth on which ye tread, All that must eternal be Witness the solemnity. ‘From the corners uttermost 275 Of the bounds of English coast, From every hut, village and town Where those who live and suffer, moan For others’ misery or their own,

261. Such, they curse their Maker not] In Nbk 10 f. 16r S. wrote ‘So serene, [they canc.] curse it not’, transcribed the line into Ashley f. 8v, then alt. it to the version given here. LC and 1832 follow the original Ashley reading, Mary Copybk 2 and 1839 the alt. one except for a lower-case ‘m’ in ‘maker’. Two explanations are possible: either both S. and Mary preferred the original reading when preparing LC; or S. made the changes in Ashley after LC had been transcribed and sent to Hunt; then later, when transcribing Mary Copybk 2, Mary adopted his altered version, which was perhaps also that of the missing Harvard Nbk 1 MS. The latter explanation appears more likely; hence the reading of the present text. 266. great Assembly] The assembly in the following stanzas is intended to recall especially the mass political meetings of summer 1819, the last of which, in Manchester on 16 August, occasioned MA. L&C 2062– 2334 offers an idealised version of such an assembly, based on a similar episode in Ruins chapters xvi–xvii, and alluding to the revolutionary gathering of the Fête de la Fédération of July 1790 in Paris. Cameron (1974) 625 compares Sir Francis Burdett’s call in a letter published in the Examiner 609 (29 August 1819) for ‘public meetings throughout the United Kingdom’ to demand ‘justice and redress’ following Peterloo (551). 267. fearless and the free] fearless, of the free, 1832. 277. suffer, moan] Mary Copybk 2, 1832, 1839; suffer moan Ashley, LC. 278. or] and 1832. At this point in Ashley (10r) S. transcribed, then canc., a stanza which he had drafted in Nbk 10 f. 17v–18r: From the cities where from caves Like the dead from putrid graves Troops of starvelings gliding come Living Tenants of a tomb.

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‘From the workhouse and the prison 280 Where pale as corpses newly risen, Women, children, young and old Groan for pain, and weep for cold — ‘From the haunts of daily life Where is waged the daily strife 285 With common wants and common cares Which sows the human heart with tares — ‘Lastly from the palaces Where the murmur of distress Echoes, like the distant sound 290 Of a wind alive around ‘Those prison halls of wealth and fashion Where some few feel such compassion For those who groan, and toil, and wail As must make their brethren pale — 295 ‘Ye who suffer woes untold, Or to feel, or to behold Your lost country bought and sold With a price of blood and gold — ‘Let a vast assembly be, 300 And with great solemnity

It is possible that this is the ‘verse’ which he says (in a letter to Hunt of 27 September  1819) was inadvertently omitted from Mary’s transcription in LC; if so, he thought better of including it, hence the cancellation. See note to ll. 201–4. The stanza evokes the living conditions of the poor in the manufacturing cities. Cp. Southey’s account in Letters from England (1807): ‘Here in Manchester a great proportion of the poor lodge in cellars, damp and dark, where every kind of filth is suffered to accumulate . . . These places are so many hotbeds of infection; and the poor in large towns are rarely or never without an infectious fever among them, a plague of their own . . .’, ed. Jack Simmons (1984) 210. Similarities with ll. 279–82 would explain the cancellation of the stanza. See note to ll. 160–5, 225. 282. ‘Perhaps the pain — the positive bodily pain which the poor here [in England] endure from cold, may be esteemed the worst evil of their poverty’ (Letters from England 145: see previous note). 284. waged] urged Mary Copybk 2. That Mary preferred waged to ‘urged’ in 1839 suggests that the Mary Copybk 2 reading is a simple mistranscription. 286. sows] Nbk 10 f. 18v, Ashley, LC; sow Mary Copybk 2, 1832, 1839. tares] harmful weeds, in reference to the parable recounted in Matthew xiii 24–30 and interpreted in 36–40. S.’s allusion implies that the Biblical distinction between the good and the wicked should be replaced with one between the haves and have-nots. 290. alive around] Nbk 10 f. 18v, Ashley, LC, 1832; Of a wind, alive around — Mary Copybk 2; Of a wind, alive around; 1839.

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shelley: selected poems Declare with measured words that ye Are, as God has made ye, free —

‘Be your strong and simple words Keen to wound as sharpened swords, 305 And wide as targes let them be, With their shade to cover ye. ‘Let the tyrants pour around With a quick and startling sound, Like the loosening of a sea, 310 Troops of armed emblazonry. ‘Let the charged artillery drive Till the dead air seems alive With the clash of clanging wheels, And the tramp of horses’ heels. 315 ‘Let the fixèd bayonet Gleam with sharp desire to wet Its bright point in English blood Looking keen as one for food. ‘Let the horsemen’s scimitars 320 Wheel and flash, like sphereless stars 301. measured] ne’er said Mary Copybk 2, 1839. In LC, Mary transcribed only the two words Declare with from Ashley, leaving the rest of the line blank. S. then added measured words that ye in the blank space with a different nib and ink. In Mary Copybk 2, Mary (not having LC before her) transcribed her source, perhaps the missing Harvard MS, as ‘ne’er said’ (though Ashley is awkwardly written at this point and might well be read as such), whence the 1839 reading. In LC measured words that ye is enclosed in pencilled square brackets. This may be either Mary’s reminder that the gap in the text must be filled in, or a compositor’s mark to indicate that the four words go together on the same line, ‘that ye’ having been squeezed in below it for lack of space and not signalled with Mary’s customary bracket to indicate that the words form part of the line above. 305. targes] light shields carried by foot-soldiers for protection in battle before the advent of firearms, as in PU IV 291. 309. sea,] Mary Copybk 2, 1832, 1839; sea Nbk 10 f. 19v, Ashley, LC. the loosening] the setting free (from its confines); cp. PU III iii 81. 310. emblazonry] ‘Heraldic devices collectively, symbolic ornament’ (OED 1. b). The reference is to the insignia on the uniforms and banners of the troops. Cp. Milton, Paradise Lost ii 511–13: ‘him round/A globe [body] of fiery seraphim enclosed/With bright emblazonry, and horrent arms’. 319. horsemen’s] Ashley, Mary Copybk 2, 1832; horseman’s LC, 1839. scimitars] short curved swords used especially by Turks and Persians (OED) and associated with the military force of Oriental despotism. Webb (1995) cites a poem published in the radical journal the Black Dwarf on 1 December 1819 in which the crowd and soldiers at Peterloo are compared to modern Greeks and Turkish troops respectively. L&C 2371–496 develops just such a scene of massacre of a Greek multitude, which has gathered peacefully to demand its liberation, by the troops of their Turkish oppressors. 320. sphereless stars] I.e. stars which have wandered from what older astronomers termed the sphere of the fixed stars and appeared as comets or meteors. OED cites this as the earliest use of the word. Cp.

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Thirsting to eclipse their burning In a sea of death and mourning. ‘Stand ye calm and resolute, Like a forest close and mute, 325 With folded arms and looks which are Weapons of an unvanquished war, ‘And let Panic, who outspeeds The career of armèd steeds Pass, a disregarded shade 330 Through your phalanx undismayed. ‘Let the laws of your own land, Good or ill, between ye stand Hand to hand, and foot to foot, Arbiters of the dispute, 335 ‘The old laws of England — they Whose reverend heads with age are grey,

L&C 621 and note and LMG 284–5: ‘a fixed star gone astray/From the silver regions of the Milky Way’. 323. The 9th article of S.’s A Declaration of Rights (1812) is: ‘No man has a right to disturb the public peace, by personally resisting the execution of a law however bad. He ought to acquiesce, using at the same time the utmost powers of his reason, to promote its repeal’ (Prose Works i 57). 326. of an unvanquished] LC, 1832, 1839; of unvanquished Ashley, Mary Copybk 2; ‘of a holy war’ Nbk 10 f. 20v. 331–43. These stanzas are printed in italics in 1832. Hunt explains why in a footnote to line 330: ‘The three stanzas next ensuing are printed in italics, not because they are better, or indeed so well written, as some of the rest, but as marking out the sober, lawful, and charitable mode of proceeding advocated and anticipated by this supposed reckless innovator. “Passive obedience” he certainly had not; but here follows a picture and a recommendation of “non-resistance,” in all its glory. The mingled emotion and dignity of it is admirably expressed in the second line of stanza 85 [l. 349 of the present text]. Let churches militant read it, and blush to call the author no Christian!’ Hunt had originally commented on these stanzas in the final paragraph of his first version of the Preface, which he canc. on the proofs in favour of the footnote given above: ‘The stanzas exhorting to this measure have been printed in italics, not as being finelier written than the others, but in marked honour to the intentions of their nobleminded and beneficent author; and as bringing his spirit, as it were, into consciousness with us in our moment of congratulation’ (MYRS ii 73). See note to ll. 344–63. 335–9. S. is adopting the idiom of contemporary reformers who urged their claims on the principle that ‘the rule of law was the distinguishing inheritance of the “free-born Englishman” ’: E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1968) 87. Specifically, S.’s appeal would be to such precedents as the Magna Carta (1215), the Bill of Rights (1689) and Habeas Corpus. Leigh Hunt forcefully advances this reformist argument to legal precedent in the leading article in the Examiner 604 (25 July 1819). More generally, the lines derive from the conviction, current among reformers, that ancient English rights and liberties were the foundation and guarantee of attempts to reform the present political system. In his well-known Address to the Journeymen and Labourers of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, Cobbett invoked ‘the example of our Ancestors . . . we want nothing new. We have great constitutional laws and principles, to which we are immovably attached. We want great alteration, but we want nothing new’: Political Register (2 November 1816) 568. See Thompson, 84–96 and Dawson 204–10.

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shelley: selected poems Children of a wiser day; And whose solemn voice must be Thine own echo — Liberty!

340 ‘On those who first should violate Such sacred heralds in their state Rest the blood that must ensue, And it will not rest on you. ‘And if then the tyrants dare 345 Let them ride among you there, Slash, and stab, and maim, and hew; — What they like, that let them do. ‘With folded arms and steady eyes, And little fear, and less surprise 350 Look upon them as they slay Till their rage has died away. ‘Then they will return with shame To the place from which they came, And the blood thus shed will speak 355 In hot blushes on their cheek. 341. sacred heralds] As messengers or ambassadors between sovereigns or their opposing armies, heralds enjoyed an invulnerable condition that had to be respected; they also arbitrated at tournaments and determined precedence in public ceremonies. In S.’s analogy between the laws of England and heralds, the party that should infringe the status of the laws as Arbiters (334) would bear the guilt of the resulting bloodshed. in their state] in the formal exercise of their official function. The phrase sacred heralds occurs four times in Pope’s translation of the Iliad: i 420, ii 123, v 644, ix 807. 342. ensue,] LC, 1832; ensue; Mary Copybk 2, 1839; ensue . . . Ashley f. 11v; ensue — Nbk 10 f. 20v. 345. you] ye Mary Copybk 2. 344–63. S. sets out the moral, psychological and social basis of the conduct that is here recommended to people and soldiers in PVR: ‘The true patriot . . . will exhort them [reformers gathered at a mass meeting] . . . to expect without resistance the onset of the cavalry, and wait with folded arms the event of the fire of the artillery and receive with unshrinking bosoms the bayonets of the charging battalions . . . not because active resistance is not justifiable when all other means shall have failed, but because in this instance temperance and courage would produce greater advantages than the most decisive victory . . . the soldier is a man and an Englishman. This unexpected reception would probably throw him back upon a recollection of the true nature of the measures of which he was made the instrument, and the enemy might be converted into the ally’ (Julian vii 48–9). 350. slay] stay 1832. 351. died] passed Mary Copybk 2. There is a canc. stanza at this point in the draft in Nbk 10 f. 21v: Bethink ye my beloved sons All things mortal must die once. There will come a destined day When the Earth must pass away. 355. hot blushes] Cp. An Address, to the Irish People (1812): ‘do not then cover in darkness wrongs at which the face of day, and the tyrants who bask in its warmth ought to blush. Wherever has violence succeeded’ (Prose Works 18–19).

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‘Every woman in the land Will point at them as they stand — They will hardly dare to greet Their acquaintance in the Street. 360 ‘And the bold, true warriors Who have hugged Danger in wars Will turn to those who would be free Ashamed of such base company. ‘And that slaughter, to the Nation 365 Shall steam up like inspiration, Eloquent, oracular; A volcano heard afar. ‘And these words shall then become Like oppression’s thundered doom 370 Ringing through each heart and brain, Heard again — again — again — ‘Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number — Shake your chains to earth like dew 375 Which in sleep had fallen on you — Ye are many — they are few.’ THE END 356–9. The Examiner for 22 August  1819 reprinted an address which the Female Reformers of Manchester had intended to make to Henry Hunt at the meeting of 16 August as they presented him with a new banner. It includes the injunction: ‘May your flag never be unfurled but in the cause of peace and reform, and then may a female’s curse pursue the coward who deserts the standard’ (543). 358–9. [Ye whom Death cannot subdue/Cowards] Every child will Nbk 10 f. 22r. 360–3. The Examiner for 22 August 1819 carried a report of a meeting of Reformers held the previous day at the Crown and Anchor in London, at which the resolutions included: ‘That the exemplary behaviour of the regular troops employed on that occasion [Peterloo], forms a humane contrast to the conduct of the Yeomanry Cavalry, and may be fairly construed into a pledge that the British regular force will not trample upon the rights, nor destroy the liberties of their fellow subjects’ (536). The following week’s Examiner reprinted an article from the Times which reported: ‘The declaration of impartial persons . . . is, that the Hussars behaved with great comparative coolness and moderation’ (557). 361. wars] the wars Mary Copybk 2, 1839. 364–7. S. predicts that the massacre he has just reimagined will act like the volcanic vapour which was traditionally thought to inspire the priests and priestesses who delivered the prophecies of the ancient oracles. See PU II iii 1–10 and notes. The volcano stands as a figure for revolutionary transformation in L&C 2892, 3498; Hellas 589. 364–5. S. first wrote, then canc., ‘Then with calm words speak to each/Gentle doctrines, which’ in Nbk 10 f. 22r. 364. slaughter,] Nbk 10 f. 22r, Ashley f. 12r; slaughter LC, Mary Copybk 2, 1832, 1839. The comma in both draft and fair copy marks a rhetorical pause designed to clarify the reference of the adverbial phrase to the Nation. 373. number —] number; Mary Copybk 2; NUMBER! 1832; number! 1839. 376. YE ARE MANY — THEY ARE FEW. 1832; few — Ashley f. 12v; few! — Mary Copybk 2; few! 1839.

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19  Ode to Heaven Ode to Heaven was published as one of the Miscellaneous Poems in 1820. S.’s holograph fair copy is in Nbk 9 where it is written on the recto pages only of ff. 17r–20r, his fair copy of PU III ii 18–iii 34 occupying the verso pages. Mary’s transcription in Harvard Nbk 1, which appears to be based on S.’s holograph, concludes with a place and date, ‘Florence — December 1819’; and she included the Ode among the poems written in that year in 1839. This notation may only record the date of her transcription, however, and MS evidence suggests a period of composition that began somewhat earlier. The poem was drafted in the reverse direction of Nbk 10, the entries written in that direction dating from about summer 1819 to spring 1820. The draft of the Ode occupies seven pages (ff. 42r rev.–45r rev.) of the nbk, which are entirely devoted to it and free of extraneous matter. The draft is immediately preceded by a series of excerpts in Gk from the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, interspersed with S.’s commentary, and followed by the draft of My lost William, thou in whom [To William Shelley] (Longman iii 185–8, no. 254). Aeschylus was a favourite author with whom S. was intimately engaged during the composition of PU from September 1818 to December 1819. In a letter to Hogg of 25 July 1819 (L ii 105), he mentions having read Aeschylus that Spring and tells Peacock on 24 August that he is considering translating some Gk plays (L ii 115); while on 20 April 1820 (L ii 186) he says that he is reading the Agamemnon with Lady Mountcashell (Mrs Mason). Within those limits, a more precise date for the notes is difficult to fix with certainty, though a hypothesis can be advanced fairly confidently. In the reverse direction of Nbk 10, the draft for the Preface to The Cenci (mid-August) on ff. 7r rev.–18v rev. and a stanza of MA (mid-September) on f. 21r rev. are followed by the satirical fragments A daughter, mother and a grandmother and Proteus Wordsworth, who shall bind thee? (Longman iii 158–61) which were probably drafted after 15 October (see headnotes to these poems). To — [Lines to a Reviewer], part of which is drafted on f. 28v rev., also appears to date from after 15 October, perhaps from as late as Spring 1820. The position of the notes to Agamemnon (ff. 38r rev.–41v rev.) would therefore seem to place their composition in October–November 1819. The draft of My lost William, thou in whom [To William Shelley] (ff. 45v rev.–46v rev.), which immediately follows that of the Ode to Heaven, seems to have been written about mid-November 1819. The Ode was therefore probably drafted before mid-November, because it is unlikely that the draft would fit more or less exactly (as it does) into a space left by S. for the purpose of continuing his notes on Agamemnon when he began the draft of My lost William. It is nonetheless possible that S. did not transcribe his fair copy in Nbk 9 until December, so that Mary’s date in Harvard Nbk 1 could register the month of his transcription as well as hers. The draft in Nbk 10 is entitled ‘To Heaven’ and has no headings to mark different speakers. In the draft, stanza 4 is not a statement but a long question beginning ‘Art thou but the mind’s first chamber’. Stanza 5 begins with the cancelled phrase ‘Peace presumptuous spirit’, the change of address introducing a challenge, which continues to the end of the draft, to the prayer-like apostrophe to Heaven in stanzas 1–3 and the speculative interrogation of stanza 4. S.’s fair copy in Nbk 9 is untitled, but ‘Chorus of Spirits’ is written above stanza 1, while stanza 4 is preceded by the heading ‘a Remoter Voice’ and stanza 5 by ‘a louder & still remoter Voice’. S.’s intention at this stage was evidently to assign stanzas 1–3 to a ‘Chorus of Spirits’ and stanzas 4 and 5–6 to one each of the two designated individual voices coming from afar. Both ‘Chorus of Spirits’ and detached though unspecified voices occur as speech-headings in PU Acts I and IV, from which S. will have taken over this dramatic device. Mary’s transcription in Harvard Nbk 1 introduces the title Ode to Heaven but includes no speech-headings of any kind. In 1820 ‘Chorus of Spirits’ is restored, apparently

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-19

19  ode to heaven

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intended as a subtitle to the Ode, although only individual voices speak, not the Chorus collectively. The identifiers ‘First Spirit’, ‘Second Spirit’ and ‘Third Spirit’ placed before stanzas 1, 4 and 5 are a variant on the pattern of The Two Spirits. As in that poem, the words attributed to each spirit are distinguished only by the tenor of the utterance and not by any prior characterisation of the speaker. Reiman (1977 and 2002), following Chernaik, adopt the speaker headings from S.’s fair copy in Nbk 9, but the arrangement in 1820 must have been introduced either by S. himself, or on his instructions, in the press-copy, which was probably made by Mary and checked and corrected by him, as was their custom. The Ode to Heaven very probably developed directly out of S.’s work on a fourth act for PU from September to November 1819. Its machinery of spirits, the use of a complex lyric stanza with demanding rhymes including a triplet, the playful engagement with serious philosophical reflection, and the marked affinities with PU in diction and imagery (see notes) all suggest that the Ode was either originally intended for inclusion at some point in the fourth act of PU, or was composed in a closely similar spirit. In thematic terms, the two poems share a particular interest in the nature of time (as in PU IV 1–179; see notes to those lines), and of space, in a vertiginous juxtapositioning of the largest and smallest scales of existence which rehearses in highly concentrated form the extended poetic representations of telescopic and microscopic perspectives in PU IV (see ll. 206–268 and notes). The Ode’s ‘Heaven’ is a designedly un-Christian conception, in the spirit of Mont Blanc which polemically eschews any conventional Christian reflection on sublime mountain scenery. As with that poem, the work of Coleridge seems a presence in S.’s Ode; see notes. Here ‘Heaven’ is understood initially as the physical arena of the sky as visible portal to the Universe and canopy of Earth. The poem’s three voices articulate a series of increasingly sophisticated perspectives on this ‘Heaven’, moving from wonder at the scale and contents of the material universe, through a quasi-Platonic celebration of the subordination of matter to mind, and in the final two stanzas to a defiantly celebratory and open-minded scepticism. In philosophical terms, this progression is potentially significant, and Wasserman 152 invokes a suggestive context in quoting Mary on S.’s Berkeleian immaterialism: This theory gave unity and grandeur to his ideas, while it opened a wide field for his imagination. The creation — such as it was perceived by his mind — a unit in immensity, was slight and narrow compared with the interminable forms of thought that might exist beyond, to be perceived perhaps hereafter by his own mind; or which are perceptible to other minds that fill the universe, not of space in the material sense, but of infinity in the immaterial one. (Preface to 1840 (ELTF); Julian v ix) However, as noted in Chernaik 122, the tone of the Ode is light, ‘as might be appropriate to social discourse among minor spirits’, and Chernaik aptly remarks that the poem represents ‘the dispassionate, philosophizing poet at his most engaging’. Text from 1820. Capitalisation follows S.’s holograph fair copy in Nbk 9. As neither this holograph nor Mary’s transcription in Harvard Nbk 1 is punctuated carefully enough to serve as press-copy, and as 1820 seems in places excessively and in others inaccurately punctuated, the punctuation of 1820 has been modified in the present text, after comparison with S.’s holograph and Mary’s transcription. The indentation pattern is from 1820; Mary’s transcription in Harvard Nbk 1 differs slightly (neatly and clearly indenting the fourth and sixth lines in each stanza, with the final three lines further indented), and Reiman (1977 and 2002) adopt a complex indentation pattern which represents each rhyme-sound with a different indent. Published in 1820.

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Ode to Heaven

chorus of spirits first spirit

5

10

15

Palace-roof of cloudless nights, Paradise of golden lights, Deep, Immeasurable, Vast, Which art now, and which wert then; Of the present and the past, Of the eternal Where and When, Presence-chamber, Temple, Home, Ever-canopying Dome Of acts and ages yet to come! Glorious shapes have life in thee, Earth and all Earth’s company; Living globes which ever throng Thy deep chasms and wildernesses, And green worlds that glide along, And swift stars with flashing tresses, And icy moons most cold and bright, And mighty suns, beyond the Night, Atoms of intensest light!

¶ 19. 3. Immeasurable] See note to l. 51 below. 6. Where and When] I.e. Space and Time. 7. Presence-chamber] a room, e.g. of a palace, in which the monarch or other person of rank formally receives visitors. 9. In Nbk 10, immediately after the draft of stanza 1, S. canc. the phrase ‘The Republic of the’, apparently recalling PU IV 398–9: ‘The unquiet republic of the maze/Of planets’, and cp. SP i 58 and note. For affinities between Ode to Heaven and PU IV, which was written and transcribed between September and early December 1819, see headnote. 12. These globes are presumably conceived as different from the green worlds of l. 14. Living] ‘Luminous, brightly shining’; cp. With a Guitar. To Jane 22, ‘Like a living meteor’, Q Mab i 262–3; and see OED ‘living’ ppl. A 1d(b). 13. Cp. Coleridge, Kubla Khan 12–13: ‘But oh! That deep romantic chasm which slanted/Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!’ 14. Hypothetical earth-like planets throughout the universe, as in Q Mab i 253–67; cp. PU IV 457–62, describing the Earth as a planet: Thou art speeding round the sun, Brightest world of many a one, Green and azure sphere, which shinest With a light which is divinest Among all the lamps of heaven To whom light and life is given. 17. beyond the Night] I.e. so distant that they are not visible as stars to the human eye at night. 18. Atoms] Suggesting the atomism of Lucretius in De Re. Nat.; see note to l. 38 below.

19  ode to heaven

20

25

345

Even thy name is as a God, Heaven! for thou art the abode Of that Power which is the glass Wherein man his nature sees; — Generations as they pass Worship thee with bended knees — Their unremaining Gods and they Like a river roll away — Thou remainest such — alway!

second spirit

30

35

Thou art but the Mind’s first chamber, Round which its young fancies clamber Like weak insects in a cave Lighted up by stalactites; But the portal of the grave, Where a world of new delights Will make thy best glories seem But a dim and noonday gleam From the shadow of a dream.

third spirit Peace! the abyss is wreathed with scorn At your presumption, Atom-born! What is Heaven? and what are ye 19. S. originally began the stanza as a question: ‘That of which thou art th’abode/Can its name be [ ] God . . .’ (Nbk 10 f.42r rev.). 20–22. Butter (1970), following Hughes 1820, identifies the Power with the sun, and proposes a Platonic context in Republic vi 508 where the sun is analogous with the Good and mediates between the eye and the visible world. But S. may more straightforwardly have in mind conventional anthropomorphic conceptions of God in Heaven, understood as a projection of human qualities. Cp. L&C ll. 3244–8 and note. 30. Most cave-dwelling insects have greatly reduced wings or none at all, are nearly or completely blind, and lack pigmentation. 31. stalactites] Stalactites are pointed hanging structures created by the accumulation of mineral-rich water droplets in underground caverns, and they can combine with their upward-pointing counterparts, stalagmites, to create pale columns in caves; cp. PU IV 282, ‘caverns on crystalline columns poised’. 35–36. I.e. like a fragment of a dream recollected in waking consciousness. 36. Between this stanza and the next, S. drafted the first five lines of a stanza which he did not complete or otherwise use in the finished poem: ‘Below thy depth, above thy height/Within thine omni?[present] might/What feelest thou? we gaze & see/A power beyond all names of power/Stamped, as on a scroll, on thee — ’. The rejected lines recall the inconclusive interrogation of the mountain in Mont Blanc, especially ll. 127–44. 37. wreathed with scorn] ‘Contorted with contempt’, by personification: cp. L&C ll. 1923–4: ‘the King with gathered brow, and lips/Wreathed by long scorn’. 38. Atom-born!] Suggesting the Lucretian doctrine in De Re. Nat. that all material things are composed of atoms, and that only these atoms, rather than the forms they successively compose, permanently exist.

346 40

45

50

shelley: selected poems Who its brief expanse inherit? What are suns and spheres which flee With the instinct of that spirit Of which ye are but a part? Drops which Nature’s mighty heart Drives through thinnest veins. Depart! What is Heaven? a globe of dew Filling in the morning new Some eyed flower whose young leaves waken On an unimagined world. Constellated suns unshaken, Orbits measureless, are furled In that frail and fading sphere, With ten millions gathered there, To tremble, gleam, and disappear!

46–54. Cp. PU IV 431–3: ‘As the dissolving warmth of dawn may fold/A half-unfrozen dew-globe, green and gold/And crystalline . . .’, and 523, where The Earth exclaims ‘I am as a drop of dew that dies!’ S.’s image of a globe of dew in this stanza is glossed in Reiman (2002) as representing ‘the entire visible universe . . . seen as a micrcosm existing as a tiny part of a dewdrop in an infinitely bigger universe’. It is, however, possible that S. intends to contrast the telescopically visible universe of Earth, planets, and stars in outer space with the invisible universe existing on the microscopic scale, a contrast developed in PU IV (see headnote). A source for the image has been suggested in Marvell’s ‘On a drop of dew’, but that poem develops the dew-drop as an analogy for the soul in relation to God, which seems remote from S.’s purpose here. More suggestive is the argument in Hugh Roberts, Shelley and the Chaos of History (1997) 112, that this stanza is ‘a direct meditation . . . upon Coleridge’s use of the image in the Statesman’s Manual’. The passage in question is from the first ‘Lay Sermon’: ‘Are we struck with admiration in beholding the Cope of Heaven imaged in a Dew-drop? The least of the animalcula to which that drop would be an Ocean contains in itself an infinite problem of which God Omni-present is the only solution’ (Statesman’s Manual (1816), ed. R. J. White (1972) 50). Coleridge’s argument in the ‘Lay Sermon’ is that the Bible exemplifies in its intellectual method the ‘hidden mystery in every, the minutest, form of existence,’ and points to ‘the actual immanence of ALL in EACH’ (White, 49–50). For Coleridge the discovery of the extent and variety of microscopic life therefore constituted a mystery capable only of divine solution. S. read The Statesman’s Manual in January 1817 (Mary Jnl i 153). 48. Some eyed flower] S. perhaps has in mind the daisy, which has a differently coloured ‘eye’ in the centre of its flower; the flowers close up in the evening and open again in the morning sun. Chernaik 124 comments that this phrase ‘suggests the perceiving mind’. 50. I.e. suns set firmly in constellations. 51. measureless] Cp. Coleridge, Kubla Khan 4, ‘caverns measureless to man’. 53. millions] Harvard Nbk 1, 1820, 1839; million Nbk 9. In the draft in Nbk 10, S. wrote ‘With a million such’, by which he might have intended ‘a million suns and orbits’, unless he meant to complete the phrase as ‘a million such as ye’, renewing the direct address of the previous stanza. He then substituted ‘gathered’ for ‘such’, leaving the reference of ‘million’ unclear. Elsewhere in his poetry, the collective noun ‘million’ or ‘millions’ — he uses both forms — almost invariably signifies a vast number of people, and that would appear to be the sense here. The plural, apparently originating in Mary’s transcription, would seem to have been accepted by S., though he may simply have overlooked it. Hugh Roberts’s political reading of this stanza in Shelley and the Chaos of History 116 proposes a reference in the figure ten millions to the 1811 census, which gave the population of England and Wales as 10,488,000 (‘which Shelley correctly rounds down to the nearest million’). S. is likely to have been aware of the figure given his interest in Malthus and contemporary debates about population growth, and it is given in Godwin, Of Population (1820) 221.

20  to s[idmouth] and c[astlereagh]

347

20  To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh] There is a holograph fair copy of these four stanzas — legible but with little punctuation — entitled To S.& C., in Nbk 11 (pp. 60–1). They were probably then directly transcribed into Harvard Nbk 1 by either S. or Mary: her list of Contents shows the title To Sxxxxxth and Cxxxxxxxxgh as occupying the missing page 38, between MA and Exxxxxd (apparently England in 1819); both of these fair copies have also been removed from the nbk. The stanzas were first published in The Athenaeum for 25 August 1832 (554–5), in one of the series of articles that comprise Thomas Medwin’s ‘Memoir of Shelley’, under the title Similes and preceded by a note: Shelley had at command the same weapons which Byron used but he disdained the arm of satire, and treated his critics with a noble scorn; he says to one of them — The grass may grow in wintry weather As soon as hate in me. . . . that Shelley could wield a lash of bronze for others, he proved in Adonais, and not excepting even the strongest lines of our English Juvenal, Churchill, perhaps the stanzas on Keat’s [sic] Reviewer cut nearer to the bone than any in our language. Among the few satirical poems he wrote, was one on the Court of Chancery, on being robbed of his children; but, great as his wrongs were, even this he never published, though it should have found a place among his posthumous works. This satire was an abstraction, but of awful power. Another I will give on two politicians, of whom Lord Castlereagh, whom he used to call πυργοαναξ [Purganax; see OT Dramatis Personae (Longman iii 658)], was one. (For the lines quoted, see To — [Lines to a Critic] 3–4; the poem ‘on the Court of Chancery’ is To —— [the Lord Chancellor]). Both poem and note were republished the following year in Medwin (1833) 125–6. Mary included the stanzas in 1839 (iii 189–90) in a text that reads hue for yew in l. 7 but is otherwise identical to Medwin’s save for minor differences of punctuation. In 1840 (247), she expanded the title to Similes, For Two Political Characters of 1819. The differences between S.’s Nbk 11 holograph and both 1839 and Athenaeum 1832 in ll. 1, 2, 3, 7 (see notes below) might represent alterations made by S. in the missing Harvard Nbk 1 fair copy, though they hardly count as improvements. Morn (1839/Athenaeum 1832) for moon (Nbk 11) in l. 9 must be a mistranscription; however, the word is not perfectly formed in Nbk 11 and so is susceptible to misreading. 1839’s hue for yew (Nbk 11/Athenaeum 1832) would seem to be a mistranscription or compositorial error caused by aural similarity. It remains possible that it was the missing Harvard Nbk 1 fair copy that served as press-copy for both Medwin’s text and 1839; Mary may even have removed the leaf in question from Harvard Nbk 1 and sent it to the press. But it may also be that, as the leaf was missing, she based her text on Athenaeum 1832 just as she adopted its title. In one case, as in the other, it is not clear why she did not make use of the Nbk 11 holograph, unless she was unaware of it or had forgotten that it was there. A draft of stanza 4 and of another line of the poem, apparently related to ll. 5–6 of the Nbk 11 draft given below, has survived on the front pastedown of Nbk 13, and it is possible that To S and C was entirely drafted on one or more of the missing pages of that nbk. (See

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-20

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BSM vii pp. 26–7, 3–22.) Nbk 13 was largely used for drafts of PB3, which was composed in the latter half of October 1819. As the draft of the single line and that of stanza 4 of the present poem are written in ink above and below a pencil draft of what appears to be an unused sentence for the Dedication to PB3, To S. and C. would seem to date from late October–2 November. This range would be consistent with the position of the missing poem entitled To Sxxxxxth and Cxxxxxxxxgh, which falls between MA and Exxxxxd [in 1819] in the list of Contents of Harvard Nbk 1 (see MYRS v 156). MA was posted to Leigh Hunt on 23 September, and England in 1819 was probably the poem sent to Hunt on 15 December, so again a date of composition in late October–2 November 1819 would be a plausible, if not a certain inference. Immediately following the fair copy of stanzas 1–4 in Nbk 11, S. roughly drafted further lines, apparently intended for two additional stanzas, in which the predators and scavengers of ll. 1–20 are reminded that retribution follows misdeeds. Those lines of an untidy draft that are sufficiently coherent and complete may be reproduced as follows: Wolves & death-birds have been shot After eating what ye kill Sharks & dogfish have been caught Ye disgorge their maws they?[filled] Vipers have been bruised & broken By the?[heel] which they have stung [Scorpions] mashed [into a token] Of the danger, [which is spoken] It is possible, though very unlikely, that the missing Harvard Nbk 1 fair copy included a finished version of these lines: the four stanzas given below are poetically effective vituperation as they stand, and the threats implicit in the additional draft lines would further have reduced the possibility of publication. Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh (1769–1822) and Henry Addington, Viscount Sidmouth (1757–1844) served from 1812 to 1822 as Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary respectively in the Tory Liverpool administration (1812–27). Reformers and radicals considered them as both treacherous and reactionary, principal architects of repression at home and abroad. Each was hostile to parliamentary reform. In the turbulent period of post-war agitation for political and economic redress, Sidmouth oversaw a network of spies and informers who reported to the Home Office on the supposed threat of radical activity in the country. He had demanded the exceptional suspension of Habeas Corpus in 1817 and, with Castlereagh, argued in favour of the coercive legislation voted by Parliament in the aftermath of Peterloo. Castlereagh, who was also leader of the House of Commons from 1812 to 1822, had been dogged since 1798 by charges that he acted with a severity amounting to cruelty in suppressing the rising of United Irishmen in that year when he was chief secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He was blamed as well for his role in what liberals regarded as an unjust and punitive post-war settlement in Europe which showed undue favour towards the restored monarchies. See headnote to MA and notes to ll. 6, 22, 24; also PB3 note to l. 153 (Longman iii 103–4). Text from Nbk 11 pp. 60–1. Apart from the first comma in l. 3, the dashes in ll. 8 and 16 and the final full stop, all punctuation has been supplied, with reference to 1839 and 1840. Published in The Athenaeum 25 August 1832 pp. 554–5; BSM xviii pp. 84–5 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

20  to s[idmouth] and c[astlereagh]

349

To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]

5

As from their ancestral oak Two empty ravens wind their clarion, Yell by yell, and croak for croak, When they scent the noonday smoke Of fresh human carrion: —

10

As two gibbering night-birds flit From their bower of deadly yew Through the night to frighten it — When the moon is in a fit, And the stars are none or few: —

15

As a shark and dogfish wait Under an Atlantic isle For the Negro ship whose freight Is the theme of their debate, Wrinkling their red gills the while: —

20

Are ye — two vultures sick for battle, Two scorpions under one wet stone, Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle, Two crows perched on the murrained cattle, Two vipers tangled into one.

¶ 20. 1. their] an Athenaeum 1832, 1839; ancestral] of great antiquity, ironically appropriate to the estates of the recently ennobled peers of the realm addressed in the title. 2. wind] sound Athenaeum 1832, 1839; empty] hungry. 3. for] by Athenaeum 1832, 1839. 4. noonday smoke] The vapour rising from corpses rotting under the midday sun. 7. bower] bowers Athenaeum 1832, 1839; yew] hue 1839; in a fit] temporarily obscured: see note to WA 70. 9. moon] morn Athenaeum 1832, 1839. 11. dogfish] Any of various small sharks: cp. A Vision of the Sea (Longman iii 365–78, no. 321) 56; Hellas 522. 13. Negro ship] A ship carrying slaves from West Africa to the West Indies. The line appeals to the widespread revulsion that followed the notorious case of the slave ship, The Zong, whose captain ordered 133 sick Africans to be thrown overboard in September 1781 in order to claim compensation from his insurer, which would not have been paid in the event of their natural death. The appalling conditions endured by the captives on slave ships were frequently evoked in Parliament and reported in the press: e.g. the Examiner 496 (29 June 1817) 406; 498 (13 July 1817) 435. This allusion to the horrors of slavery, combined with the British government’s role in the indefinite postponement of the abolition of the international trade in slaves in 1815, makes the similes in this stanza grimly apt to the Foreign Secretary Castlereagh and the Home Secretary Sidmouth. See note to MA 8. 14. their] The word is partially obscured by a blot on the page in Nbk 11. 18. bloodless] cruel, unfeeling: cp. Q Mab iii 37 and Byron, A Sketch (1816) 60. 19. murrained] infected with murrain, a term designating a number of contagious diseases in cattle. S. puns on murrain/[John] Murray (the publisher of Byron’s Don Juan I and II (1819)) in L ii 198, though an allusion to Murray is not intended here.

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21  England in 1819 This sonnet, roughly drafted in pencil and revised in ink on p. 178 of Nbk 11, is copied fair on p. 182. It appears that it was then transcribed into Harvard Nbk 1; this is probable though not certain: the first forty pages of the nbk have been removed, and a poem entitled E xxxxx d is listed by Mary in the Contents as occupying page 38. Accepting the inference that this missing poem was indeed England in 1819, the allusion to Peterloo (see headnote to MA) in l. 7 means that it must have been written in the period from 9 September, when S. set about composing a number of political poems prompted by the events in Manchester on 16 August (L ii 119), to 23 December when he wrote to Leigh Hunt: ‘I send you a Sonnet. I do not expect you to publish it, but you may show it to whom you please’ (L ii 167). The Sonnet has generally been identified as England in 1819, and on good grounds: both the contents of the second paragraph of S.’s letter, beginning ‘What a state England is in!’, and his conviction that the poem is too dangerous for Hunt to publish would be appropriate to the uncompromising indictment of the monarch, the princes, the Church and the unreformed Parliament that it contains at a moment when Parliament was passing the infamous Six Acts to control the press and public gatherings. The apparent influence on line 11 of the attack on S.’s character in the Quarterly Review for April 1819, which he read in mid-October (L ii 126–7), would further narrow the period of composition to c. 15 October–23 December; see the note to that line. The position of both draft and fair copy in Nbk 11 is consistent with this range of dates (BSM xviii pp. xvii–xxi). England in 1819 is governed by the synecdoche established in the title and first line and which makes the physical and mental health of the moribund king stand for the state of the nation. In late 1819, George III was blind, deaf and sunk into a state of advanced senility; he had been diagnosed as irremediably insane in late 1810 and would die on 29 January 1820. His son, the future George IV, had exercised the functions of Regent from 6 February 1811. The poem develops as an ironic variant on the consolatory religious narrative of death followed by the resurrection of the individual to eternal life; here instead, it is the country, prompted by an undefined ghostly apparition, that ‘may’ awaken to a miraculous clarity of vision which, it is implied, will disclose the way to a radically altered future. Formally the sonnet adopts neither the Petrarchan nor the Shakespearian stanzaic pattern, the relentless catalogue of national ills driving its syntax forward in search of a verb which is only supplied in line 13. The peculiar rhyme scheme, abababcdcdccdd, seems to be without established precedent. S.’s poem continues an English tradition of political sonneteering, of which Milton’s sonnets on public themes are the founding texts. Wordsworth’s recent development of the Miltonic model in the Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty in Poems, In Two Volumes (1807) — especially London, 1802 in which Milton is invoked — as well as his additions to the series in Poems (1815) makes an especially apt comparison. Text from Nbk 11 p. 182. Published in 1839; BSM xviii 218–19.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-21

21  england in 1819

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England in 1819

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An old, mad, blind, despised and dying King; Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn, — mud from a muddy spring; Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know, But leechlike to their fainting country cling Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow; A people starved and stabbed on th’untilled field;

¶ 21. Title. Supplied first in Mary Copybk 2 p. 153 as ‘England in 1820’; alt. to its present form in 1839. The sonnet is without title in Nbk 11 though above the fair copy is what may be an abortive attempt at one: ‘A Mad — ’. 1. despised] Following established satirical practice, S. insinuates a contentious judgement, in this case, a frankly partisan one, into a list of indisputable facts. George III was not widely detested in 1819. His recurrent bouts of mental illness since 1788–9, his position as a rallying point for patriotic sentiment during the long war against France, the contrast with his undoubtedly unpopular sons, the Prince Regent first among them, and his present feeble state of health — had earned him widespread sympathy and respect. J. D. Margolis, ELN iv (1967) 276–77 points out an echo of the king’s description of himself in King Lear III ii 20: ‘A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man’, noting parallels between the health of the two monarchs and the disorder and bloodshed in the nation in both play and poem — similarities which prevented King Lear from being staged during the period of the Regency (Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (1986) 204–5). 2–3. The draft in Nbk 11 provides details of the princes’ contemptible behaviour: ‘who mock their Sires’, ‘Flattery & lies’, ‘?[drunken] mirth’, ‘barbarous pomp, & obscene?[revelling]’. The seven sons of George III who reached adulthood — the Prince of Wales and the Dukes of York, Clarence, Kent, Cumberland, Sussex and Cambridge — made heavy and widely resented claims on the public purse. Collectively they manifested sufficient extravagance, recklessness and profligacy to merit the low estimation in which opinion held them: see L i 105, 110, 282, 297, 346; ii 147–8. their dull race] their undistinguished lineage. 5–6. The images in these lines derive from the practice of bloodletting. Hirudo medicinalis, the leech chiefly used to draw blood, has no eyes and, like other species of leech, drops from its host when full. Typically employed to treat local disorders, the leech was applied to take blood slowly and in small quantities from the capillaries, a process unlikely to cause the patient to faint. Phlebotomy or venesection involved opening a vein to remove larger quantities of blood more quickly, and was very generally carried out, on different medical theories, to treat a variety of illnesses. Patients were frequently bled to the point of fainting, or until they fainted, in order to induce a constitutional state favourable to healing. Bartholomew Parr, The London Medical Dictionary, 2 vols (London, 1809), provides an overview of contemporary principles and practice regarding phlebotomy and the therapeutic use of leeches (i 752–4; ii 385–91). S.’s lines prefer metaphorical power to strict medical accuracy. They combine the fainting brought about by phlebotomy (though here imagined as debilitating rather than beneficial) with the parasitic nature, blindness and prolonged suction of the leech — characteristics of rulers without sight, feeling or knowledge (l.4) and who will eventually fall without a struggle. 5. cling] grow canc. Mary Copybk 2. 6. blow;] blow. Nbk 11, Mary Copybk 2, 1839. 7. on] in Mary Copybk 2, 1839, eds. field;] field, Nbk 11, Mary Copybk 2; field, — 1839. The line alludes to both the widespread hardship experienced since Waterloo by labourers in agriculture and manufacturing and specifically to the injury and loss of life on St. Peter’s Field in Manchester on 16 August 1819: see headnote to MA.

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shelley: selected poems An army which liberticide and prey Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield; Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay; Religion Christless, Godless, a book sealed; A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed, Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

8. which] It appears that S. transcribed ‘whom’ from the draft to the fair copy in Nbk 11, then wrote which over it. The result is not unambiguous and requires some deciphering; 1839 follows the alt. reading. 9. Makes] The singular verb is governed by liberticide and prey in the previous line. Rossetti 1870/1878 regularises to ‘Make’, considering the singular both ‘ungrammatical and misleading’. But the sense, though involved, seems clear enough: when used to destroy liberty, an army is an instrument equally dangerous to those who deploy it and to their victims. See Cenci IV iv 110 and note (Longman ii 828). An ironic biblical allusion may also be intended to ‘Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, and a two-edged sword in their hand;/To execute vengeance upon the heathen, and punishments upon the people’ (Psalms cxlix 6–7), or to the vision of the ‘Son of man’ in Revelation i 16: ‘And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword: and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength’. 10. In S.’s poetry, Gold and Blood are consistently identified as the foundation of oppressive tyranny whose characteristic actions are corruption and murder; e.g. Q Mab iv 190–5; MA 291–4. 11. a book sealed;] Mary Copybk 2, 1839; a book sealed, Nbk 11. Alluding to Isaiah xxix 11: ‘And the vision of all is become unto you as the words of a book that is sealed, which men deliver to one that is learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I cannot; for it is sealed.’ In the ad hominem attack on L&C/RofI in the Quarterly Review xxi (April 1819), S. had been charged with dissolute behaviour and exhorted to rectify his understanding with reference to the text cited above: ‘he is really too young, too ignorant, too inexperienced, and too vicious to undertake the task of reforming any world, but the little world within his own breast . . . There is a book which will help him . . . which has more poetry in it than Lucretius, more interest than Godwin, and far more philosophy than both. But it is a sealed book to a proud spirit’ (470). S.’s line is, in effect, a riposte which turns the charge against the current state of institutional religion, for which the Bible is closed and which in turn closes it to its followers. Also apt are Revelation v–viii and xxii 10. 12. S. transcribed his first attempt at the line, ‘A cloak of lies worn on Power’s holiday’, from draft to fair copy in Nbk 11, before writing ‘A senate full of lies’, then substituting the present line in which worst is canc. An unrepresentative Parliament, inherited from ages past, has long been in need of reform. In PVR, S. described the Long Parliament (1640–48) as mounting a real challenge to royal authority because it was more representative, so bringing about ‘the complete revolution in a tyranny consecrated by time’ (SC vi 998; Julian vii 22). statute, unrepealed] statute unrepealed Mary Copybk 2, 1839. 13. Phantom] In the draft in Nbk 11, S. tried ‘Phoenix’ and ‘gorgon’ before settling in the fair copy on a phrase from the peroration of his pamphlet An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte (1817): ‘Let us follow the corpse of British Liberty slowly and reverentially to its tomb: and if some glorious Phantom should appear, and make its throne of broken swords and sceptres and royal crowns trampled in the dust, let us say that the Spirit of Liberty has arisen from its grave and left all that was gross and mortal there, and kneel down and worship it as our Queen’. (Prose Works i 239) The figure of a sudden apparition, human or spirit, which delivers the oppressed occurs in various forms in S.’s verse; e.g. L&C VI xix–xx; MA 102–25; Hellas 405–52.

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22  Ode to the West Wind Published as one of the Miscellaneous Poems in 1820. The first three stanzas are drafted in pencil on ff. 4r rev.–6r rev. of Nbk 12. S. probably made this draft outdoors in the ‘wood that skirts the Arno’, which he identifies as the place where the ‘poem was conceived and chiefly written’ in his prose note to the title; that is, in the wooded park of the Cascine outside the city walls of Florence. He writes to the Gisbornes on 6 November of his liking for this place where ‘I often walk alone watching the leaves & the rising and falling of the Arno’ (L ii 150). The first three stanzas he transcribed with slight revisions into Nbk 11 63–5 beneath the date ‘Octr 25’. The greater part of stanza four is drafted on p. 155 of the same nbk, while all of that stanza and the final five lines of stanza five are found in a mixture of fair copy and draft in Nbk 14 137–8. What appears to be a rejected line is cancelled on p. 136. Two missing leaves between the present pp. 136 and 137 may well have carried draft, and perhaps fair copy, for the remaining lines of stanza five. S.’s prose note to the title is drafted on f. 108v of the nbk that contains his uncompleted holograph of PVR (SC vi 1066–69). The presence of MS text in these various locations suggests that composition was carried on at different moments and in different circumstances, though not necessarily over a long period of time. A probable span for the seventy lines of verse would be from about 15 October to about the end of the month. The prose note may have been composed then as well, but its MS context requires a more cautious estimate — between 25 October and the end of the year (SC vi 1069). Because the Ode seems to have been prompted in part by the review of L&C/RofI in the Quarterly Review for April 1819, which S. read on or shortly before 15 October (L ii 126–7), it is unlikely to have been begun before then; but the period of composition may plausibly, if not certainly, be narrowed to a few days on either side of 25 October, the date above S.’s transcription of stanzas 1–3, which may designate the day of the transcription itself or of the draft or of both. MS evidence in two different nbks appears to support the hypothesis of a brief period of composition. The pencilled fragment ’Twas the 20th of October (Longman iii 192–3, no. 256), which is likely to have been written on that date, occurs on f. 7r rev. of Nbk 11, three pages after the end of the draft of stanzas 1–3 of the Ode. A phrase apparently intended for a letter to Horace Smith on p. 139 rev. of Nbk 14, facing the fair draft of stanza four, was probably set down on 28 October. On that day, S.’s letter to the Gisbornes, concerning a sum of money promised to Henry Reveley, assures them that he had not only written to his banker but to ‘private friends’ in an effort to raise it (L ii 131); Mary Jnl i 300 confirms that Horace Smith was among the friends appealed to. On the same page, S. has calculated the 70 lines of the Ode by multiplying the 14 lines in each stanza by 5 (BSM v 288–91, 417). Unlike most of the miscellaneous poems published with PU in 1820, the Ode was not transcribed into Harvard Nbk 1. The transcription that served as press-copy was probably sent to Charles Ollier no later than a few days after 14 May 1820 together with several of the other ‘little poems’ that were published in the PU volume (L ii 197). The text in 1820 does not differ substantively from the fair copy of stanzas 1–3 in Nbk 11, but there are several differences of significance between the fair draft of stanza 4 and the draft of stanza 5, both in Nbk 14, and 1820. It seems therefore that S. must have transcribed the press-copy of these stanzas himself or that Mary transcribed them with his help or from an intermediate fair copy he had made.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-22

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shelley: selected poems

Less than a fortnight after the arrival of the Shelley household in Florence on 2 October 1819, S. had to confront a dispiriting crisis in his life as a writer. He received in the post from Charles Ollier the anonymous review of L&C/RofI in the April 1819 number of the Quarterly Review, which made a sustained and malicious assault on his poetry, ideas and personal character. S. believed the reviewer — actually his Eton contemporary John Taylor Coleridge — to be the laureate Robert Southey: see headnote to A Satire upon Satire (Longman iii 269–76, no. 290). In the Preface to L&C/RofI, S. had given hostages to fortune by declaring that whether he possessed the requisite gift of a poet was what ‘I expect to be taught by the effect which I shall produce upon those whom I now address’ (156–7), and conceding ‘Should the Public judge that my composition is worthless, I shall indeed bow before the tribunal from which Milton received his crown of immortality’ (210–12). The scant sales of his poetry to date together with the Quarterly’s contemptuous dismissal of his literary pretensions seemed to pronounce a comprehensive doom on his ambition to be, like Wordsworth and Byron, a poet for the times — and this at a moment when he was anxiously anticipating the fate of his completed The Cenci and nearly completed PU, both of which would be published the following year. The distresses of his personal life were another source of disquiet and apprehension. The three children born to Mary and to him had died, Clara (September 1818) and William (June 1819) after the family’s removal to Italy in search of a climate more propitious for his health. Since William’s death especially, Mary had experienced a heavy depression of spirits which had been exacerbated by the continuing vexations of the murky affair of S.’s ‘Neapolitan charge’, the child Elena Adelaide Shelley to whom he had given his name in February 1819: see headnote to I had two babes, a sister and a brother (Longman iii 501–4, no. 334). That Mary was within three weeks of giving birth to their fourth child, who would be named Percy Florence, made of the Florentine autumn, a season balanced between death and life, a tension that finds its equivalent in the antithetical dynamic of the Ode. The death-life opposition also marked S.’s perception of the political conjuncture at home. Less than a month earlier, following the news of Peterloo, he had sent to England the MS  of MA which prophesied that the bloodshed in Manchester ‘Shall steam up like inspiration’ (365) for the new social and political order that he anxiously hoped would soon be realised. This, he both feared and half-wished, must be brought to birth through violent conflict. His letters of the autumn evoke ominous spectres: ‘this crisis of approaching Revolution’ (28 October), and an imminent ‘bloody struggle’ (6 November) between authorities and people (L ii 132, 149). A natural analogy for these intertwined crises was furnished by the dramatic rising in the second half of October of a powerful west wind, signal that autumn was passing into winter. The meteorologist F. H. Ludlam’s close examination of the Ode (in Weather xxvii (1972) 503–14) concludes that its images derive from a singularly accurate observation of the travelling cyclonic thunderstorm that typically accompanies the abrupt onset of the Mediterranean winter. This is not to say that S. observed all the atmospheric details in the poem, most of them incorporated into stanza two, on the single day he recalls in his prose note; he is not necessarily charting the progress of a particular storm. In Italy, he watched the atmosphere often and with care (see note to ll. 15–18 below) and may well have brought together in the Ode phenomena that he noticed on a number of occasions. Even so, it was

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not his primary purpose to record weather effects as such but to build them into a poetic structure to accommodate the urgent concerns detailed above. The intricate symmetries of the poem, from its adaptation of Dantean terza rima to the correspondences between the three natural domains that make up its cosmic panorama, recall the apprehension of nature habitual in earlier writers of religious outlook. Their practice of discovering in nature’s patterns and parallels intimations of a spiritual, ultimately divine, presence S. refashions to the particulars of his present situation and forward prospects. The combination of precise observation and a symbolism with powerful traditional resonances creates the poem’s peculiar character. An attempt to identify some of the major sources upon which it draws is made in the notes below. The rhetorical ordering of the poem S. adapted from his own Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, written in summer 1816. The earlier poem’s address to the abstraction of the title, which is perceived not directly but through its various manifestations in nature, is made at a critical juncture in the poet’s life and leads to a prayer for a future that will realise a defining moment of insight in youth. This narrative disposition of present, past and future is shaped in the Ode to the imperatives of autumn 1819. The Hymn’s desire for an ‘onward life’ of autumnal serenity is altered by Ode to accommodate both a sense of failure and a perception that ‘the price of creativity in an adult world is destruction’ (Curran (1975) 170). The appeal to the West Wind to bring about personal dissolution as the condition of creative change S. also recovered from his own earlier work, in fact from the major poem which was the product. L&C opens with ‘the rushing of a wind’, agent of a cosmic disruption that is the stimulus and condition of prophecy. In the lines that S. wrote, then rejected, as a meditative prelude to L&C, Fair clouds arrayed in sunlight lose the glory (Longman ii 3–9, no. 142) he had invoked a Power whose passive instrument Our nature is — a Spirit that with motion Invisible and swift its breath hath sent Amongst us, like the wind on the wide Ocean. (19–22) A sacrificial agency is added to the dual force of this destructive and directing spirit/wind in the great paean to seasonal change as the ground of fertility and mechanism of renewal that Cythna delivers in Canto ix (3631–3747) of L&C. The redemptive rationale she offers to Laon for the defeat of their revolution animated by love imagines ‘the blasts of autumn’ driving ‘the wingèd seeds/Over the earth’ to be born into the ‘Spring, of hope, and love, and youth, and gladness’, which is the issue that by clear implication the Ode appeals for in its final stanza. Formally the Ode is a brief sonnet sequence, each stanza of 14 lines being composed on five rhymes including the final couplet: aba bcb cdc ded ee. The form is unusual, but (among traditional sonnet structures) prosodic parallels are evident with the Spenserian variation on the English (or Shakespearian) sonnet whose iambic pentameter lines rhyme: abab bcbc cdcd ee. Each employs five rhymes and a final couplet while continuing rhymes link the tercets of the Ode and the quatrains of the Spenserian sonnet.

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Text from 1820. The capitalisation of the MSS in Nbks 11 and 14 has been adapted. As these MSS were not punctuated for the press, 1820’s punctuation has been followed, though it has been somewhat lightened with reference to the MSS and to 1839. Published in 1820.

Ode to the West Wind*1 I O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

* This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions. The phenomenon alluded to at the conclusion of the third stanza is well known to naturalists. The vegetation at the bottom of the sea, of rivers, and of lakes, sympathises with that of the land in the change of seasons, and is consequently influenced by the winds which announce it. (S.’s Note) S.’s note. temperature] nature, character — as determined by the combined qualities of the wind. Cisalpine] south of the Alps.

¶ 22. 1. The winds were regarded as gods by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Hesiod, Theogony 378–79 describes the birth of the ‘strong-spirited winds’ Zephyrus (west), Boreas (north) and Notus (south), the offspring of Eos (the dawn) and the Titan Astraeus. In Italy, the West Wind had a double aspect as the mild Zephyrus or Favonius of the spring and the strong and moisture-laden wind from the west that succeeded in autumn to the hot and dry south wind of summer and announced the onset of winter. Some weeks earlier, and in a different spirit, S. had invoked Zephyrus in Come thou Awakener of the spirit’s Ocean (Longman iii 10–11, no. 218): see l. 2 and note. breath] besides the ‘breath of life’ that God breathed into Adam’s nostrils (Genesis ii 7), the word carries the traditional associations of the wind with creation and inspiration. Cp. the speculation in Pliny, Hist. Nat. II xlv 116: ‘whether wind is the famous “breath” that generates the universe by fluctuating to and fro as in a sort of womb . . .’; also the Spirit of God that ‘moved upon the face of the waters’ in Genesis i 2 and the ‘rushing mighty wind’ that precedes the descent of the Holy Spirit as tongues of fire in Acts ii 2. See Q Mab i 45 and L&C 145 and nn. 2–3. The comparison of the dead to dry leaves is a classical commonplace; e.g. Iliad vi 146–49; Aeneid vi 305–12. Cp. also Dante, Inferno iii 112–17; Paradise Lost i 300–303; Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage iv 846; Q Mab v 4–6 and nn; L&C 162 and n. In a letter to Peacock of 23–24 January 1819 describing the tombs at Pompeii, which the Shelleys visited on 23 December 1818, S. wrote: ‘The wild woods surround them on either side . . . you hear the late leaves of autumn shiver & rustle in the stream of the inconstant wind as it were like the step of ghosts’ (L ii 74). The leaves–ghosts analogy figures in PU II i 156–9; Ode to Naples (Longman iii 625–49, no. 343) 2–3; Twas the 20th of October (Longman iii 192–3, no. 256) 5–7; SP iii 34–37.

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Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

10

Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill

2. unseen presence] The agency of the wind is discernible only in movement in the natural world on which it acts. Cp. Hymn to Intellectual Beauty 1–2: ‘The awful shadow of some unseen Power/Floats though unseen among us.’ 3. enchanter] From the Latin incantare (to utter a spell or charm) and anticipating l. 65, ‘And, by the incantation of this verse’. James Rieger, The Mutiny Within (1967), cites the double sense in Lycidas 58–9: ‘What could the muse herself that Orpheus bore,/The muse herself for her enchanting son’. S. may also have recalled Leigh Hunt’s dramatic poem The Descent of Liberty (1815), which portrays Napoleon Bonaparte as the Enchanter whose tyrannical spell is broken by the descent of the goddess Liberty: Hunt Works v 83–122. In L&C 3671–75, S. imagines the present oppressed state of the world as ‘sanguine waves [that]/stagnate like ice at Faith, the enchanter’s word’. 4. GM (1964) considered that the four colours ‘glanced at’ the races of humanity, a reference given weight by the original draft reading of ‘nations’, i.e. peoples, for multitudes in l. 5. Eben Bass, ‘The Fourth Element in the Ode to the West Wind’, Papers on Language and Literature iii (1967) 328, points out the colours’ traditional associations with the four elements. hectic red] characteristic of a fever, particularly of tuberculosis; dry and flushed in appearance. In a letter to Peacock of 6 November 1818 describing the scenery at Ferrara, S. wrote: ‘The country . . . is intersected by lines of wood trelissed with vines whose broad leaves are now stamped with the redness of their decay’ (L ii 45). 5–8. Cp. L&C 3669–89, and see headnote. 5. multitudes] nations canc. Nbk 12. 7. wingèd seeds] The seeds are wingèd figuratively because they are carried rapidly through the air by the wind and literally by being enclosed in a winged seed-case. The field maple (acer campestre) and the sycamore (acer pseudoplatanus), both deciduous trees producing winged seeds, are common in Tuscany. Cp. SP iii 38–41. 8. grave] Cp. England in 1819, in which the institutions and rulers of the country are likened to graves from which a redeeming spirit may emerge. 9. azure sister] S. feminises the gentle west wind of spring (Zephyrus), the bringer of clear skies, traditionally personified as a young man. 10. clarion] King-Hele (1971) 215 suggests that the natural counterpart of clarion might be birdsong. S. is combining an allusion to the general resurrection promised in 1 Corinthians xv 51–52, ‘for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall all be changed’, with the rebirth of plant-life in spring as in SP i 7–8: ‘And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breast/Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.’

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shelley: selected poems (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill: Wild Spirit, which art moving every where; Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!

II 15

Thou on whose stream, ’mid the steep sky’s commotion, Loose clouds like Earth’s decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

11. King-Hele (1971) 215 identifies the botanical basis of the image: ‘Spring is seen driving the sap up the trees, forcing out millions of buds to feed on the carbon dioxide of air.’ The complex analogy in the line imagines buds bursting in spring as flocks being driven by their shepherds to pasture on the new grass, with an implied comparison to flocks of birds. 13. art] are 1839. Recalling Genesis i 2: ‘And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’ 14. In Edward Moor’s The Hindu Pantheon (see L i 342), S. could have read of the gods Siva (Destroyer) and Vishnu (Preserver). Siva ‘personifies destruction, or rather reproduction; for the most popular system of Hindu philosophy excludes, while time shall exist, the idea of absolute annihilation: to destroy is, therefore, but to change, or recreate, or reproduce’ (35). Cp. ll. 8–10 and nn.; cp. also SP Conclusion 19–20 and n. Vishnu is ‘a personification of the preserving power’ (15). The Preface to Southey’s The Curse of Kehama (1810) identifies ‘Seeva’ and ‘Veeshnoo’ as ‘the Destroyer’ and ‘the Preserver’: see L i 101 where S. describes Kehama as ‘my most favorite poem’. hear, O hear!] As commentators have noted, the refrain of S.’s poem, repeated in lines 28 and 42, echoes the formula of supplication in Psalms; e.g. lxi 1: ‘Hear my cry, O God; attend unto my prayer.’ The repetition also recalls the Litany in The Book of Common Prayer. 15–18. The wind drives loose clouds along its stream just as a stream of water carries the leaves that trees shed on it. S., who in Italy took ‘great delight in watching the changes of the atmosphere . . . & the growth of the thunder showers with which the noon is often overshadowed’ (L ii 20), here describes rain-laden fractostratus, fractocumulus or ‘scud’ clouds, which, detached from larger formations, are propelled from the west by the wind. Clouds are formed in those turbulent regions of the atmosphere where the air mixes with moisture from the ocean, hence the tangled boughs of l. 16: see King-Hele (1971) 216. GM (1964) considered that the image was inspired by the waterspouts that S. saw along the northwest coast of Italy and which he described as the trunks of trees, e.g. in A Vision of the Sea (Longman iii 365–78, no. 321) 5: ‘the black trunks of the waterspouts’ and note to l. 21. Mary’s Note on the Cenci (1839 ii 275–6) recalls the view from the Villa Valsovano near Livorno in summer 1819: ‘The storms that sometimes varied our day showed themselves most picturesquely as they were driven across the ocean; sometimes the dark lurid clouds dipped towards the waves and became water-spouts, that churned up the waters beneath, as they were chased onward and scattered by the tempest.’ Ludlam 508 regards the phenomenon lying behind the figure of tangled boughs rather as scud clouds ‘running beside thunderstorms, which can be seen discharging water into the sea but which themselves are composed of water evaporated from the sea . . . opposing streams of liquid and vapour’. 15. steep] ‘It is the mountainous thunderheads and lesser towering cumulus elsewhere in the sky whose tall flanks prompt the description of the sky as ‘steep’ (Ludlam 508). Cp. ll. 21–2. commotion] Disturbance, agitation due to the combined action of rain, wind, and cloud.

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Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread On the blue surface of thine airy surge, Like the bright hair uplifted from the head Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge Of the horizon to the Zenith’s height, The locks of the approaching storm. Thou Dirge

25

Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O hear!

18. Angels] Messengers, harbingers. See note to ll. 15–18 above. 20–21 S. had seen figures of Maenads (from Gk μαίνεσθαι (to be enraged)) sculpted in relief on an altar supporting a statue of Minerva at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, which the Shelleys visited on 11 October 1819 (Mary Jnl i 298), and S. visited again on 13 and 20 October (Mary Jnl i 299). S. describes the reliefs in Notes on Sculptures: ‘The tremendous spirit of superstition . . . seems to have caught them in its whirlwinds, and to bear them over the earth as the rapid volutions of a tempest bear the ever-changing trunk of a waterspout, as the torrent of a mountain river whirls the leaves in its full eddies. Their hair loose and floating seems caught in the tempest of their own tumultuous motion’ (Julian vi 323). These lines anticipate the association of the wind’s agency with the power of prophecy in ll. 68–69. Cp. the effects of the prophetic vapour on Asia in PU II iii 47–48: ‘The fragments of the cloud are scattered up —/The wind that lifts them disentwines my hair — ’. Ludlam 511 considers that the plume cloud running before a storm and rising above cumulus clouds, especially if lit up by the setting sun, would be appropriately imagined as bright hair uplifted from the head/Of some fierce Maenad. James Rieger, The Mutiny Within (1967) 179, suggests that the Maenads are recalled again in the major symbols of ll. 54–70 — blood, leaves, lyre — from the episode of the death of Orpheus in Ovid, Met. xi 1 ff. 22. Zenith] The highest point of the sky overhead. 23. locks] The Latin word ‘cirrus’, meaning ‘a lock or curl of hair’, was first applied to high wispy clouds by Luke Howard in his Essay on the Modifications of Clouds (1803). Typically, high cirrus clouds moving from the west herald the approach of a cyclonic thunderstorm (Ludlam 505). The hook-shaped cirrus uncinus or ‘mare’s tail’ cloud may specifically be intended here, and/or the rapidly moving ‘denser plume of fibrous cloud which reaches far ahead of the towering cloud columns at the heart of a thunderstorm . . . when it reaches into the zenith it is a warning of the arrival of the storm an hour or two later’ (Ludlam 508–11). the approaching storm] S. used the same figure for what he perceived as a gathering political crisis in autumn 1819 in England. In a letter to Peacock of 9 September, thanking him for newspapers containing accounts of the Peterloo Massacre (see headnote to MA), he wrote: ‘These are, as it were, the distant thunders of the terrible storm which is approaching’ (L ii 119). 24. closing] gathering, closing in. 25. dome] doom 1840, a misprint as Forman 1876–7 recognised. Cp. S.’s letter of 20 April  1818 to Peacock, describing the cathedral at Milan: ‘its stained glass & massy granite columns overloaded with antique figures & the silver lamps that burn forever under the canopy of black cloth beside the brazen altar & the marble fretwork of the dome, give it the aspect of some gorgeous sepulchre’ (L ii 8). 26–27. vapours] The water vapours that gather to form clouds. Cp. What think you the dead are? (Longman iii 7–9, no. 217) 4. solid] Dark and dense: cp. the volcanic ‘solid cloud’ in PU IV 339–42 and n. 28. Black rain] rain that takes the colour of the sky darkened by the storm and/or the colour of the falling night anticipated in ll. 24–7.

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30

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

III

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave’s intenser day, 35

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers

31. coil . . . streams] Concordance glosses as ‘confused tumult of waters’, which is hardly possible in the context. The suggestion of S. C. Wilcox (N&Q cxcv (1950) 77) ‘lazily meandering sea-currents’, which make the sea smooth, is closer to the sense intended. Cp. The Boat on the Serchio (Longman iv 350–68, no. 406) 101: ‘In morning’s smile its [the river’s] eddies coil’, and A Vision of the Sea 123–5: And the fierce winds are sinking with weary wings, Lulled by the motion and murmurings And the long glassy heave of the rocking sea. crystalline] clear; transparent. The word is accented on the second syllable. 32–36. The Shelleys sailed round the coast of Baiae on 8 December 1818 (Mary Jnl i 242). Both Mary’s jnl and S.’s letter to Peacock of 17 or 18 December 1818 record their disappointment with the landscape on disembarking. The effect of the scenery from the boat, however, S. described as ‘inexpressibly delightful’. At Baiae, the Shelleys ‘observ[ed] the ruins of its antique grandeur standing like rocks in the transparent sea under our boat’ (L ii 61). Medwin remembered hearing S. ‘dilate with rapture on the beauty of that divine Bay, as he hung over the side of the boat, and gazed on the subaqueous ruins of the wrecked palaces overspread with marine flowering plants and weeds, that grow luxuriantly about them’ (Medwin (1913) 204). On an inlet of the Bay of Naples, Baiae’s climate, spectacular location and sulphur-springs made it a fashionable resort for the great of ancient Rome. The ruins of some of its buildings could be seen under the ocean. Joseph Forsyth moralised the scene: ‘Yet what are those villas now? Alas! nothing but masses of built tufo which you can hardly distinguish from the tufo of the hill, naked walls, skeletons which were concealed from the ancients themselves, and covered with marbles too beautiful to remain’ (Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy (1816) 281). 32. pumice] A porous volcanic rock. 34. the wave’s intenser day] more transparently blue than the sky. Cp. S.’s letter to Peacock of 25 July 1818 describing a favourite bathing place at Bagni di Lucca: ‘The water of this pool . . . is as transparent as the air, so that the stones and sand at the bottom seem, as it were, trembling in the light of noonday’ (L ii 25–26). 35. Cp. the description of Venice in Lines Written among the Euganean Hills 129–32: Save where many a palace gate With green sea-flowers overgrown Like a rock of ocean’s own, Topples o’er the abandoned sea . . . 36. Cp. To a Sky-Lark 54–55. 37–38. Rogers (1967) 223 detects an allusion in these lines to John Taylor Coleridge’s review of L&C/RofI in the Quarterly Review xxi (April 1819) 471. Attacking S.’s militant atheism and predicting his continuing

22  ode to the west wind

40

361

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the Ocean, know Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!

IV 45

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O Uncontrollable! If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be

50

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed Scarce seemed a vision, I would ne’er have striven

obscurity as a poet, the review evokes Exodus xiv 21 in which a passage appears through the Red Sea, allowing the Israelites to escape the pursuing Egyptians, who are drowned by the returning waters. 39–42. S. elsewhere employs unfolding sea-flowers as an image of mental development; see SP ii 8; OL (Longman iii 378–419, no. 322) 54. 39. oozy woods] OED (adj.2 2b) defines the phrase as ‘[slimy] forests of sea weeds’. Cp. PU II ii 73: ‘The oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools’. From a boat on the Bay of Naples in December 1818, S. observed through the translucent sea ‘hollow caverns clothed with the glaucous sea-moss,  & the leaves  & branches of those delicate weeds that pave the unequal bottom of the water’ (L ii 61). 41. grow grey with fear] The wind abruptly brings about the effects of autumn on the undersea plants. The cloudy skies that accompany the wind alter the colour of these plants — a phenomenon which S. imagines as hair suddenly turning grey with terror. 42. despoil themselves] undress or disrobe themselves at the command of the wind as the plants of earth do in autumn, with some suggestion of plunder by violence (OED 3c). 45. pant] rise and fall as if taking rapid breaths. 47–51. Rejected drafts on S.’s youth in the Dedication to L&C (see note to stanza 3, Longman ii 50) include the lines: . . . and dreams divine my heart had nursed Till it grew strong on night-dividing wings . . . I feared not those who ruled, nor did I hate Mine equals, but was lone, untameable Like some wild beast that cannot find its mate A solitary gazelle [ ] Which in the desert wilderness doth dwell Secure in its own swiftness 50. thy] the 1840, 1847; thy Nbk 14. 51. vision,] 1839, 1840, 1847; vision; 1820.

362

shelley: selected poems As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

55

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

V Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies 60

65

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse,

52. Against the bond of life, I should not need canc. Nbk 14. 54. Christ’s crown of thorns and the seed that ‘fell among thorns’ in the parable of the sower (Matthew xiii 7) are both recalled. Perhaps also alluding to the nightingale, who was fabled to sing with its breast against a thorn, recalling its suffering when in the human form of Philomela: see Ovid, Met. vi 426 ff. Cp. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage iv 88–9: ‘The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree/I planted, — they have torn me, — and I bleed’. See note to ll. 20–1. 56. tameless, and swift, and proud] yet mortal — swift & proud Nbk 14 138. See rejected draft for L&C in note to ll. 47–51 above. Beneath the draft of ll. 66–70 on page 137 rev., S. copied the Gk sentence αρετη σε νικω θνητοσ ων θεον μεγαν (‘In virtue I, a mortal, surpass you, a great god’). This is l. 342 of Euripides’ Hercules Furens and is spoken to Zeus by Amphitryon, the husband of Alcmene, the mother of Heracles by Zeus who had visited her in the shape of her husband. Rogers (1967) 18–20 relates the quotation to the Ode and to S.’s situation in autumn 1819. 57. The lyre animated by the wind S. evokes in various contexts as a figure for his persuasion that inspiration originates in a power independent of the mind: e.g. Alastor 37–49; On Christianity (Prose Works 251–2); DP: ‘Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre’ (Reiman (2002) para. 2); cp. At the creation of the Earth [The Birth of Pleasure] (Longman iii 261–2, no. 285) 6–7: ‘airs low-breathing/ Through Aeolian pines’, and Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage iv 1228–31: But there is that within me which shall tire Torture and Time, and breath when I expire . . . Like the remembered tone of a mute lyre. 59. thy mighty harmonies] Cp. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage iv 946–47: ‘Then let the winds howl on! their harmony/Shall henceforth be my music.’ 63. dead thoughts] His writings — perhaps especially L&C/RofI for which his expectations had been high — and which had so far failed to find the readers in whose minds they might live. 64. leaves to quicken a new birth] Both senses of quicken, ‘to hasten’ and ‘to impart life to’, are appropriate, as are the two senses of leaves — of a tree and of a book. Neither would require S.’s ideas to be adopted as such,

22  ode to the west wind

363

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened Earth 70

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

only that they should assist in the necessary renewal. S. can hardly have failed to think of the infant with which Mary was pregnant and who, their son Percy Florence, was to be born on 12 November. He wrote to Leigh Hunt on 2 November 1819: ‘She [Mary] has written out as you will observe, my Peter [PB3 (Longman iii 70–152); see note to ll. 106–110] & this is, I suspect the last thing she will do before the new birth’ (L ii 135). Whatever private dimension may underlie the phrase, the new birth here prophesied is of the most general scope — mental, social and political. See note to l. 70. 66–7. S. is borrowing an image from the terza rima stanzas he appears to have drafted shortly before the Ode; see And what art thou, presumptuous, who profanest (Longman iii 194–7): [But as my hopes were fire, so my] decay [Shall be as ashes covering them.] Oh Earth, Oh friends, if when my [] [has ebbed away] One spark be unextinguished of that hearth Kindled in (19–23). And cp. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage iv 1202–5: But in this page a record will I seek. Not in the air shall these my words disperse, Though I be ashes; a far hour shall wreak The deep prophetic fulness of this verse. 69. See l. 10 above and note. Cp. also the address to Freedom in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage iv 876–77: ‘Thy trumpet voice, though broken now and dying,/The loudest still the tempest leaves behind’, and PVR on the original poets and philosophers of the present age, who are ‘the trumpet which sings to battle and feels not what it inspires’ (Julian vii 19). 70. When Winter comes, Spring lags not far behind Nbk 14. S.’s revision of the poem’s concluding line tempers the assertion of a transparently rhetorical question with uncertainty, as in Paine’s Rights of Man, Part II (1792): ‘what pace the political summer may keep with the natural, no human foresight can determine’ (Paine Writings ii 518). S. follows Paine in the analogies to be drawn ‘from physical to moral topics’ in Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists (1812): ‘we see that the loveliness of the flower decays, though the root continues in the earth’ (Prose Works i 53). The agency of urgently required change he identified in PVR (written shortly after the Ode) as ‘the literature of England, an energetic development of which has ever followed or preceded a great and free development of the national will, [and which] has arisen, as it were, from a new birth’ (Julian vii 19). Cp. also Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage iv 878–82: The tree hath lost its blossoms, and the rind, Chopp’d by the axe, looks rough and little worth, But the sap lasts, — and still the seed we find Sown deep, even in the bosom of the North; So shall a better spring less bitter fruit bring forth.

364

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23  On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, In the Florentine Gallery S.’s descriptive meditation on a painting in the gallery of the Uffizi Palace is assigned by Mary to ‘Florence, 1819’ in 1824 where the poem was first printed. The Shelleys had lodgings in Florence from 2 October 1819 to 26 January 1820. In a letter of 13 or 14 October, S. announced to Maria Gisborne his ‘design of studying piecemeal’ the paintings and sculptures in the Uffizi (L ii 126); and he wrote to T. J. Hogg the following April that during what had been a severe winter in the city he had ‘dedicated every sunny day to the study of the gallery there’ (L ii 186). Mary records his visiting the Uffizi on 11, 13 and 20 October; and on 31 December, she makes an entry retrospective to 12 November (the day their child Percy Florence was born): ‘Visit the Galleries’ (Mary Jnl i 298–302). No holograph MS has been traced. The text of the poem as published in 1824 is based directly on the transcription in Mary Copybk 1, which, in its present state, is incomplete. The portions of the poem as it appears in 1824 that survive in Mary’s transcription are: the title; stanzas 1, 2 and 5; and ll. 31–2. Her transcription also includes four lines related to both ll. 1–4, for which they may be a rejected draft, and 37–40: It is a woman’s countenance divine With everlasting beauty breathing there Which from a stormy mountain’s peak, supine Gazes into the nights trembling air. (p. 97) and five further lines, evidently intended for some early point in the poem: It is a trunkless head, and on its feature Death has met life, but there is life in death, The blood is frozen — but unconquered Nature Seems struggling to the last — without a breath The fragment of an uncreated creature. (p. 100) In the absence of S.’s draft, any judgement on Mary’s transcription must be tentative, but one can speculate that the first fragment became redundant as its details were absorbed into the rest of the poem. The second is an incomplete draft for ll. 1–5 or 2–6 of a stanza; it is impossible to determine whether S. had abandoned it definitively or whether he might have completed and incorporated it had he decided to finish the poem. Neville Rogers, ‘Shelley and the Visual Arts’ (K-SMB xii (1961) 9–17), combines the two fragments which he prints as the draft of a sixth stanza omitted from 1824 by Mary. This editorial supposition lacks material support. The two fragments are transcribed three pages apart in Mary Copybk 1; Mary signals no connection between them, and the rhyme scheme of each is incompatible with the other. Preceding p. 97 in Mary Copybk 1 (the first on which her transcription of On the Medusa is to be found), two leaves are missing, which, one may infer, carried S.’s draft of the rest of the poem. To judge from the coherence of Mary’s transcription, she had a reasonably complete and legible draft to work from, though not a perfectly finished one. The incomplete state of the transcription and the absence of S.’s draft render idle any speculation on the order in which he intended the stanzas to be placed, especially as the order in 1824 does not appear strictly to follow any narrative sequence or conform to any obvious spatial pattern. Instead of 1824’s arrangement,

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-23

23  on the medusa of leonardo da vinci, in the florentine gallery 365 another — 1, 3, 4, 2, 5 — would be as acceptable or more so. S.’s missing MS may have been written on loose paper or on pages torn from one of his nbks. Several transcriptions near this one in Mary Copybk 1 are taken from the various loose sheets now gathered in Box 1, others from holograph drafts which are now lost (BSM ii 236–7). It is quite possible that S. drafted the poem in the gallery with the picture itself in view. Such was his practice on other occasions; Medwin reported, for example, that he set down his notes on the sculptures in the Uffizi on the spot (Medwin (1913) 222): see headnote to The memory of the good is ever green (Longman iii 171–3, no. 248). (But, for the judgement that he wrote from a memory of the picture, see the article by Rogers cited above.) The draft might have been made at any time between mid-October and the end of December 1819, though November–December would be a more likely span, S. being engaged with his response to the hostile review of L&C/RofI in the Quarterly from about 15 October and not posting the central text of that response, PB3, to England until 2 November. The Medusa of classical myth was one of three female monsters, the Gorgons, daughters of the sea-deities Phorcys and his sister Ceto. Dragon-like creatures who were crowned with serpents, the three sisters inspired such terror that whoever looked upon them was turned to stone. Alternatively, it was the power of their gaze that turned its objects to stone. Medusa, the only one of the three who was mortal, was slain by the hero Perseus (the son of Zeus and Danae) who had been set the task of bringing her severed head to King Polydectes in order that the king should agree to regulate his passion for Danae. In his struggle with the monster, Perseus had the advantage of gifts bestowed on him by divine favour: winged sandals that enabled him to fly, a helmet that rendered its wearer invisible, a polished shield, which acted as a mirror when it was held above the Medusa by Athena herself, so that he could avoid looking directly at her, a bill-hook with which to decapitate her, and a shoulder-pouch in which to conceal her severed head which retained its petrifying power even after death. From the headless neck of Medusa sprang the winged horse Pegasus and the giant Chrysaor. Later, tradition joins beauty to the Medusa’s monstrosity. Ovid recounts (Met. iv 793–803) how she was renowned for her loveliness, especially for her magnificent hair. When Neptune took her virginity in the temple of Minerva, the outraged goddess punished Medusa by replacing her hair with serpents. This narrative of beauty rendered grotesque and fearful figures prominently in, for example, Lemprière’s article Medusa in the Bibliotheca Classica (1815). The Ovidian version clearly influenced the picture in the Uffizi that arrested S.’s attention and forms the central paradox explored in his poem. The picture in question is painted in oils on a wooden panel measuring 74 x 49 cm. It had been attributed to Leonardo from 1782 when his biographer Luigi Lanzi identified it with the second of two lost paintings representing the Medusa which Vasari in the Life of Leonardo claimed that the artist had produced. The attribution was widely accepted in the nineteenth century, the painting receiving the praise of (among others) Walter Pater, who in his chapter on Leonardo in The Renaissance (1868) makes a lyrical appreciation. It is now considered to be the work of an unknown Flemish painter and to date from the end of the sixteenth or beginning of the seventeenth century. The artist represents neither Perseus, Athena, Pegasus nor any narrative incident from the mythical tradition involving them. Medusa’s severed head with its writhing snakes alone occupies the foreground (a good half) of the picture space; a mountainous landscape recedes into the distance. The head is oriented so as to give the impression that the snakes are nearest to the viewer, the cut neck facing away and to the viewer’s right. Medusa’s face is seen slightly from above in three-quarter profile, the breath of life escaping from her parted lips. A bat flits in the top right-hand corner, toads squat in the lower right, a rat creeps just above the hidden portion of the face and an eft stands on a stone to the left of it. Blood glows on the ground beneath the head.

366

shelley: selected poems

The poem on the Medusa is an exercise in that systematic study of aesthetics to which S. was stimulated by the masterpieces of visual art he encountered on his Italian travels. In his letter to Maria Gisborne of 15 October 1819, he identified ‘one of my chief [aims] in Italy’ as ‘the observing in statuary and painting the degree in which, and the rules according to which, that ideal beauty of which we have so intense yet so obscure an apprehension is realized in external forms’ (L ii 126). In the painting of the Medusa, he saw an occasion to explore a fundamental aesthetic problem, how the beautiful and the repulsive can be subject to the harmony of a single work of art. That he regarded the question as of the highest order is clear from his remarks in a letter from Naples to Peacock of 25 February 1819 in which he delivers a decidedly unfavourable opinion of Michaelangelo’s Last Judgement, the preliminary study for which he had just seen: he has no sense of beauty, and to want this is to want the essence of the creative power of mind. What is terror without a contrast with and a connection with loveliness? How well Dante understood this secret; Dante with whom this artist has been so presumptuously compared. (L ii 80; see also L ii 112) Above all, it was the presence of beauty in various combinations with painful and disturbing elements that arrested Shelley in the statues representing Laocoön, Minerva and Niobe, which he saw in Rome and in Florence in 1819 and which he described in his Notes on Sculptures (Julian vi 310, 322–3, 331–2). Text from 1824. Published in 1824; BSM ii pp. 196–99, 202–03 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

On The Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, In The Florentine Gallery

5

10

It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky, Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine; Below, far lands are seen tremblingly; Its horror and its beauty are divine. Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine, Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath, The agonies of anguish and of death. Yet it is less the horror than the grace Which turns the gazer’s spirit into stone Whereon the lineaments of that dead face Are graven, till the characters be grown Into itself, and thought no more can trace;

¶ 23. Title. In The Florentine Gallery] Not present in Mary Copybk 1. 3. tremblingly] Indistinctly, as though out of focus, because of the darkness and cloudy atmosphere (ll. 1–2): see note to l. 36. Locock 1911 suggests that, in order to scan the line regularly, the word should be given a metrical value of four syllables. 5. seems] 1839, 1840, 1847; seem Mary Copybk 1, 1824. 6. shine] Mary Copybk 1, 1847; shrine 1824, 1839, 1840. 8. agonies] The convulsive throes, or pangs of death (OED n. 3). 10. stone] 1847; stone; 1824, 1839, 1840; stone, Mary Copybk 1. 13. itself] the gazer’s spirit of l. 10. thought no more can trace] The object of trace appears to be characters, i.e. distinctive facial features; the elliptical (and appropriately involved) sense of ll. 9–13 would

23  on the medusa of leonardo da vinci, in the florentine gallery 367

15

20

25

30

’Tis the melodious hues of beauty thrown Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain, Which humanize and harmonize the strain. And from its head as from one body grow, As [   ] grass out of a watery rock, Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow, And their long tangles in each other lock, And with unending involutions show Their mailèd radiance, as it were to mock The torture and the death within, and saw The solid air with many a ragged jaw. And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft Peeps idly into these Gorgonian eyes; Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise Out of the cave this hideous light hath cleft, And he comes hastening like a moth that hies After a taper; and the midnight sky Flares, a light more dread than obscurity. ’Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror; For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare

then be: ‘the grace of the Medusa as represented in the painting is such as to engrave her features on the gazer’s spirit, thus rendering it incapable of distinguishing them as objects of its own gaze, and/or (taking trace in another sense) tracking them to their source’. 14. hues] 1847, Rossetti 1870/1878, Locock 1911; hue Mary Copybk 1, 1824, 1839, 1840, eds. The plural is called for by the verbs humanize and harmonize (l. 16) which the word governs, but the grammatical error may have been in S.’s draft, which Mary corrected only belatedly. beauty] Mary Copybk 1 has a blank space instead of this word; beauty appears in 1824, perhaps Mary’s addition to a gap in S.’s MS. 16. strain] ‘subject, theme’ (Concordance); ‘stress’ Locock 1911; but the primary sense is surely ‘passage of music, melody, tune’; cf. the ‘melodious hues’ of l. 14. 17. as from one body] The sense intended is far from clear; perhaps simply ‘the serpents’ heads grow from the Medusa’s head as if it were a body’, or ‘the serpents grow from the Medusa’s head as if each were a single serpent’s head growing from its body’. 18. watery rock] Concordance glosses watery as ‘damp, oozy’; this would be the result of the misty atmosphere on the mountain peak of l. 2; but the image, far from precise, may be that of a rock in, or on the bank of, a river or stream, a sense that suggests the flow of the next line. 22. mailèd] composed of overlapping scales: cp. Lemprière’s Bibliotheca Classica (1815) art. Medusa: ‘Their [the Gorgons’] bodies were also covered with impenetrable scales’, and L&C 202, MA 111 and nn. mock] the sense may be ‘flout, defy’ or possibly ‘mimic’. 25. beside,] 1839, 1840, 1847; beside 1824. eft] a small lizard. 26. these] 1839, 1840, 1847; those 1824. 29. hath] 1840, 1847; had 1824, 1839. 31. a taper] the taper Mary Copybk 1.

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35

Kindled by that inextricable error Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air Become a [   ] and ever-shifting mirror Of all the beauty and the terror there — A woman’s countenance, with serpent locks, Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks.

40

24  Love’s Philosophy Published in Leigh Hunt’s weekly miscellany The Indicator (XI, 22 December 1819). Hunt had written in a letter to Mary of 12 September 1819: ‘I must ask you, Shelley, to give me a few verses, if you have any to spare, for the next Pocket-Book, which will be speedily going to press’ (Hunt Correspondence i 146). S. responded to the request in a letter posted on 16 November (SC vi 1085) with ‘a piece for the Examiner; or let it share the fate, whatever that fate may be, of the “Masque of Anarchy” ’ (L ii 152). On 2 December, Hunt replied: ‘What a delicious love song is that you enclosed!’, indicating his intention to publish it in the Examiner, then in a postscript altering his mind: ‘upon reading your delightful song, Shelley, for the ninth or tenth time: I shall put it, incontinently, into the Indicator (Hunt Correspondence i 153). Three weeks later, Love’s Philosophy appeared (under that title), signed with a Gk capital sigma Σ, and preceded by this note: We intended to introduce the following delightful little lyric, by a friend, in very different company from that of the gentlemen just presented to the reader [in Hunt’s essay Thieves, Ancient and Modern, the first part of which immediately precedes the lyric]; but as Mercury, who was the god of thieves, was also the inventor of the lyre, and as Love himself, time out of mind, has been called a thief, it is not, in all respects, inappropriately situated. We may fancy Mercury playing, and Love singing: — and the song is indeed worthy of the performers. It is elemental, Platonical; a meeting of divineness with humanity. (p. 88)

35. inextricable error] Concordance’s ‘hallucination’ misses the fundamental sense: error is a Latinate poeticism for ‘the action of roaming or wandering; hence a devious or winding course, roving, winding’ (OED). Cp. Paradise Lost iv 237–9: ‘the crisped brooks,/Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold,/With mazy error . . .’ As Rogers (K-SMB xii 16) points out, S.’s phrase borrows the Latin inextricabilis error from Aeneid vi 27. There it describes the maze constructed by Daedalus, which is represented on the temple door at Cumae, a suggestive prototype for its use here, pace Rogers. While at Naples, S. visited the site of Aeneid vi in December 1818 (L ii 59). By extension, the phrase designates the impossibly tangled knot formed by the serpents which have twisted themselves round one another, forming the unending involutions of l. 21. Locock 1911 cps. the final two stanzas of The Tower of Famine (Longman iv 35–43, no. 370) which incorporate the triple rhyme ‘terror — mirror — error’ — and which offer a variation on the intricate relations of beauty and terror explored in this poem. 36. a thrilling] quivering, trembling: see note to l. 3. Locock 1911 suspected that S. ‘wrote, or meant to write, “the thrilling” ’; perhaps so, but both 1824 and Mary Copybk 1 read a thrilling. 37. and ever-shifting] an evershifting Mary Copybk 1, a possible reading if S. intended to fill the preceding lacuna with a noun. 40. those] the Mary Copybk 1.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-24

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No draft of the poem has been traced, but two fair copies are known to exist. That in Harvard Nbk 1 71 is entitled An Anacreontic and followed by the notation ‘Florence — January 1820’, which may record only the date of the transcription. Title, place and date are in Mary’s hand. If the date was intended as that of composition, it may result from faulty memory; or perhaps either Mary or S. wished to mask the poem’s relation to Sophia Stacey. The other fair copy S. transcribed into The Literary Pocket-Book (LPB) for 1819, which he presented to Sophia on 28 December 1819: see headnotes to Goodnight and Thou art fair, and few are fairer [To Sophia]. The copy given to Sophia has no title, and it is possible that S. never provided one. If the press copy he sent to Hunt had carried the title Love’s Philosophy, there appears to be no good reason for S. to omit it on the transcription he made a few weeks later for Sophia Stacey. Both the other poems he transcribed for her in the LPB are titled: Goodnight and Time Long Past (Longman iii 246–7, no. 275). Hunt’s introductory note to The Indicator printing furnishes a seduction-lyric, conventional enough in theme, with a philosophical dimension and imagines it as authoritatively performed by classical deities, so it may be that he himself supplied an appropriate title to an untitled piece sent by S. In the absence of the press-copy, one cannot be sure of this; it is always possible that the title was S.’s and that it suggested Hunt’s note. The poem must have been composed by 16 November when S. enclosed it in the letter to Hunt posted on that date. Sophia Stacey first met S. when she called on him on 10 November in Florence. According to her journal, between 14 and 17 November, she and S., whom she had by then decided was both interesting and mysterious, had read Italian together and talked of personal and family matters; and he had perhaps given her the poem The Indian Girl’s Song (Helen Rossetti Angeli, Shelley and his Friends in Italy (1911) 95–8) Love’s Philosophy may therefore have been composed with her in mind as the addressee a few days before posting it to Hunt, though it could of course have been written earlier. The poem starts from and elaborates upon the commonplace of a universal erotic impulse in nature, which the poet’s beloved is urged to accept as exemplary. Sources which might have influenced S. are not lacking. A likely passage is to be found, for example, in Tasso’s pastoral drama Aminta which S. read in 1815 and again in 1818 (Mary Jnl 92, 203, 266). During a celebrated exchange in the first scene (125–64), Dafne chides Silvia for her resistance to the love which all nature manifests: La vite s’avviticchia al suo marito; L’abete ama l’abete, il pino il pino . . . e l’un per l’altro faggio arde e sospira . . . Or tu da meno Esser vuoi de le piante, Per non esser amante? (153–6, 163–5) The vine embraces her husband; the fir-tree loves the fir-tree, the pine the pine . . . one beech-tree for the other burns and sighs with love . . . will you, then, be lesser than the plants by not being a lover? In a letter of 20 September 1819, Hunt had told S. that he was translating Tasso’s Aminta, and S. had urged him to write original poetry instead in the letter that accompanied this lyric which appeared as Love’s Philosophy (L ii 152), but he expressed great admiration for Hunt’s translation (Amyntas, a Tale of the Woods; from the Italian of Torquato Tasso (1820)) in a letter of 26 August 1821 (L ii 345).

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The Harvard Nbk 1 title of An Anacreontic signifies a brief lyric in the manner of those of Anacreon and his followers, typically celebrating the pleasures of love, wine and song. Thomas Moore had translated the lyrics attributed to Anacreon and attached the designation ‘Anacreontic’ to several of his early poems. For Parks C. Hunter Jnr. in SP lxv No. 4 (1968) 679 Love’s Philosophy is a free translation of the Anacreontic ode which begins ‘Η γη̂ μέλαινα πίνει/πίνει δένδρεα δ’ αὐτήν (The black earth drinks/the trees drink it [the rain]) and in English is commonly given the title Drinking or a similar title. This commends the order of nature according to which the earth drinks rain, the ocean vapours, the sun the ocean, and the moon her beams from the sun — concluding: ‘I’ll make the laws of nature mine,/And pledge the universe in wine’ (No. XXI in Moore’s Odes of Anacreon (1800)). It may be that in his own poem, S. recalled and adapted to the praise of love this homage to natural revelry; To a Sky-lark (see headnote) appears to have been influenced by another Anacreontic ode. Other possible sources have been suggested. William Benbow’s pirated Miscellaneous and Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1826) reprints what is in all essentials the text of Love’s Philosophy from 1824, supplying the poem with the subtitle ‘An Imitation from the French’ (p. 290) though without specifying any French source. Following up this indication, J. H. Dixon in N&Q, 4th series, I (25 January 1868) 80 put forward a French song in the Anacreontic mode which he claimed S. had paraphrased. The text of this song as given in the collection Chansons choisies, avec les airs notés, 4 vols (Londres [i.e. Paris], 1783), iv 216 is as follows: Les vents baisent les nuages; Les zéphirs baisent les fleurs; Les eaux baisent les rivages; Les amours baisent les coeurs: Tout baise dans la nature; Que n’en faisons-nous autant! Baisons-nous donc sans mesure, Et nos coeurs seront contens. A note on the page attaches the lines to the air on which Que ne suis-je la fougère, a traditional French sentimental ballad (also known as Les Souhaits or Les Tendres Souhaits) had been set in the eighteenth century. In the ballad, a lover wishes to be the fern on which his beloved shepherdess reclines to rest, the breeze that cools her, and so on. The simple and well-known air to which it was sung is attributed to different composers. The similarities of Les vents baisent les nuages to Love’s Philosophy are clearly to be seen in the exhortation to follow Nature’s erotic instinct, in some of the images invoked, and in the closing injunction to kiss; but none of the examples — commonplaces in the main — that are given in the French song is exactly followed in S.’s poem, and his development of the general theme is more subtly varied in both imagery and rhetoric and includes a number of elements absent from the supposed original. It is always possible that S. had heard Les vents baisent les nuages sung and remembered it when composing his own poem; he may even have heard Sophia Stacey sing this mildly licentious piece. But such resemblances as there are seem insufficient to establish securely any relation between the two beyond general and generic ones. Burton R. Pollin in K-SMB xix (1968) 35–6 noticed similar, if more ethically elevated, sentiments on universal love as model for human behaviour in Godwin’s Mandeville, which S. read at the end of 1817: Nature is love. See how the bending branches kiss the stream! Each portion of nature nourishes its neighbour portion .  .  . See how the fawns upon yonder hill sport and

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gambol and frisk with each other . . . they derive from surer instinct the principle of gaiety and love. And shall man, the lord of the creation, be less tender to his brother, man? The connection is reinforced by S.’s letter to Godwin of 7 December 1817 (L i 574) which singles out the passage in which these lines occur for special praise. Mary published the poem in 1824, dated January  1820 as in Harvard Nbk 1, repeating the date in 1839 and 1840. Her dating was accepted by Rossetti 1870 but corrected in Forman 1876–7 on the basis of the Indicator printing. The 1824 text follows the Indicator except at lines 11 and 12 where Mary prefers Harvard Nbk 1. She will not have seen S.’s transcription for Sophia Stacey in LPB. Text from S.’s holograph fair copy in The Literary Pocket-Book; Or, Companion for the Lover of Nature and Art. 1819, on blank page following p. 42, now in the library of Eton College. A semicolon has been substituted for a comma in l. 2, a semicolon supplied in l. 5 and a dash in l. 14. Variants of substance are given in the notes. Published in The Indicator XI, 22 December 1819 (from which the title is taken); MYRS viii 288–9 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

Love’s Philosophy

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The Fountains mingle with the River And the Rivers with the Ocean; The winds of Heaven mix for ever With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single; All things by a law divine In one spirit meet and mingle. Why not I with thine? — See the mountains kiss high Heaven And the waves clasp one another; No sister-flower would be forgiven If it disdained its brother, And the sunlight clasps the earth And the moonbeams kiss the sea — What is all this sweet work worth If thou kiss not me?

¶ 24. 3. mix for ever] melt together Harvard Nbk 1. 5. the world] LPB, Harvard Nbk 1, Indicator, 1839. this world 1824. 7. In one another’s being mingle Harvard Nbk 1, Indicator, 1824, 1839. The LPB reading attenuates the eroticism of the other textual witnesses. 9. See] See, Harvard Nbk 1. 11. No sister-flower] No leaf or flower Indicator. 12. disdained its brother] disdained to kiss it’s brother Indicator. 15. What were these examples worth Harvard Nbk 1; What are all these kissings worth Indicator, 1824, 1839.

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25  ‘Thou art fair, and few are fairer’ [To Sophia] First published in Rossetti 1870 under the title Lines Written for Miss Sophia Stacey and followed by the notation Via Val Fonda, Florence, the address of the Palazzo Marini where the Shelleys lodged from 2 October 1819 to 26 January 1820. The MS from which Rossetti took his text was supplied by the two sons of the woman to whom the verses are addressed in the 1870 title, though ‘with the sole reservation to themselves of the exclusive right of setting them to music’. Sophia Stacey (1791–1874) was twenty-eight years old, just over a year older than S., when in November 1819 she arrived in Florence together with her travelling companion Miss Corbet Parry-Jones. The two women called on the Shelleys on 10 November, and the following day they took lodgings in the Palazzo Marini where S., Mary and Claire were staying in the boarding-house kept by Mme Merveilleux du Plantis. There was a family connection between S. and Miss Stacey. On the premature death of her parents — her father had been a well-to-do brewer of Maidstone and had served as mayor of the town — she became the ward of S.’s uncle by marriage Robert Parker, husband of Sir Timothy Shelley’s eldest sister. The chief source of information on S.’s relations with Sophia during the seven weeks of their acquaintance is the journal that she kept of her foreign travels. This has been lost, but the portion covering her stay in Florence from 8 November to 29 December 1819 is summarised with extracts by Helen Rossetti Angeli, Shelley and His Friends in Italy (1911) 95–105. The account given here is indebted to Angeli, to the note on Sophia by her great-great-grandson Rodney M. Bennett (K-SJ 35 (1986) 16), and to the same author’s privately printed pamphlet The Catty Family descended from Louis François Catty through James Patrick Catty (2000), to MYRS viii 277–79, and to Bieri II 169–77. In addition to the present poem, a number of S.’s lyrics are implicated more or less directly with Sophia Stacey: see Goodnight, Love’s Philosophy, On a Dead Violet: To ——, Time Long Past (Longman iii 246–7, no. 275), To —— (I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden), Music (I pant for the music which is divine) (Longman iii 238–41, no. 273)) and possibly The Indian Girl’s Song. See also Holy, my sweet love (Longman iii 247–8, no. 276)), Follow to the deep wood, sweetest (Longman iii 245–6, no. 274A), and ?[Oh] Music, thou art not “the food of Love” (Longman iii 15–16, no. 223). See also headnote to Epipsychidion. Living under the same roof as winter came on, Sophia and the Shelleys developed sociable relations. It was she who suggested the second name for the infant Percy Florence, born to Mary on 12 November, as a memorial of his birthplace. She walked with S. and Mary in the Cascine. Claire acted as interpreter for her singing lessons with an Italian master. Sophia and Miss Parry-Jones dined with the Shelleys on Christmas day. After leaving Florence, Sophia wrote some half dozen letters to the Shelleys in 1820, two of which at least Mary answered. From Mary’s response of 5 March, it appears that Sophia wished to visit the Shelleys again in Italy, though no second meeting took place. Mary’s letter is cordial, offers advice on sightseeing in Rome, and gently teases Sophia on her conservative political sympathies (Claire Jnl 117, 126, 131, 146, 150, 171; Mary Jnl i 305, 308; Mary L i 130–1). Sophia’s brief association with S. had a palpably erotic dimension. They read Italian together, discussed literature and music, politics and religion, as well as ‘Love, Liberty, Death’. They visited the Uffizi and walked in the Cascine, suitably accompanied. She found him a ‘mysterious, yet interesting character’, and later felt that they had become ‘very close friends’. Claire’s judgement was that S. had ‘made love to Sophia’. Like Claire, Sophia had a pleasant voice and sang well; she also accompanied herself on the harp (see ll. 15–16 below). S. was clearly taken by her performances. She records in a note apparently written some years later: ‘On hearing me frequently play the harp, he expressed a wish to write some lines for me, and a short time afterwards he placed “Thou art fair and few are fairer” in my hands’ (Angeli 102). S. also gave her copies of Goodnight, Love’s Philosophy, Time Long Past, possibly The Indian Girl’s Song, and in early March 1820 sent her a copy of On a Dead Violet: To ——.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-25

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There is a draft of the first stanza, the only draft of the poem known to exist, in Nbk 10 f. 2v. If this was written with Sophia Stacey in mind, then it probably dates from December 1819. Both Shelley’s Guitar 127 and BSM xxii 27 accept this date for the draft, taking ll. 3–6 as inspired by Sophia’s playing on the harp. While this is possible, another hypothesis appears more probable. The draft stanza may at first have been intended for the lyric in praise of Asia, beginning ‘Life of Life!’, in PU II v 48–71. The draft phrase ‘nymphs of air & ocean’ would be appropriate to Asia, and the metre of the draft is that of the lyric in PU. The use of feminine rhymes as well as other similarities of vocabulary — e.g. ‘limbs’ (54), ‘Fair are others’ (60) — and the general conception of a physical beauty illuminated by a radiance of spirit from within, all support the connection between the draft and the passage from PU. The draft could have been made at any time in the period spring–autumn 1819, rejected in favour of ll. 54–65 of PU II v as printed, then recuperated with minor variations as the first stanza of the present poem to Sophia. S. appears to have carried out a similar exercise in recuperation in On a Dead Violet: To —— (see headnote), which he also gave to her. That such was his practice is confirmed by Jane Lady Shelley in conversation with Maud Rolleston (Talks with Lady Shelley (1925) 77): ‘I know that many of Shelley’s poems were written before he even thought of giving them to anyone. Then at some later time, the poem would receive the inscription ‘To —— ’ and it would be sent to the person in question.’ Sophia, by then having married for a second time, sent a transcription (SS Trans) of the poem to Sir Percy Shelley in 1868, headed by the following note: ‘Your father expressed a wish to write some lines for me, and shortly after he placed the following M. S.? in my hands.’ She dates the transcription ‘Florence December 1819’ and appends the signature ‘P.B.S.’. S.’s holograph fair copy (Bodleian MS. Shelley adds F.1), probably the one he gave to Sophia, is not dated or signed. It carries the word Sophia in the upper-right-hand corner. This is not the usual position for a title, and the word may rather be addressed to the recipient in the manner of a salutation heading a private communication in verse. In addition to the transcription she sent to Sir Percy, Sophia transcribed the poem into her now lost journal where it is also dated December 1819 (Angeli 99). This twice-recorded date, together with her recollection that it was after hearing her ‘frequently play the harp’ that S. presented her with the poem, make December 1819 the highly probable time of composition for stanzas 2–4. Stanza one may well have been composed earlier in the year, as indicated above. Forman’s conjecture that the draft of stanza 1 and Follow to the deep wood, sweetest were intended to form a single lyric is considered in the headnote to the latter (see Longman iii 245). Text from Bodleian MS. Shelley adds F.1 f. 1r and 1v. Commas have been supplied in lines 3, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21 and 22; full stops at the end of stanzas 1, 3 and 4. Published in Rossetti 1870 ii 210–11, BSM xxi 427 (facsimile and transcription of MS). Entitled: Lines Written for Miss Sophia Stacey (Rossetti 1870), To Sophia (Forman 1876–7), Sophia (Forman 1880).

‘Thou art fair, and few are fairer’ [To Sophia]

5

Thou art fair, and few are fairer Of the Nymphs of earth or ocean; They are robes that fit the wearer, Those soft limbs of thine, whose motion Ever falls and shifts and glances As the life within them dances. Thy deep eyes, a double Planet, Gaze the wisest into madness

¶ 25. 7–10. Sophia Stacey had strikingly large eyes and an intense gaze, ‘almost lycanthropic’ according to her great-great-grandson (Bieri II 170), who remarks that ‘a feature of all her pictures is strong and

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shelley: selected poems With soft clear fire, — the winds that fan it Are those thoughts of tender gladness Which, like Zephyrs on the billow, Make thy gentle soul their pillow. If, whatever face thou paintest In those eyes, grows pale with pleasure, If the fainting soul is faintest When it hears thy harp’s wild measure, Wonder not that when thou speakest, Of the weak my heart is weakest. As dew beneath the wind of morning, As the sea while Whirlwinds waken, As the birds at thunder’s warning, As aught mute, yet deeply shaken, As one who feels an unseen Spirit Is my heart when thine is near it.

26  To —— (‘I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden’) Published in 1824 without date; included in 1839 among the Poems Written in 1820. No fair copy has been traced, and there is no transcription in either Mary Copybk 1 or Mary Copybk 2. S.’s untitled draft in Nbk 11 115–16, a mixture of roughly pencilled lines and some fair copy in ink, is both longer and less uniformly achieved than the two stanzas printed by Mary in 1824 and which are given below. Although the draft is untidy, those two stanzas are clearly worked out in the form in which they appear in 1824, so the simplest hypothesis would be that Mary extracted them directly from Nbk 11. It is always possible that S. himself prepared a fair copy which supplied her text, but there is no necessity to suppose its existence. The order in which S. composed the three stanzas that comprise the draft on the facing pages 115–16 is not perfectly clear, but as Chernaik 278–80 suggests, he probably first set down on the righthand page 116 the following stanza with its several cancelled attempts at a third line: I fear thy [singing] sweet voice child of Beauty It is too sweet for me

impressive eyes’ (The Catty Family 1). Her portrait of c. 1818 by Bouton is reproduced in Bieri II 96. 10. tender] gentle SS Trans, no doubt a mistaken transcription. In his holograph (adds F.1), S. first wrote gentle then substituted tender, evidently to avoid repetition with gentle in l. 12. 13. paintest] I.e. ‘reflectest (in your eyes)’: see OED paint v1 1f. 20. while] which Rossetti 1870/1878, eds. 22. aught] ought SS Trans. — an obvious mistranscription. yet] but Rossetti 1870/1878.

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[Thy voice dissolves the chain of] Duty [binds more tight] [But yet seem] [Heavy & tight for] Whilst thou remainest free The phrase ‘And lingerest’ follows, possibly the undeveloped beginning of another stanza, then the draft of the second stanza of the 1824 text. On the left-hand page 115, the cancelled phrase ‘I kiss’ is followed by the line ‘Fear not my kisses [gentle] fairest maiden’. There follow six lines drafted first in pencil then gone over in ink, the four lines of stanza 1 in 1824, and what appears to be the first lines towards another stanza: How wouldst thou walk beneath the load Which I bear smiling. Facing these lines on the right-hand page is the phrase ‘Yet kiss me,’ — perhaps the beginning of a further stanza. Mary may have decided not to include what, it has been suggested, was the original first stanza because of its unfinished state or because she judged that S. meant the first four lines of his ink fair copy to replace it. She may also have recognised, what seems very likely, that it had been inspired by Sophia’s Stacey’s singing, and so left untranscribed the clearly implied contrast between the singer’s beauty and freedom and the burdened spirit that accompanies the speaker’s awareness of a duty that constrains him — which could be taken as S.’s reflection on the state of their marriage in late 1819. That it was probably she who entitled the poem To —— suggests that she recognised Sophia’s part in it. If indeed the poem represents a direct response to Sophia’s singing — see headnote to Thou art fair, and few are fairer [To Sophia] — then it was probably composed between 11 November and 29 December 1819 while Sophia was staying in the same Palazzo Marini in Florence as the Shelleys. It may even be the ‘song on singing’ that S. claimed he had been ‘unable to perform’ in a note to Sophia in March 1820 accompanying On a Dead Violet: To —— (see headnote). Text from 1824. Published in 1824. Julian iv 45 prints as ‘unpublished lines’ a version of most of the draft material given above. BSM xviii 115–16 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

To —— [‘I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden’] I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden, Thou needest not fear mine; My spirit is too deeply laden Ever to burden thine. 5

I fear thy mien, thy tones, thy motion, Thou needest not fear mine; Innocent is the heart’s devotion With which I worship thine.

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27  On a Dead Violet: To —— The textual history of this lyric variation on the traditional theme of love decayed is involved and complicated. S. transcribed the fair copy, the text of which is given below, on Mary’s letter of 7 March 1820 sent from Pisa to Sophia Stacey in Rome, evidently without Mary seeing it. (For S.’s relations with Sophia Stacey, see the headnotes to Thou art fair, and few are fairer, Goodnight and Time Long Past (Longman iii 246–7, no. 275).) A note on the letter introduces the poem thus: I promised you what I cannot perform; a song on singing: — there are only two subjects remaining. I have a few old stanzas on one which though simple & rude, look as if they were dictated by the heart. — And so — if you tell no one whose they are you are welcome to them. The note continues after the poem: Pardon these dull verses from one who is dull — but who is not the less ever your’s PBS. When you come to Pisa, continue to see us. Casa Frassi Lung’Arno. (See ‘Text from’ below) S.’s remarks indicate that while Sophia was in Florence he had engaged to write a series of songs on different topics for her — which no doubt she was to sing — one of which, on singing itself, he was unable to execute. See To —— (I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden). The series would presumably have included the three other lyrics named above, which he had given her on 28 December 1819. Taking his assertion at face value, On a Dead Violet had been composed long enough ago to be considered ‘old stanzas’ which, although not written as one of the promised songs, nonetheless treated one of the subjects agreed upon. The poem he sends, although unpolished, was inspired by genuine feeling. He wishes to share it with her, but she must not reveal him as the author. The three stanzas of the poem that he sent are drafted in pencil and corrected in ink on p. 114 of Nbk 11. The draft is untitled, and the order of the stanzas on the page (3–1–2) differs from that of the fair copy sent to Sophia Stacey, though they may have been drafted 1–2–3. The first line is written twice more, as if meant for the opening line of a poem, on pp. 122 (apparently the beginning of a fair copy which includes the first letter of the first word of l. 2) and 152 (another fair copy giving in addition the first two words of l. 2 as ‘Which she’) of the nbk. Facing the main draft on p. 113 are lines, also in a mixture of ink and pencil, evidently meant to follow on from stanza 3; first two lines in pencil: It was & is not — let this be Thine epitaph & mine poor flower Then a stanza in ink: Our fortunes are alike, poor blossom My?[peace] & thine together For from the time we left her bosom We both began to wither Then what has the appearance of a skeletal stanza, perhaps to continue from the above or as an alternative to it. My heart Must envy

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-27

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For thus, my friend, must that become When I remember not The meditation on a withered flower as emblem of perished love, a commonplace from the lyric repertoire, had recently been versified by Thomas Moore in, for example, Poor Broken Flower. S. curtails the song he sent to Sophia by omitting to develop a fourth stanza from his drafts, thereby excluding any aphoristic moral conclusion (such as that sketched in the partial stanza quoted immediately above) from the lover-flower analogy. The three-stanza version strikes a sharper note of melancholy desolation, which it shares with Misery. — A Fragment and its associated stanzas (Longman ii 701–7, no. 202), which are drafted in the same nbk, with The world is dreary (Longman ii 707–8, no. 203), also drafted in Nbk 11, and with Is not today enough? [why do I peer] (Longman iii 213–4, no. 260): all of these appear to date from summer–autumn 1819, the acute period of Mary’s depression and her estrangement from S. following William Shelley’s death on 7 June 1819 in Rome. If, as seems quite likely, On a Dead Violet arises from and responds to the emotional torment of that period, S.’s urging Sophia Stacey not to reveal him as author aims to conceal the poem’s origin in his acutely strained relations with Mary. The poem that he tailored from his draft and sent to Sophia might of course also be understood as expressing S.’s feelings for her, equally a motive for secrecy. Drafts in Nbk 11, in which S. entered a wide range of poems that he left incomplete, can be difficult to date. On a Dead Violet was very probably drafted after William’s death on 7 June 1819 and certainly before Mary’s letter to Sophia Stacey of 7 March 1820 was posted to her (perhaps a few days after 7 March: SC x 869) — though exactly when is uncertain. In BSM xviii, pp. xxxix–xlviii, Nancy Goslee argues on the basis of MS evidence that On a Dead Violet as well as Music (I pant for the music which is divine) (Longman iii 238–41, no. 273)) and To —— (I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden) probably all date from no later than December 1819. Goslee stresses in particular the relation of the three lyrics to the stanzas for Misery which are drafted both before and after them. Neil Fraistat (BSM ix lvii–lx) dates these stanzas between late 1818 and late 1819. S.’s description of the fair copy sent to Sophia Stacey as ‘a few old stanzas’ would fit a date of composition in that period. The drafts of Music, on the pages immediately before On a Dead Violet and To —— (I fear thy kisses), immediately after it, show verbal similarities among the three poems as drafted that suggest more intimate connections. On a Dead Violet would appear to have evolved from the draft of Music on pp. 111–12 which includes the lines ‘As the scent of a violet withered up/Which grew by the brink of a silver lake’ and ‘And the violet lay dead, whilst the odour flew/On the wings of the wind oer the waters blue’. On the two pages immediately following On a Dead Violet are drafts of the poem that Mary printed in 1824 as To ——, beginning ‘I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden’. The much-cancelled pencil draft includes lines that she did not transcribe for the published poem, which are included in the headnote to To —— (I fear thy kisses) and which bring together a sweet singing voice, the freedom of the singer and the constraints imposed on the listener who is bound by ‘the chain of Duty’. If these lines (on p. 116) were intended as part of the ‘song on singing’ promised to Sophia, which S. wrote that he was unable to complete, he had only to turn the page to the previous opening and extract three stanzas from the lyric drafted there and entitle it On a Dead Violet, borrowing his central image and some words from the earlier draft of Music. On the basis of these converging strands of evidence, On a Dead Violet may be dated to the period during which Sophia Stacey lodged in the same building as the Shelleys in Florence from 11 November to 28 December 1819, though the possibility that it was composed earlier or later in the broader range of 7 June 1819–7 March 1820 cannot be excluded. See also SC x 879–83. Bieri II 176 suggests that the draft stanza quoted above beginning ‘Our fortunes are alike’ may refer to Elena Adelaide Shelley. See headnote to I had two babes — a sister and a brother (Longman iii 501–4, no. 334).

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S. made two further fair copies of the poem that are known to survive. One he sent to Leigh Hunt for publication in The Literary Pocket-Book for 1821 (LPB) where the poem appears on p. 120 under the title Song. On a faded Violet and signed with a Gk capital Delta ∆. Hunt thanks S. for his contribution in a letter of 3 November 1820: ‘What a beautiful flower you have stuck in our Pocket-Book this year, — the Violet!’ (SC x 991). Shortly thereafter, the second fair copy was sent to Charles Ollier as one of a set of poems to be published with J&M. S. described the collection, which was never published, as ‘all my saddest verses raked up into one heap’ (10 November 1820; L ii 246). The Hunt fair copy MS is now in CHPL (SC 836), and is transcribed and analysed in SC x 856–86. The Ollier fair copy, entitled To a faded violet, is now Bodleian MS. Shelley e. 5, p. 10 and is reproduced and analysed in BSM xxi 426, 529–30. Mary published the poem in 1824 as Song, On a Faded Violet without date and based on the Hunt MS, but in 1839 she printed a text based on the Ollier MS, though also entitled On a Faded Violet, among the Poems Written in 1818. Why she preferred the Ollier MS in 1839 is unclear. Medwin published stanzas 2 and 3 under the Ollier MS title, To a Faded Violet (Medwin (1913) 210). His version shows a number of variants from both the draft and fair copies described above. Forman considered that Medwin’s version might derive from an independent MS (Medwin (1913) 210; Murray (BSM xxi 530) suggested that Medwin’s variants might be no more than mistranscriptions. At any rate, Medwin is not an entirely reliable witness, and the variations in his text may be owing to lapses of memory or represent his ‘improvements’. Variants of substance from these textual witnesses are given in the notes. In November 1869, Sophia Stacey’s sons communicated the text of the poem as sent by S. to her in March 1820 to W. M. Rossetti who was then in the final stages of preparing copy for Rossetti 1870 (see Rossetti’s letters to them in MYRS viii 295–7). Rossetti indicated in his note to the poem that it had been included in the letter to Sophia of 7 March 1820, but he printed it among the poems of 1818, as Mary had done in 1839, because the phrase ‘a few old stanzas’ in S.’s note seemed to warrant her earlier dating. Rossetti adopts the title from S.’s letter, On a Dead Violet, but gives S.’s subtitle To —— inaccurately as To Miss ——, explaining with a show of delicacy that ‘it must mean “To Miss Stacey”; but, as the verses appear to have been written some time before they were sent to that lady, I have abstained from inserting her name’. In his text, he prefers the 1824 reading in l. 8 (see note below). Text from S.’s first holograph fair copy appended to Mary’s letter of 7 March 1820 from Pisa to Sophia Stacey in Rome, now in the Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cologny (Genève). A full stop has been supplied at the end of l. 4, a semicolon substituted for a comma at the end of l. 10. Published in The Literary Pocket-Book; Or, Companion for the Lover of Nature and Art. 1821, p. 120, entitled Song. On a faded Violet; MYRS viii 300–01 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

On a Dead Violet: To —— The odour from the flower is gone Which like thy kisses breathed on me; The colour from the flower is flown Which glowed of thee and only thee. ¶ 27. 1–4 1839 (based on the Ollier MS) reads:

28 goodnight 5

10

379

A shrivelled, lifeless, vacant form It lies on my abandoned breast, And mocks the heart which yet is warm With its cold, silent rest. I weep — my tears revive it not, I sigh — it breathes no more on me; Its mute and uncomplaining lot Is such as mine should be.

28 Goodnight S. inscribed a copy of this love lyric on a blank page in The Literary Pocket-Book for 1819 which he presented to Sophia Stacey on 28 December 1819, the day before she left Florence. Time Long Past (Longman iii 246–7, no. 275) and Love’s Philosophy are inscribed on other pages. (For S.’s relations with Sophia Stacey, see headnote to Thou art fair, and few are fairer.) The Literary Pocket-Book was a small portable diary and notebook, edited by Leigh Hunt and published by Charles Ollier, which was issued annually in November for the following year from 1818 to 1822. Hunt no doubt sent the 1819 issue to S. as a token of appreciation, having ‘taken the liberty’ of including Marianne’s Dream (see headnote to no. 138, Longman i 573) among the original poems in the volume. The first two stanzas of Goodnight are drafted in pencil overwritten with ink on f. 48r rev. of Nbk 10; an incomplete draft of stanza three in pencil corrected in ink follows on f. 48v rev. A somewhat untidy fair copy of the first two stanzas only is transcribed on p. 118 rev. of Nbk 14, evidently because S. made the transcription before completing stanza three. A fair copy in S.’s hand of all three stanzas entitled Song (in what appears to be Mary’s hand) was transcribed into Harvard Nbk 1. Another fair copy by S. (now in the Morgan Library & Museum: MA 3223) was sent, probably in autumn 1821, to either Leigh Hunt or Charles Ollier for publication in The Literary Pocket-Book for 1822 where it appeared in print for the first time signed with a Gk capital sigma Σ. Mary published the poem without date in 1824 but in 1839 placed it among the poems written in 1821, perhaps because Hunt’s Literary Pocket-Book for 1822 had appeared in November 1821, though she may have known of and wished to disguise its connection with Sophia Stacey. Her text in both 1824 and 1839 is identical to that in LPB, save for one minor difference of punctuation. The position of the draft in Nbk 10 and of the fair copy of stanzas 1 and 2 in Nbk 14 is consistent with composition in autumn 1819. Although it is not certain that S. wrote the The colour from the flower is gone, Which like thy sweet eyes smiled on me; The odour from the flower is flown, Which breathed of thee and only thee! 5. shrivelled] withered Ollier MS, Medwin (1913), 1839. 7. which] that Medwin (1913). 8. With cold and silent rest Hunt MS, LPB, 1824, Ollier MS, 1839. 10. no more on me] none back to me Medwin (1913). 12. should] must Medwin (1913).

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poem with Sophia Stacey in mind rather than presenting her with a poem already written, their relations during her stay in Florence from 10 November to 29 December certainly provided him with ample stimulus to erotic verse. Overall the evidence warrants a date of composition in December 1819, probably late in the month. For S.’s Italian lyric on the same theme, and Medwin’s English translation of it, see Buona Notte (Longman iv 93–6, no. 387). Text from S.’s holograph inscribed on a blank page preceding page 50 of The Literary Pocket-Book; Or, Companion for the Lover of Nature and Art. 1819, which is now in the library of Eton College. A full stop has been added at the end of stanzas 1 and 3. Variants of substance only are given in the notes from other MSS and early printings: Morgan Library & Museum MA 3223 is abbreviated as M; The Literary Pocket-Book for 1822 as LPB 1822. Published in The Literary Pocket-Book for 1822, p. 123; MYRS viii 292–3 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

Goodnight? no love, the night is ill Which severs those it should unite; Let us remain together still, Then it will be — “good night”. 5

10

How were the night without thee, good Though thy sweet wishes wing its flight? Be it not said, thought, understood — Then it will be — “good night”. The hearts that on each other beat From evening close to morning light Have nights as good as they are sweet But never say “good night”.

¶ 28. 1. 1 no love] ah no Nbk 14, Harvard Nbk 1, M; ah! no LPB 1822, 1824, 1839. night] hour Harvard Nbk 1, 1824, 1839. 4. good night”] good night Nbk 14, Harvard Nbk 1; good night M, LPB 1822, 1824, 1839. 5. I cannot call the lone night good Nbk 10, Nbk 14; How can I call the lone night good Harvard Nbk 1, M, LPB 1822, 1824, 1839. 8. “good night”] good, night Nbk 14; good night Harvard Nbk 1, M; good night LPB 1822, 1824, 1839. 9. The hearts that rest beside each other Nbk 10; To hearts which near each other move Harvard Nbk 1, M, LPB 1822, 1824, 1839. 11. The line has only two words in Nbk 10: Find peace. The night is good; because, my love Harvard Nbk 1, M, LPB 1822, 1824, 1839. 12. They never say good night Harvard Nbk 1, M, LPB 1822, 1824, 1839.

29  ‘what men gain fairly, that should they possess’

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29  ‘What men gain fairly, that should they possess’ These ten lines are drafted in ink in Nbk 10 on the otherwise blank f. 60r rev. The draft, which has no title, is relatively clean with only a few revisions. As People of England, ye who toil and groan (Longman iii 253–5, no. 281) is drafted on either side of it — ff. 57v rev. to 59r rev., continuing on 60v rev. and 61r rev. — What men gain fairly was probably in place before S. completed drafting that longer fragment. Mary included the lines in 1840 under the title Fragment XIX, though she removed line 7, and assigned no date to them. Rossetti 1870/1878 grouped the nine lines of 1840 with other fragments of 1819. Forman 1876–7 iv 7–8 combined the 1840 text with the first six and a half lines of People of England, which Richard Garnett had transcribed from Nbk 10 and published in Relics, entitled the resulting fifteen and a half lines Fragment: To the People of England and dated them 1819, conjecturing ‘I think there can be little if any doubt that the whole sixteen lines, hitherto printed apart, belong together’. When, in preparing Huntington Nbks, Forman came to examine the draft in Nbk 10, he altered his opinion only a little: The occurrence of the heroic quatrain [i.e. ll. 5–8], now restored by the insertion of the suppressed line 7, lessens slightly the likelihood that this was part of the poem To the People of England, which, fragmentary and unfinished as it is, was, I scarcely doubt, intended for a poem in heroic couplets. (Huntington Nbks ii 182–3) The position of What men gain fairly amidst the drafts for People of England raises the possibility that the two might have been conceived as parts of a whole, but that possibility diminishes on examination. Although the first stanza of People of England appears to fall into the rhyme-scheme aabbcbcbdd, which is also that of What men gain fairly, the former is unfinished, and so inferences from the draft can only be made tentatively. Rhetorically each is distinct: People of England adapts a catalogue of specific grievances to a mode of direct address and exhortation, while What men gain fairly sets out the social dimension of morally acceptable ownership as a succession of principles. It is difficult to imagine how the two could fit harmoniously into a single poem. The moderate and realistic position on property set out in the opening lines contrasts with such earlier statements of S.’s as ‘No man has a right to monopolize more than he can enjoy’ of A Declaration of Rights (Prose Works i 59), so preparing the temperate ground against which the direct challenge to illegitimate possession that concludes the poem stands out the more trenchantly. Lines 1–4 lay down the principle that all value is founded upon labour, while conceding that the inconveniences of accumulation and inheritance may be consistent with general welfare. Then the force, fraud and connivance with these that S. regarded as ­underpinning the unjust political system of contemporary England are equated with thievery, and the right of the dispossessed to recover what is theirs unequivocally declared. S. advances more detailed and nuanced arguments for these positions in a passage in PVR (Julian vii 37–43) which serves as an illuminating commentary on What men gain fairly. Between the poem and the prose treatise, there is a critical difference, however. In the latter, the only recovery of unjustly held property which S. countenances is a tax to be levied for the general good in case of ‘public emergency’, while in the poem, the remedy is uncompromising: the possessor may be

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divested of goods of illegitimate origin as a thief would be of his plunder. As the lines are so intimately related to the passage of PVR cited above, they were probably composed at the same time or slightly thereafter — from early November 1819 to end of January 1820 (SC vi 951–5). And, as the passage of PVR in question occurs some two-thirds of the way through, that range may be narrowed to the period December 1819 to January 1820. It was probably to be included in S.’s proposed volume of ‘popular songs’, for which see headnote to Song: To the Men of England. Text from Nbk 10 f. 60r rev. Full stops have been added at the end of ll. 4 and 10. Published in 1840 321 (except for l. 7); Huntington Nbks ii 181–2; MYRS iv 246–7 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

‘What men gain fairly, that should they possess’

5

10

What men gain fairly, that should they possess And children may inherit idleness From him who earns it . . . this is understood — Private injustice may be general good. But he who gains by base and armèd wrong Or guilty fraud, or base compliances With those whom force or falsehood has made strong May be despoiled; even as a stolen dress Is stripped from a convicted thief and he Left in the nakedness of infamy.

¶ 19. 1–3. GM compares Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (2nd edn, 1790): ‘The only security of property that nature authorizes and reason sanctions is, the right a man has to enjoy the acquisitions which his talents and industry have acquired; and to bequeath them to whom he chooses. Happy would it be for the world if there were no other road to wealth or honour . . .’ (MWW v 24). 1. should they] they should 1840. 3. it . . .] it— 1840. 4. The line recalls the subtitle of Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714). Mandeville argued that vices, and in particular those of pride, luxury and fraud, were necessary to stimulate the prosperity of a large, ambitious and warlike trading nation such as Britain. S. had specifically challenged this view in An Address to the Irish People (1812): Prose Works 36. Mary records reading The Fable of the Bees between early February and 3 March 1820 (Mary Jnl i 308–11). In this line, S. does not espouse that view specifically, but states a more general principle, one that is consistent with, for example, the positive role attributed to self-interest in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776). S. recognizes the social advantages of a system of property that is held to be unjust on a strict reckoning in PVR (Julian vii 37–9). 5. base] bare is a possible reading. Cp. L&C 1160: ‘armèd men, whose glittering swords were bare’. 8–10. S. habitually imagines the process of uncovering political fraud as the removal of deceptive garments: see God save the Queen! [A New National Anthem] 25–8 and Dawson 203–4.

30  an exhortation

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30  An Exhortation Published in 1820 as one of the Miscellaneous Poems. The untitled draft is on ff. 47v rev.–48v rev. of Nbk 10, written crossways over other drafts and in spaces left blank on partially filled pages. A rejected line apparently intended for stanza 3 is drafted on both f. 45v rev. and in part on f. 47r rev: ‘Think not gold or flattery vile.’ As the drafts that were already on these pages all appear to date from autumn 1819 to the end of the year, An Exhortation was probably composed no earlier than December 1819. Mary’s transcription in Harvard Nbk 1 76–7, where the title and a few alterations have been added in S.’s hand, is dated by her Pisa, April 1820; this may record either the date of composition or of her transcription or both. As there are some substantive differences between the Nbk 10 draft and the fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1 — the stanzas are drafted in the order 1–3–2, for example — S. must either have guided Mary as she transcribed or himself prepared a fair copy from which she worked (MYRS v 171). In 1839 Mary placed An Exhortation among the Poems Written in 1819, so on a strict consideration of the evidence a date of composition more precise than late 1819 — April 1820 cannot be determined. However, the fact that the draft in Nbk 10 is written crossways probably indicates that it was entered late in the period through spring 1820 (the time during which S. used the nbk) when few pages remained blank. This, combined with the Harvard Nbk 1 date, makes composition in April 1820 more likely, though an earlier date remains possible. On 8 May 1820, S. included in a letter to the Gisbornes what he described as ‘a little thing about Poets; which is itself a kind of an excuse for Wordsworth & [?]. You may shew it Hunt if you like’ (L ii 195). His remarks have been taken as referring to An Exhortation, which would have pleased Hunt for its assertion of the poet’s native independence of mind. In the poem, S. returns in a lighter tone and a minor key to the theme of the poet’s relation to ‘wealth or power’, which he had elaborated at length in PB3 and evoked briefly in the fragment Proteus Wordsworth, who shall bind thee? (Longman iii 160–1, no. 243). In the Dedication to PB3, S. says of the poet Peter, a satirical portrait of Wordsworth: ‘He changes colours like a chameleon, and his coat like a snake’ (32–3). Traditional emblem of inconstancy and flattery, from its ability to change the colour of its skin, the chameleon is among the ‘creeping things that creep upon the earth’ which are considered to be contagiously unclean in Leviticus xi 29–44. Text from 1820. The capitalisation of Harvard Nbk 1 has been adopted. Punctuation has been slightly modified after consulting the draft in Nbk 10, the Harvard Nbk 1 fair copy, and 1839. Published in 1820.

An Exhortation

5

Chameleons feed on light and air: Poets’ food is love and fame: If in this wide world of care Poets could but find the same With as little toil as they, Would they ever change their hue

¶ 30. 1. According to legend, the chameleon nourished itself on air: cp. Hamlet II ii 93–4: ‘of the chameleon’s dish. I eat the air’, and Ovid, Met. xv 411. 4. the same] I.e. love and fame. 5. they] the chameleons. 6. Would they ever] They would never Nbk 10.

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shelley: selected poems As the light Chameleons do, Suiting it to every ray Twenty times a day?

10

15

20

25

Poets are on this cold earth As Chameleons might be, Hidden from their early birth In a cave beneath the sea; Where light is, chameleons change: Where love is not, Poets do: Fame is love disguised: if few Find either, never think it strange That Poets range. Yet dare not stain with wealth or power A Poet’s free and heavenly mind: If bright Chameleons should devour Any food but beams and wind, They would grow as earthly soon As their brother lizards are. — Children of a sunnier star, Spirits from beyond the moon — O, refuse the boon!

7. light] nimble, agile, but also frivolous, fickle. 10–18. The draft of l. 12 (see note below) helps to clarify this ‘rather obscure’ passage (Locock 1911): ‘Poets change colours when deprived of love and fame as a chameleon does when provided with light and air. In this world poets find love and fame as rarely as a chameleon would find light if from its birth it were confined to an undersea cave. What surprise, then, that poets range; i.e. inconstantly change attachments, affections?’ (OED v1 2.). 10. on] in Harvard Nbk 1. 12. Sent to nurse canc. darkness from their birth Nbk 10. 13. The dwelling-place of another figure of inconstancy, the sea-god and seer Proteus, was traditionally said to be a cave under the sea: Theresa M. Kelley, ‘Proteus and Romantic Allegory’, ELH xlix (1982) 631. 18. Poets] poets Harvard Nbk 1. 23. earthly] S. is punning on the etymology of chameleon, from the Gk καμαί (on the ground, dwarf) and λέων (lion). Most species of chameleon are tree-dwellers. 25. sunnier] distant Nbk 10. 27. refuse] reject Nbk 10. boon] of wealth or power (l. 19).

31 song

385

31 Song

To the Men of England There is an untitled fair copy of this well-known political song in S.’s hand in Box  1 ff. 75v–76r, on pages originally part of Harvard Nbk 1 from which they were torn out. See headnotes to To — Lines to a Critic and To — Lines to a Reviewer. Mary transcribed S.’s fair copy into Mary Copybk 2 and published it in 1839 with the present title (see note to title). The only drafts of the poem as published in 1839 that are known to survive are versions of ll. 29–30 and 32 in Nbk 14 pp. 8, 17. On the latter page, S. also drafted what appears to be a discarded stanza intended for the Song, apparently to follow l. 28. ?[O], not to miscreate, — abstain From forcing to this world of pain The children to whom ye dare not give Aught that makes life worth to live. In composing the Song, S. seems to have drawn largely on his draft of People of England: see headnote to no. 281 (Longman iii 253–5) and notes to ll. 6 and 9 below. Discarding several of its secondary themes, he transforms that draft’s long stanzas framed as apostrophes elaborated through a series of dependent clauses to the ballad stanza he adopted for MA with its elementary parallelisms and repetitions, and its seven-syllable lines rhyming aabb. The earlier draft’s final exhortation to resist oppression is also altered, into the Song’s bitter concluding stanza, at once taunt and lament, a tone entirely absent from People of England but consistent with the belligerent rancour of To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh] and To —— (Corpses are cold in the tomb). The peculiarity of S.’s Song can be appreciated by comparing it to Byron’s Song for the Luddites (1816) and Thomas Campbell’s Song: ‘Men of England’ (1822). On 1 May 1820, S. wrote to Leigh Hunt: ‘I wish to ask you if you know of any bookseller who would like to publish a little volume of popular songs wholly political,  & destined to awaken & direct the imagination of the reformers. I see you smile but answer my question’ (L ii 191). As S.’s plan for such a collection does not appear to have developed much beyond the stage of this proposal, it is impossible to be sure which of the poems he had drafted or completed by Spring 1820 (or shortly thereafter) he might have intended for it. Commentators have suggested slightly varying lists of likely inclusions. On a fairly broad definition of ‘song’, the present one might well have been accompanied by God save the Queen! [A New National Anthem], To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh], To —— (Corpses are cold in the tomb), What men gain fairly, that should they possess, England in 1819, A Ballad (Young Parson Richards stood at his gate) (Longman iii 485–93, no. 333) and MA. An Ode (‘Arise, arise, arise!’) (Longman iii 162–8), no. 244), eventually published in 1820, he might at first also have considered for the ‘little volume’. Six of these poems were copied fair into Harvard Nbk 1. In her ‘Note on Poems of 1819’ in 1839, Mary considered the political songs as ‘not among the best of his productions, a writer being always shackled when he endeavours to write down to the comprehension of those who could not understand or feel a highly imaginative style’ (iii 207). That the volume never came to fruition was due in part to the cautious reticence of Hunt and Charles Ollier, whom S. regarded at that time as the principal or only outlets for his work in England. Hunt received a number of poems from S. in late 1819, which neither he nor Ollier was prepared to publish, among them PB3, MA and England in 1819. Although in a letter to S. of 2 December 1819, he declared himself ready to arrange for the publication of ‘your political

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songs & pamphlets’ without the ‘timid’ Ollier (SC vi 1090), Hunt will have been intimidated by the passage in that month of the final two of the ‘Six Acts’ as part of the government’s response to the post-Peterloo crisis. These were designed to control the press by reinforcing the laws against books and periodicals deemed ‘blasphemous’ and/or ‘seditious’ and so discourage the publication of works that risked becoming the object of government prosecution. Mary recalled these circumstances in 1839: ‘He had an idea of publishing a series of poems adapted expressly to commemorate their [the people’s] circumstances and wrongs — he wrote a few, but in those days of prosecution for libel they could not be printed’ (iii 207). S.’s draft of People of England is likely to have been written in the period December 1819– January 1820. In view of its apparent dependence on that earlier draft, the present Song should probably be dated between January and 1 May 1820 when S. wrote to Leigh Hunt to propose the volume of popular songs mentioned above. Carlene Adamson (BSM v p. xxxi) argues for a composition date of Spring 1820 for this and other political songs drafted in Nbk 14 despite their being included in 1839 by Mary among the poems of 1819: these include To —— (Corpses are cold in the tomb) and Liberty (Longman iii 319–22, no. 300). Text from Box 1 ff. 75v–76r. S.’s fair copy was not prepared for the press; its punctuation has been supplemented with reference to 1839. Published in 1839 (iii 186–7); MYRS v (facsimile of MS).

Song To the Men of England Men of England, wherefore plough For the lords who lay ye low? Wherefore weave with toil and care The rich robes your tyrants wear? 5

Wherefore feed and clothe and save From the cradle to the grave Those ungrateful drones who would Drain your sweat — nay, drink your blood?

Wherefore, Bees of England, forge 10 Many a weapon, chain and scourge, That these stingless drones may spoil ¶ 31. Title. S.’s holograph in Harvard Nbk 1 is headed ‘Men of England — &c — A Song’ in what is very probably Mary’s hand. It is uncertain whether the heading was intended as a formal title or, what seems more likely, a short title to identify a poem left untitled by S. Whether it carries his authority is impossible to determine. The title or short title is repeated in Mary’s Contents at the end of the nbk, but not all the titles she lists there are consistent with other authoritative MS evidence. J&M, for example, is listed as ‘Maddalo and Julian’, and Stanzas Written in Dejection — December 1818, Near Naples as ‘Lines Written at Naples’. See MYRS v 156. In 1839, Song is printed as title and To the Men of England as subtitle, a disposition retained in the present text. 2. ye] thee Harvard Nbk 1, evidently S.’s error of transcription which Mary first transcribed into Mary Copybk 2, then corrected in 1839. 6. from the cradle to the grave] Cp. People of England 10. 9. Bees of England] The analogy between the social lives of bees and human beings for moral commentary and satire had long been a commonplace — from one of its principal ancient sources in Virgil’s Georgics IV through Swift’s The Battle of the Books (1704) and Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees (1714). For the latter, see What men gain fairly 4 and note. Dawson (51) points out the use of the analogy by radicals such as Paine, Wooler and Spence to enforce a political message like that in the present stanza. Cp. People of England 20–26. 10. scourge] a whip or lash.

31 song

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The forced produce of your toil?

15

Have ye leisure, comfort, calm, Shelter, food, love’s gentle balm? Or what is it ye buy so dear With your pain and with your fear?

The seed ye sow, another reaps; The wealth ye find, another keeps; The robes ye weave, another wears; 20 The arms ye forge, another bears. Sow seed — but let no tyrant reap: Find wealth — let no impostor heap: Weave robes — let not the idle wear: Forge arms — in your defence to bear. 25

30

Shrink to your cellars, holes, and cells — In halls ye deck another dwells. Why shake the chains ye wrought? Ye see The steel ye tempered glance on ye. With plough and spade and hoe and loom Trace your grave and build your tomb, And weave your winding-sheet — till fair England be your Sepulchre.

27–8. Ye see] Box 1 reads ‘when see’, an obviously unfinished phrase which S. apparently left as such pending revision. Mary transcribed ‘when we’, then cancelled ‘we’ and wrote ‘see’ above the line (Mary Copybk 2), altering this to Ye see in 1839. 28. glance] Various senses are possible: the verb may mean ‘to flash, gleam’ and/or ‘to move rapidly, esp. in an oblique or transverse direction’ (OED 2). The awkwardly phrased couplet would then carry the sense: ‘Why try to escape from the chains you have fashioned? When they flash (or sway) you see that you yourselves have tempered the steel of which they are made.’ If, however, glance is understood as ‘to strike a glancing blow’, which seems more likely, then the sense of the second sentence would be: ‘You see the weapons, the steel for which you have tempered, turned against you’, or possibly ‘glint on you’, which would be a clear allusion to Peterloo. 31. weave your winding-sheet] Carl Woodring cites Gray’s The Bard (49–50): ‘ “Weave the warp, and weave the woof,/The winding-sheet of Edward’s race” ’: Politics and English Romantic Poetry (1970) 264. But S. may well be making an ironic revision of stanza II of Byron’s Song for the Luddites (1816): When the web that we weave is complete, And the shuttle exchanged for the sword, We will fling the winding sheet O’er the despot at our feet, And dye it deep in the gore he has pour’d (6–10) (Byron PW iv 48). 32. Sepulchre] Box 1 f. 76r; sepulchre Mary Copybk 2, 1839, eds. In Nbk 14, after an earlier draft of the first two lines of the discarded stanza quoted in the headnote above, S. continued: ‘So let famed Albions land become/At once the mother’ (17).

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32  To —— (‘Corpses are cold in the tomb’) These five stanzas were first published in The Athenaeum for 2 December 1832 (724) under the title Lines Written during the Castlereagh Administration. They are there attributed to ‘The Late Percy Bysshe Shelley’ and preceded by a brief notice: ‘There is something fearful in the solemn grandeur of these lines. They may, however, be now published without the chance of exciting either personal or party feeling.’ In the course of 1832, The Athenaeum had published several pieces of verse and prose by S. in a continuing series, ‘The Shelley Papers’, of which the present poem is an instalment. The following year Thomas Medwin included it in Medwin (1833) in a text identical to the one printed in The Athenaeum; this and the title of his volume give grounds for concluding that it was he who supplied the poem to the magazine. Several sections of his ‘Memoir of Shelley’ had also appeared in The Athenaeum during 1832, some containing previously unpublished verse. But Medwin’s role in The Athenaeum publication has been contested. In The Browning Box or The Life and Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes as reflected in letters by his friends and admirers (1935), H. W. Donner, the editor of the volume, printed a letter (18–19) of 3 July 1824 from Mary to Thomas Forbes Kelsall, a young lawyer and friend of Beddoes, with whom he shared an enthusiasm for S.’s poetry, and who was also one of the financial guarantors of 1824. An untitled transcription of To —— (Corpses are cold in the tomb) is appended to the letter, without introduction or comment, by Mary. Both letter and transcription are included in the version printed in The Browning Box in Mary L i 432–33, which accepts them as genuine. The transcription of the poem agrees in all essentials with Mary’s untitled transcript in Mary Copybk 1, from which the text of 1839 was derived, apart from the variants recorded in the notes to ll. 16, 22 and 25 below. Donner also prints an extract from a letter of 22 October 1832 from C. W. Dilke, the editor of The Athenaeum, expressing his willingness to publish an unnamed Shelley poem that Kelsall had sent him, evidently this one, as well as to pay ‘any reasonable price’ for the MS (21). From this evidence, Donner infers that it was Kelsall and not Medwin who supplied Corpses are cold to Dilke, explaining the variants in ll. 16 and 22 of the Athenaeum text as arising from Kelsall’s difficult handwriting (144). It may be so: there seems no good reason to question Donner’s account, though it rests upon the hypothesis of a transcription by Mary which is not known to survive. Carlene Adamson (BSM v p. xxxv) questions the existence of such a transcription, which could have been furnished by Kelsall to the Athenaeum, conjecturing that that text was based instead on a transcription by Medwin from one of S.’s holograph fair copies: either Harvard Nbk 1 (149–50) or Harvard MSS ff. 1Bv–1Br. If so, the transcription by Medwin, which is not known to survive either, is likely to have been based on Harvard Nbk 1, which it resembles more closely; the variants would then be either errors made by Medwin in transcribing or misreadings by the Athenaeum compositor. Medwin was certainly staying with S. in Pisa in November 1820 when S. sent Corpses are cold to Ollier (L ii 246). On the available evidence, it is impossible to choose confidently between these two hypotheses. But neither is the question of any significance for the establishment of the text. As the substantive Athenaeum variants exist in neither of the two Harvard holographs, there are no persuasive grounds for accepting them as authoritative. The stanzas were drafted in Nbk 14 pp. 10–12, then transcribed by S. into Harvard Nbk 1. This fair copy bears the title England in what appears to be Mary’s hand (as MYRS v 192 points out), and it is listed by her in the Contents at the end of the nbk by the same title. Another holograph fair copy was transcribed, and is now among the Harvard MSS (ff. 1Bv–1Br). Entitled simply To ——, it is substantially identical to the holograph in Harvard Nbk 1 apart from the title and the important variant in l. 24 (see note). Although it is not punctuated with the care of the press-copy MSS of MA or PB3, this version appears to have

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-32

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been posted by S. to Charles Ollier from Pisa on 10 November 1820 with particular instructions for its publication: I enclose also another poem, which I do not wish to be printed with Julian & Maddalo, but, at the end of the second edition of the Cenci, or of any other of my writings, to which my name is affixed, if any other should at present have arrived at a second edition which I do not expect. I have a purpose in this arrangement, & have marked the Poem I mean by a cross. (L ii 246) The Harvard MSS holograph is marked with a large cross on the blank half of f. 1Bv next to stanza two of the poem, a material indication that this was the MS sent to Ollier. An identical title, To ——, is also adopted by S. for the MS of To —— [the Lord Chancellor], on part of which Corpses are cold is transcribed (see headnote). The title clearly announces that an actual unnamed individual is addressed, which may or may not have been S.’s intention when drafting the poem. Stanzas 3–5 suggest that this individual is a figure of national importance, a government minister perhaps, or even the Prince Regent. Such calculated uncertainty as to the identity of the addressee is obviously part of ‘the purpose in this arrangement’ that S. mentions in the letter to Ollier. Another purpose of S.’s instructions is surely to contrive an outlet for a bitterly controversial poem in view of Ollier’s unwillingness to publish PB3 and Hunt’s refusal to print MA in the Examiner: see headnotes to PB3 (Longman iii 70–81, no. 239) and MA. The title Lines Written during the Castlereagh Administration in The Athenaeum, Medwin (1833), and 1839 transparently hints that the individual is Lord Castlereagh himself, whereas the title England (apparently written by Mary) in Harvard Nbk 1, introduces the poem as a comment on the state of the nation, like England in 1819, with which it shares a strain of rancorous vituperation. In these 25 lines, S. turns to frank and grotesque political assault of the implications of the choral song in PU I 780–8 beginning ‘Though Ruin now Love’s shadow be’. Curran (1975) pertinently identifies the poem’s generic orientation as ‘an epithalamium — perhaps an anti-epithalamium — celebrating the marriage of Oppression and Ruin, whose aborted issue is British Liberty’ (182). In 1839, Mary placed Corpses are cold among the Poems of 1819. The first two stanzas would certainly be appropriate commentary on the events of Peterloo and the repression of dissent in the months thereafter — see headnote to MA — so that a date of composition before autumn 1819 can be excluded. Carlene Adamson (BSM v p. xxxi) argues that this and other political songs in Nbk 14 are more likely to date from Spring 1820, closer to the time of S.’s letter to Leigh Hunt (1 May) proposing a small volume of such poems: see headnote to Song: To the Men of England. The proximity of another draft datable to Spring 1820 in the nbk would support her argument (see headnote to Liberty, Longman iii 319–22, no. 300), as would the position of the fair copy near the end of Harvard Nbk 1 which was used between c. late summer 1819 and late summer 1820 for copies of recently completed poems. Although the position of the poem in each of these nbks needs to be treated with caution and cannot be regarded as decisive, to place the date of composition in the period early 1820 and 1 May 1820 seems best to accommodate the various strands of evidence. Rossetti 1878 was the first to publish the readings from Harvard MSS in ll. 4 and 24. Rossetti had seen, he says, ‘in or about 1874 . . . Shelley’s own MS. of this poem: it had been purchased at a sale for an American collector’; it was from this MS that he transcribed the readings in question. The collector seems certain to have been C. W. Fredrickson of Brooklyn, NY, from whose collection G. E. Woodberry obtained the MS now at Harvard. Woodberry 1893 includes collations of both Harvard holographs in his notes. Text from Harvard MSS ff. 1Bv–1Br. This copy is lightly punctuated: a semicolon has been supplied at the end of l. 12, an exclamation mark at the end of l. 21 and a comma after Ruin in l. 24. Substantive variants only from other textual witnesses are recorded. Published in The Athenaeum (2 December 1832) 724; MYRS v 205–4 (facsimile of MS).

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To —— [‘Corpses are cold in the tomb’]

5

Corpses are cold in the tomb — Stones on the pavement are dumb — Abortions are dead in the womb And their mothers look pale, like the death-white shore Of Albion, free no more.

10

Her sons are as stones in the way — They are masses of senseless clay — They are trodden and move not away — The abortion with which she travaileth Is Liberty, smitten to death.

15

Then trample and dance, thou Oppressor! For thy Victim is no redressor; Thou art sole lord and possessor Of her corpses and clods and abortions — they pave Thy path to the grave.

20

Hearest thou the festival din Of Death and Destruction and Sin, And Wealth crying havoc! within? ’Tis the Bacchanal triumph that makes truth dumb — Thine Epithalamium —

¶ 32. 3. Abortions] Lifeless foetuses soon to be stillborn, as ll. 9–10 make clear. 4. death-white] Both the Harvard holographs read thus; death- is careted in above the line in Harvard Nbk 1.1839 and Athenaeum 1832 read white, as do the drafts in Nbk 14 and Mary Copybk 1. 9. with which she travaileth] with which she is in labour. 12. redressor] ‘One who redresses or rectifies (esp. a wrong)’: OED. 16. festival] festal Athenaeum 1832. 18. crying havoc!] To ‘cry havoc’ was originally the signal to an army to despoil and pillage a conquered enemy (OED havoc n. 1) as in Julius Caesar III i 276. 19. that] which Harvard Nbk 1, Mary Copybk 1, Athenaeum 1832, 1839. Bacchanal triumph] The phrase associates two kinds of ceremony practised in ancient Rome. A triumph was a formal procession commemorating a military victory over a foreign foe (see MA 57 and note). The celebration of the Bacchanalia involved secret religious rites in honour of Bacchus (Gk Dionysus), the god of wine and ecstasy, during which the conduct of the initiates, often drunken and riotous, was accompanied by loud singing, and the beating of drums and cymbals. The Bacchanalia was condemned as a pretext for debauchery and crime and banned by the Roman senate in 186 bc. Livy provides an account of its origins in Greece, introduction to Rome and eventual proscription throughout Italy in History of Rome XXXIX viii–xviii. S.’s use of Bacchanal here recalls Byron’s dedicatory letter prefixed to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV (1818): ‘the bacchanal roar of the songs of exultation still yelled from the London taverns, over the carnage of Mont St. Jean, and the betrayal of Genoa, of Italy, of France . . .’ (Byron PW ii 124). 20. Epithalamium] A song traditionally sung outside the bridal chamber on the night of a wedding. Between this and the next stanza, S. has drafted in Nbk 14 three lines which he did not develop further: ‘Lift up thy [?] beaver/Cast off thy dark mask forever —/Impious and hoary Deciever’ (sic).

33  the sensitive-plant

25

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Aye, marry thy ghastly wife! Let Fear and Disquiet and Strife Spread thy couch in the chamber of Life: Marry Ruin, thou Tyrant, and Hell be thy guide To the bed of the bride.

33  The Sensitive-Plant Date of composition. In 1839, Mary placed SP first among the Poems Written in 1820; her notation at the end of the fair copy she transcribed into Harvard Nbk 1 is more precise: ‘Pisa — March — 1820.’ This may record the month of composition, of her transcription or both. The evidence of the draft MSS, while it does not positively confirm March 1820 as the period of composition, is not inconsistent with it. Complete or nearly complete drafts have survived for fifty-six of the poem’s seventy-eight stanzas, most of them in Nbk 11 where they are dispersed over some thirty pages among drafts and fair copies of other poems and prose in this nbk of notably miscellaneous contents. The Nbk 11 drafts continue, the stanzas not strictly in the order in which they appear in 1820, where SP was first published, up to Part Third ll. 70–3. The remainder of the poem appears to have been drafted in Nbk 12, although of these drafts only the final three stanzas of the Conclusion have survived. The few legible letters that remain on the stubs of several pages torn from that nbk, however, show that these pages carried the earlier stanzas of the Conclusion as well as some of the later stanzas of Part Third. Since a number of nearby pages are missing from Nbk 12, it is quite likely that it contained drafts of all the stanzas not present in Nbk 11. Both these nbks were in regular use during 1819, and both contain poems completed towards the end of that year. The SP drafts in Nbk 12 follow closely on, in the reverse direction of the nbk, from those for Act IV of PU (November–December 1819), while those for SP in Nbk 11 are scattered among the drafts of various poems dating from late 1819. See BSM xviii pp. xlviii–l; MYRS vi p. liii. Remarks in two of S.’s letters also bear on the date of composition. On 5 April 1820, he wrote to Leigh Hunt: We have pleasant apartments on the Arno, at the top of a house, where we just begin to feel our strength, for we have been cooped up in narrow rooms all this severe winter, and I have been irritated to death for the want of a study. I have done nothing, therefore, until this month, and now we begin our accustomed literary occupations. (L ii 180) S. is contrasting the Shelleys’ exiguous lodgings in the boarding-house of Madame Merveilleux du Plantis at Florence where they stayed from 2 October 1819 until 26 January 1820, with the smaller apartments in the Casa Frassi at Pisa, which they occupied from 22. Disquiet] Disgust Athenaeum 1832. 24. Hell] God Nbk 14, Harvard Nbk 1, Mary Copybk 1, Athenaeum 1832, 1839. S.’s late revision, which removes a word that risked giving offence and might have attracted prosecution as blasphemous, also alters the ironic attack of the line. 25. the bride.] thy bride! Athenaeum 1832. In Nbk 14, S. originally wrote ‘thy’, then alt. it to the in Harvard Nbk 1.

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29 January to 13 March, with their present more spacious accommodation on the upper floor of the same house where they have been installed for just over three weeks. If ‘this month’ is taken to mean the previous four weeks or so, rather than the month of April, and to approximate the time (23 days) since they entered their new apartments, S. would have resumed ‘literary occupations’ in early to mid-March and so probably composed SP before the end of the month. If, however, by ‘this month’ April is meant, then he would have composed SP in the month following Mary’s date in Harvard Nbk 1. Just over two years after the letter to Hunt of April 1820, S. again wrote to him on 19 June 1822 from Lerici; in the letter, he refers to Jane Williams, whom he expected Hunt soon to meet as ‘a most delightful person — whom we all agree is the exact antitype of the lady I described in the Sensitive plant — though this must have been a pure anticipated cognition as it was written a year before I knew her’ (L ii 438). (By ‘antitype’ S. here means the embodiment of an earlier prophetic type: see note to PB3 (Longman iii 70–152, no. 239), Prologue 13–16.) S. met Jane Williams on 16 January 1821 (L ii 256–7), and is unlikely (in view of his remarks in the letter of 5 April 1820) to have written SP as early as January 1820, so his ‘knew her’ probably encompasses a few additional weeks of growing acquaintance and admiration and would in that case accord with composition in March 1820. In neither letter are the references to time unequivocal, and since each can plausibly be interpreted as concurring with Mary’s date in Harvard Nbk 1 neither represents a material challenge to her date as the time during which SP was written. From his untidy and unfinished drafts, S. must have made a fair copy which Mary then transcribed into Harvard Nbk 1. It is possible that this fair copy, which is not known to survive, was sent to England to serve as press-copy for 1820. On the other hand, in his letter to Charles Ollier of 14 May 1820 (L ii 197) S. writes that Mary is transcribing ‘the little poems to be printed at the end of Prometheus’. While SP seems likely to have been one of these, what Mary was transcribing may have been not the press-copy, but the ‘safe-keeping’ copy in Harvard Nbk 1 which she would have had to complete before S.’s fair copy was posted; in that case, her date of March 1820 in that nbk would be the date of composition. On the whole, SP was accurately printed in 1820, as comparison with Mary’s transcription in Harvard Nbk 1 confirms. Only two corrections were made to the 1820 text in 1829, apparently from S.’s list of errata: see ii 15, iii 19 and notes. A further error in 1820 at iii 26 (see note) was not corrected until 1839; see also iii 66 and note. The Harvard Nbk 1 transcription numbers the stanzas consecutively within each part, a feature not reproduced in 1820. Sources and Influences. The sensitive-plant of S.’s poem belongs to the genus mimosa, which contains over 450 varieties. Its species is mimosa pudica. The two terms of the Latin denomination combine the sense ‘mimic’ with that of ‘bashful, modest or chaste’. The sensitive-plant’s leaves fold up in response to a range of external stimuli; hence its English name. Popularly known as the ‘humble plant’ or ‘shame plant’, and in the West Indies as ‘Shame Lady’ and ‘Shame Darling’, it is addressed as ‘my Lady Squeamish’ in William Cowper’s The Poet, the Oyster, and the Sensitive Plant (1782). (The sex of the Sensitive-Plant in S.’s poem is never specified; see note to i. 6.) In its native American environment, mimosa pudica grows wild as a weed. Introduced to Europe in the sixteenth century, it was cultivated as a curiosity in greenhouses and gardens in England. S. may well have encountered examples of the sensitive-plant directly. He almost certainly read of it in Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants (1789), perhaps also in William Nicholson’s British Encyclopedia (1807–9), which he used extensively for the notes to Q Mab (see headnote in Longman i). In the article ‘Mimosa’, Nicholson describes mimosa sensitiva (a much larger variety) as the ‘sensitive

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plant’ and mimosa pudica as the ‘humble plant’, giving an account of the latter’s sensitivity under the entry ‘Botany’: The irritable nature of some leaves is remarkable, not but that all leaves may truly be said to possess irritability with respect to light. The phenomena however to which we now allude are of the most striking kind. The sensitive plant, mimosa pudica, common in hot-houses, when touched by any extraneous body, folds up its leaves one after another, while their footstalks droop as if dying. After a while they recover themselves again. The sensitive-plant also closes up in the absence of light, and it responds similarly to other mechanical as well as to thermal stimuli. These responses were considered by eighteenth-century botanists to be properly animal characteristics; in consequence, it was thought that the mimosa possessed a nervous sensibility. Thus in The Loves of the Plants, Erasmus Darwin observes of ‘the chaste MIMOSA’: Naturalists have not explained the immediate cause of the collapsing of the sensitive plant; the leaves meet and close in the night during the sleep of the plant, or when exposed to much cold in the day-time, in the same manner as when they are affected by external violence, folding their upper surfaces together, and in part over each other like scales or tiles . . . now as their situation after being exposed to external violence resembles their sleep, but with a greater degree of collapse, may it not be owing to a numbness or paralysis consequent to too violent irritation, like the faintings of animals from pain or fatigue? (Note to II i 301) Or, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica (4th edn 1810, art. Mimosa) puts it: ‘the leaves . . . by their motion, mimic or imitate, as it were, the motion of animals’. The sensitive-plant is an annual, a fact of significance for the narrative of SP. Cowper’s comic verse parable The Poet, the Oyster, and the Sensitive Plant dramatises a quarrel between the mollusc and the mimosa whether one or the other possesses the more exquisite sensitivity; both are then chided for egotism by the Poet, who recommends: pity, sympathy, and love, These, these are feelings truly fine, And prove their owner half-divine. (62–4) In a melancholy letter to Claire Clairmont of 11 December 1821 which recounts his current aversion to the cold and to any large company, S. describes himself as ‘The Exotic as you please to call me . . . belonging to the order of mimosa’ (L ii 367–8). In the letter to Hunt of 5 April 1820, S. writes of the Shelleys’ confined social life in Pisa: We see no one but an Irish lady and her husband, who are settled here. She is everything that is amiable and wise, and he is very agreeable. You will think it my fate either to find or to imagine some lady of 45, very unprejudiced and philosophical, who has entered deeply into the best and selectest spirit of the age, with enchanting manners, and a disposition rather to like me, in every town that I inhabit. But certainly such this lady is. (L ii 180)

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The object of S.’s praise was Margaret Jane Moore, Countess of Mountcashell (1772–1835), who for the past five years had been settled in Pisa where she had adopted the name of ‘Mrs Mason’. In September 1819, it was she who advised S. that the climate of Pisa would benefit his health, a principal reason for the Shelleys’ removal there in January 1820. Critical estimates of SP have had to reckon with the possibility that S. endowed the Lady in the poem with qualities borrowed from Lady Mountcashell ever since Medwin reported S.’s remarks to that effect: Almost the only person whom he visited this winter [of 1820] was the Countess of Mountcashell. She was a superior and accomplished woman, and a great resource to Shelley who read with her Greek. He told me that she was the source of the inspiration of his Sensitive Plant, and that the scene of it was laid in her Garden, as unpoetical a place as could be well imagined — but a true poet can turn everything into beauty. (Medwin (1913) 265) Exceptionally tall and of imposing appearance, Lady Mountcashell was forty-seven years old in early 1820 when the Shelleys began regularly to visit her house at Casa Silva. One of her many attractions for them must have been that the trajectory of her life up till then bore intriguing resemblances to their own. Born Margaret Jane King, second daughter of the wealthy Irish peer Robert Viscount Kingsborough of Mitchelstown in County Cork (later third Earl of Kingston), in 1791 she entered into a dynastic marriage with Stephen Moore, second Earl of Mountcashell. Between 1792 and 1804, the couple had eight children. In the latter year, in Rome, Lady Mountcashell began a liaison with George William Tighe which resulted in a separation from her husband in 1805. With Tighe, she had two further children who lived with them in Pisa, Laura or Laurette (b. 1809) and Nerina (b. 1815). The Countess was a woman of independent mind and unconventional manners. In the 1790s, she had been an active member of the United Irishmen and had written both inspirational fiction and controversial prose in support of the Irish nationalist cause. Although no democrat, she had reformist and republican sympathies, had opposed the Union with Great Britain, and had frequented a number of prominent Irish and English radicals. Among these was William Godwin, who had written a letter of introduction intended for her which S. and Mary carried with them when they left England in March 1818; for her part, Mary Jane Godwin had written to her separately to solicit her good offices towards Claire. A more intimate connection dated from her fourteenth and fifteenth years when the young Margaret King had had Mary Wollstonecraft as her governess; an affectionate and respectful bond had grown up between the two, which Margaret had come to regard as a principal directing force in her life. Like her erstwhile governess, the Countess had a developed and systematic interest in the physical and medical aspects of child-rearing; her views on child health and well-being would be published in 1823 as Advice to Young Mothers on the Physical Education of Children. Unusually for a woman of her station, she had nursed her own children. Her earlier collection of fiction for the young, Stories of Old Daniel: or Tales of Wonder and Delight (1808), remained in print through the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1820 she published Continuation of the Stories of Old Daniel. She was intellectually alert and widely read and held progressive political opinions, but it was the union in her of an informed and cultivated intellect with a cheerful, benign and equable disposition that impressed the Shelleys and especially Claire.

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While there is no good reason to suspect Medwin of fabrication or distortion, it is important to recognise that his phrase ‘the source of the inspiration of his Sensitive Plant’ does not unequivocally affirm that the Countess was the prototype of the Lady in the poem, as Forman noted (Medwin (1913) 265). Moreover, the Lady’s beauty and ‘aery footstep’ could not be a direct representation of the physical appearance of the middle-aged ‘Mrs Mason’ in 1820 (Janet Todd, Rebel Daughters (2003) 329); and, although the Lady’s ‘lovely mind’ (ii 6) and maternal beneficence might well have been inspired by her, the portrait in SP wants the specific physical and mental detail that would allow the claim of any ‘original’ to be decisively tested. Mary’s attempt to send her a sensitive-plant in January 1823 would seem to confirm at least that the Pisan circle recognised an association between her and the Lady (Edward McAleer, The Sensitive Plant (1958) 173). On the other hand, no mention of her garden is made in S.’s letters of the period or in Mary’s or Claire’s, or in Mary Jnl or Claire Jnl, while in the passage quoted above Medwin emphasises the inventive licence S. allowed himself in creating the setting of SP. An additional source for the Lady’s portrait is provided by the connection with Mary Wollstonecraft, who had been employed as governess to the 14-year-old Margaret King and her younger sister at their family home in Ireland from October 1786 to November 1787 when she was dismissed, allegedly because of Margaret’s excessive attachment to her. With the experience as governess in an aristocratic family, Mary turned to pedagogical fiction the following year in Original Stories from Real Life (with engravings by Blake) in which a governess, ‘Mrs Mason’, imparts lessons in compassionate principles and the practical morality deriving from them to 14-year-old Mary and 12-year-old Caroline. The frontispiece to the volume shows a young and attractive Mrs Mason at what appears to be the entrance to a walled garden, her arms outspread over her two young charges, the group framed by Blakean climbing plants to right and left. The caption is borrowed from the governess’s exhortation to the girls in chapter 1, ‘Look what a fine morning it is — Insects, Birds, Animals, are all enjoying existence’, an affirmation of natural harmony based in mutual pleasure which might stand as epigraph to the first two parts of SP. In the Stories, the garden and surrounding countryside serve as an important scene of Mrs Mason’s instruction, which includes a didactic comparison between the tulip and the rose (ch. vii) as well as advice on the humane disposal of harmful insects (ch. i), which the Lady of SP seems to have made her own (ii 41–8). It is clear that whatever inspiration for the Lady S. might have drawn from the Countess of Mountcashell was tinged with recollections of the fictional version of her governess, whose name the Countess had chosen to adopt. But Mary Wollstonecraft figured in S’s conception of the Lady in another way too. The drafts of SP reveal that he had at first endowed her with a frank sensuality which is tempered, though not removed, in the finished poem, and which contrasts with the modesty of dress and behaviour enjoined on the girls in Original Stories. In the draft, for example, the Lady ‘walked through the garden with little dress/But the robe of her own bright loveliness . . . bared her deep bosom and loosened her hair’ (Nbk 11 p. 139). The loose hair and bare bosom are details borrowed from the figure of the woman narrator of L&C 285, 302–4, itself an idealised and eroticised image of Mary Wollstonecraft. The affinity is reinforced by the appropriation of L&C 478–86 in the draft (Nbk 11 p. 140) for SP ii 17–20 (see note) — in particular, the phrase ‘the Spirit that clasped her in her repose’, which S. also removed from the finished poem.

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It is probable that another individual contributed to the figure of the Lady as well. S.’s remark in the letter to Hunt of 19 June 1822 (quoted above) on the resemblance between her and Jane Williams pays graceful tribute to Jane’s cheerful kindness of disposition and love of gardening. To be able to judge confidently whether this resemblance was purely fortuitous, it would be necessary to establish a more precise timetable of composition for SP in March 1820 than the evidence authorises. Such evidence as there is suggests otherwise. A letter from Medwin that S. received on the 19th of the month (L ii 184–5, Claire Jnl 135) apprised him of Jane’s personal beauty. Medwin will surely also have mentioned that, like himself and Edward Williams (the three were sharing a house in Geneva), Jane had lived in India; perhaps too that she was an enthusiastic gardener. The letter received on 19 March accompanied a manuscript copy of Medwin’s The Pindarees, a verse narrative in the style of Byron’s Turkish tales, though set in India and furnished with numerous details of local landscape, plants, animals and customs, which on S.’s recommendation Charles Ollier was to publish in 1821. Such an Indian context would account for what is not otherwise easy to explain, the Lady’s Indian basket (ii 43; see note) and the Indian plants in her garden (iii 30). Crook and Guiton (Shelley’s Venomed Melody (1986) 205) take these references as an indication that the poem is set in Kashmir, but the garden is deliberately unlocalised in the poem, the only other allusion to place being to Baiae on the Bay of Naples (ii 3). Moreover, since ‘all rare blossoms from every clime/Grew in that garden in perfect prime’ (i 39–40), its location can hardly be identified by any one group of them. The tradition deriving from Genesis ii 9, Dante, Purgatorio xxviii and Paradise Lost iv furnishes the earthly paradise with every plant produced by nature, and it is clearly this tradition that S. draws upon for the garden in SP. Apart from the exotic dimension they attach to the setting, the Indian references would seem to encode the desire that S. expresses in a somewhat facetious passage in his letter to Medwin of 20 April (he had received Medwin’s on 19 March), his anticipation of meeting the ‘lovely lady’ Jane as an antidote to his present melancholy. The ‘pure anticipated cognition’ (a joking appropriation of a term from Kantian philosophy: see PB3, note to l. 534) of the letter to Hunt of June 1822 would in that case be not unaccountable prescience but an uncanny confirmation of a fantasy of desire that he imagined on the basis of a few hints from Medwin. An incident from S.’s undergraduate days, which has been regarded as providing another clue to the Lady’s origin, was recounted by T. J. Hogg in the New Monthly Magazine xxxiv in two articles (April and July 1832) later incorporated into Hogg i 110– 18. Hogg recalls that on a winter ramble in the countryside round Oxford, he and Shelley happened upon an isolated and enclosed garden at a distance from the gentleman’s residence to which it belonged. Excited by this discovery, on the road home, S. imagined first an exquisite female who tended the garden, then another who helped her, and finally two sisters whose character he traced out in detail and whose mutual attachment typified the delicate, sympathetic and disinterested love with which they animated the garden. It may be that some memory of this incident influenced the setting and Lady of SP. But Hogg does not say that it did, and in any case caution is called for in weighing the truth of any report of this notoriously unreliable biographer. In the present case, he himself seems to acknowledge indirectly that later acquaintance with S.’s verse coloured his recollection: ‘the trifling incident has been impressed upon my memory, and has been intimately associated in my mind, through his creations, with his poetic character’ (July 1832 p. 67; Hogg i 118).

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Whatever weight of influence is allowed to these instances of present acquaintance, anticipation or memory, SP owes much to S.’s reading. Precedents that make up the literary tradition which he assimilated and revised, of a garden tended or overseen by a beautiful female, are to be found in Genesis i–iii, Paradise Lost iv and ix, the gardens of the enchantresses Armida (Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata XVI) and Alcina (Ariosto, Orlando Furioso VI), the Garden of Adonis in The Faerie Queene III vi 30–50, and the earthly paradise in Dante’s Purgatorio xxviii (see headnote to Longman iii, no. 331). The benevolence of the Indian maiden Seta in Medwin’s The Pindarees (1821) is modelled on an erotic interchange among natural elements and creatures which recalls SP i and ii: Yon orbs on high — this little flower, Are emblems of her [Nature’s] love, or power; This basil, that with mother’s care I water — shield from sun, and air, Is animate, and seems to know From whom its life and fragrance flow . . . and the air With incense breathing every where From flowers in slumber dreaming there; All, all is love. (pp. 67–8) The Lady’s death at the end of summer signals her affinity with the Persephone (who spends the autumn and winter of the year in the underworld as queen of Hades) whose myth S. also revises in SP, as Mary would do in her drama Proserpine written in late April and early May 1820. An early favourite, Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants (1789), created a garden which is the domain of a universal and personified erotic energy harmoniously ordered and based in scientific observation. Plato’s Symposium furnished a theory of Love which S. developed in a passage of central importance (i 66–77). Cowper’s fable The Poet, the Oyster, and the Sensitive Plant can be found in The Poems of William Cowper, ed. J. D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (1980) i 435–7. Pertinent biographical information on the Countess of Mountcashell is given in Edward McAleer, The Sensitive Plant: A  Life of Lady Mount Cashell (1958); Janet Todd, Rebel Daughters: Ireland in Conflict 1798 (2003); SC viii 897–915. Contemporary reviews of 1820 are on the whole positive about the miscellaneous poems in the volume, including SP — Blackwood’s vii (September 1820) singling out its ‘affecting’ qualities, though the comprehensively disapproving notice of the volume in the Quarterly Review xxvi (1821) taxes SP with metaphorical incoherence masked by ‘the tricks of a mere poetical harlequin’. Regularly quoted in magazines and annuals, SP was one of a small number of poems that helped to create S.’s reputation as a lyricist in the early nineteenth century (White ii 415). Text from 1820. Significant variants only from the draft in Nbks 11 and 12 and the fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1 are recorded in the notes. The capitalisation of Harvard Nbk 1 has been preferred. Published in 1820, MYRS v 47–61, MYRS vi 238–9 (facsimile and transcription of MSS).

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The Sensitive-Plant part first A Sensitive-plant in a garden grew, And the young winds fed it with silver dew, And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light And closed them beneath the kisses of night. 5

10

And the Spring arose on the garden fair Like the Spirit of love felt everywhere; And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breast Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest. But none ever trembled and panted with bliss In the garden, the field or the wilderness,

¶ 33. i. 3–4. Mimosa pudica has bipinnate leaves which open and close like a fan. In view of the plant’s Latin name, these lines carry a suggestion of coyness. Cp. The Woodman and the Nightingale 52–53 (Longman iv 54–62, no. 377): ‘the loveliness/Of fan-like leaves’. The mimosa responds to a variety of stimuli, including the withdrawal of light; see headnote. In l. 4, the sensitive-plant is exhibiting sleep movements (nyctinastism) common to many varieties of plant. Cp. Darwin II i 307–8: [the mimosa] ‘Shuts her sweet eye-lids to approaching night;/And hails with freshen’d charms the rising light’. This response is reversed in the Conclusion 23–24, in which ‘our’ organs ‘endure/No light’. i 6. And the Spirit of Love felt every where 1839; And the Spirit of Love fell every where 1840. Both the draft in Nbk 11 134 and Harvard Nbk 1 read as 1820. The conjecture in Forman 1876–7 is persuasive: that the misprint of And for Like in 1839 led Mary or someone in the printing house to substitute fell for felt in 1840 in order to make sense of the line. Cp. Lines Written among the Euganean Hills 366–68: And the love which heals all strife Circling, like the breath of life, All things in that sweet abode . . . S. draws on the literary tradition of a Golden Age when the earth spontaneously brought forth fruit and flowers without cultivation as in Metamorphoses I i 89 ff. Milton invokes the tradition in Paradise Lost, in which seasonal change is attributed to a shift of the Earth on its axis, as it is in James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730), which celebrates at length the atmosphere of love engendered by Spring (1746 edn 582–1176). S.’s adoption and revision of this tradition may have been prompted in part by a remark in the review of L&C/RofI in the Quarterly Review xxi (April 1819) 463: ‘According to him the earth is a boon garden needing little care or cultivation, but pouring forth spontaneously and inexhaustibly all innocent delights and luxuries to her innumerable children’. Following Linnaeus’ sexual classification of plants according to the number of males and females (stamens and pistils) on each, Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants, the second part of The Botanic Garden, imagines ‘What Beaux and Beauties crowd the gaudy groves,/And woo and win their vegetable Loves’ (Darwin II i 9–10). Cp. i 39–40, 66–69 and notes. i 8. Cp. OWW 5–10. i 9–12. Priscilla P. St. George, JEGP lxiv (1965) 482 detects an allusion in these lines to the Bride in the Song of Songs: ‘My beloved is like a roe or a young hart’ (ii 9).

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Like a doe in the noon-tide with love’s sweet want As the companionless Sensitive-plant.

15

20

The snow-drop and then the violet Arose from the ground with warm rain wet, And their breath was mixed with fresh odour, sent From the turf, like the voice and the instrument. Then the pied wind-flowers and the tulip tall, And narcissi, the fairest among them all, Who gaze on their eyes in the stream’s recess Till they die of their own dear loveliness; And the Naiad-like lily of the vale Whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale, That the light of its tremulous bells is seen Through their pavilions of tender green;

i 15–16. Anticipating similar synaesthetic descriptions in the poem; cp. i 27–28 and note. The breath of the flowers mixes with the odour of the turf as a musical instrument accompanies a voice. See S.’s letter to Peacock (23 March 1819) describing the scenery surrounding the Baths of Caracalla, which the Shelleys visited on 13 March (Mary Jnl i 252–53): S. notes the ‘radiant blue flowers, whose names I know not, & which scatter thro the air the divinest odour which as you recline under the shade of the ruin produces a sensation of voluptuous faintness like the combinations of sweet music’ (L ii 85). The intermingling of music, odour and colour is a figure for two interrelated ideas in the poem: 1. the communicative power of love (i 66–69), and 2. the Sensitive-plant’s indeterminate status between plant and animal. i 15. breath] ‘The exhalation and being of plants’ (Concordance). Darwin I  Additional Note xxxvii describes the function of leaves as respiratory organs. i 17. pied] Parti-coloured; of any two colours, especially of white blotched with another colour, also of three or more colours in patches or blotches (OED pied a). wind-flowers] The anemone. Darwin (note to II i 318) records that ‘Pliny says this flower never opens its petals but when the wind blows; whence its name’. See Pliny, Nat. Hist. xxi 94. The fragment entitled The Question —— (Longman iii 265–8, no. 288), which is drafted in Nbk 11 (164–6), includes ‘pied wind-flowers and violets’ (l. 9). The catalogue of flowers that runs from l. 13 to l. 57 borrows from the similar catalogue in The Question ——. i 18–20. In Met. iii 344–511, Narcissus is a youth who becomes enamoured of his own reflection as punishment for spurning the love of Echo. Unable to attain the object of his desire, he wastes away. In place of his corpse is found a white flower. Cp. Alastor 406–15, PU II v 105, and Paradise Lost iv 456– 69, in which Eve is attracted towards her own reflection in a lake before she is warned against self-love. i 19. recess] The depths of the stream into which the narcissi gaze. i 21. Naiad-like] In Greek mythology, naiads were water-nymphs incarnating the divinity of a spring or stream. The water-lily nymphaea odorata, mentioned in i 45, is also known as the water-nymph. lily of the vale] The lily of the valley: cp. the Song of Songs: ‘I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys’ (ii 1). i 23–4. The bell-like blossoms of the lily of the valley shine through the canopies (pavilions) of fresh spring verdure that enclose them.

400 25

30

35

shelley: selected poems And the hyacinth purple, and white, and blue Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew Of music so delicate, soft and intense, It was felt like an odour within the sense; And the rose like a nymph to the bath addrest, Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast, Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air The soul of her beauty and love lay bare; And the wand-like lily which lifted up, As a Maenad, its moonlight-coloured cup Till the fiery star, which is its eye, Gazed through clear dew on the tender sky;

i 25–28. The Quarterly Review xxvi (1821) 180 specifically dismissed these lines as ‘the tricks of a mere poetical harlequin’. Cp. Comus 555–56: ‘At last a soft and solemn-breathing sound/Rose like a steam of rich distilled perfumes’, and To Constantia (Thy voice, slow rising like a Spirit, lingers) 38–41. i 25. hyacinth] In Greek mythology, Hyacinthus was a youth beloved of Apollo and killed by the jealous Zephyrus. A flower sprang from the boy’s flowing blood. See PU II i 139–40 and note. i 29–36. These lines rework the language and imagery of PU Acts II and IV, recalling especially the interpenetration of the atmospheres of Moon and Earth in PU IV 319–502. See SP i 33–36 and notes. i. 29–32. Although S. drafted it in Nbk 11 136, this stanza is missing from Mary’s fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1. Probably she inadvertently passed it over in transcribing from S.’s fair copy, which served as press copy, or her error was corrected on another copy which served as press copy. The stanza is included in her later editions. The lines recall Panthea’s commentary on the transfiguration of Asia as the embodiment of love and beauty in PU II v 17–20: I scarce endure The radiance of thy beauty. Some good change Is working in the elements, which suffer Thy presence thus unveiled. i 29. addrest] Prepared, made ready. i 33–34. Cp. PU IV 473–75 in which the Moon’s path around the Earth is likened to the dance of the maenad, a female celebrant of Dionysian ecstasy: Like a Maenad, round the cup Which Agave lifted up In the weird Cadmaean forest. moonlight-coloured] Cp. The Question (Longman iii 265–8, no. 288) 18: ‘moonlight-coloured May’. i 35–36. Cp. PU IV 485–86: ‘As a violet’s gentle eye/Gazes on the azure sky’ and Ode to Heaven 46–48. star] Flowers and stars are frequently associated in S.’s poetry. In SP, the association is developed on a cosmic scale; the Lady, in tending the garden, is ‘as God is to the starry scheme’ (ii 4). Wasserman 159 and Webb 232–33 identify the Spanish poet Calderón’s La Cisma de Inglaterra and Il Principe constante as sources of S.’s correlation of stars and flowers in the poem. S. had been learning Spanish with Maria Gisborne during his residence in Livorno between June and September 1819. On 4 September, the Shelleys were joined at Livorno by Charles Clairmont, whom S. made ‘read Spanish all day long’

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And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose, The sweetest flower for scent that blows; And all rare blossoms from every clime Grew in that garden in perfect prime. And on the stream whose inconstant bosom Was pranked under boughs of embowering blossom With golden and green light, slanting through Their Heaven of many a tangled hue,

45

50

Broad water lilies lay tremulously, And starry river-buds glimmered by, And around them the soft stream did glide and dance With a motion of sweet sound and radiance. And the sinuous paths of lawn and of moss Which led through the garden along and across, Some open at once to the sun and the breeze, Some lost among bowers of blossoming trees,

(L ii 120; see headnote to Within the surface of the fleeting river (Longman iii 198–200, no. 258).) On 16 November 1819, he wrote to Maria Gisborne: ‘I have been reading Calderon without you. I have read the “Cisma de Ingalaterra” the “Cabellos de Absalon” & three or four others. These pieces, inferior to those we read, at least to the “Principe Constante” in the splendour of particular passages, are perhaps superior in their satisfying completeness’ (L ii 154). A year later, S. wrote to John Gisborne: ‘I am bathing myself in the light & odour of the flowery & starry Autos [of Calderón]’ (L ii 250). Yet the association between flowers and stars is traditional in poetry. Cp. Wordsworth’s To the Same Flower [the daisy] (1807) 33–34: ‘I see thee glittering from afar — /And then thou art a pretty star’; To the Small Celandine (1807), which S. adapts in a letter to Peacock of 6 July 1819 (L ii 100), and which equates the discovery of the flower with the discovery of a new star. i 37. jessamine] Jasmine; a climbing shrub with white flowers. Cp. Milton, Lycidas 143 and Paradise Lost iv 698. tuberose] Polianthes tuberosa: its fragrant blossoms are used in perfumes. i 39–40. The verb grew completes the catalogue of flowers which began at l. 17: ‘the emphasis falls less upon their variety than upon what may be called their “mutuality” ’ (Baker 196). prime] Maturity, with an allusion to spring, traditionally known as Prime. i 42–4. pranked] Decorated, bedecked: passing through the boughs with their blossoms of various colours the golden and green light ornaments the stream below. Cp. The Question —— 26: ‘purple pranked with white’. i 46. starry river-buds] Cp. The Question —— 27, ‘And starry river-buds among the sedge’ (i.e. close to the river). It may be that here too the river-buds should be understood as growing on the bank or near the bank of the stream, by having the sense of ‘near’. But perhaps the line means that the buds of plants growing on the banks have fallen into the stream and are carried along by it. i 47 glide and dance] glide or dance Harvard Nbk 1. The draft of the stanza in Nbk 11 p. 163 does not include this line. i 49–52. Cp. S.’s letter to Peacock of 23 March 1819 describing the landscape surrounding the Baths of Caracalla: ‘These woods are intersected on every side by paths . . . which wind to every part of these immense labyrinths’ (L ii 85). i 49. and of moss] and moss Harvard Nbk 1.

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55

Were all paved with daisies and delicate bells As fair as the fabulous asphodels, And flow’rets which drooping as day drooped too Fell into pavilions, white, purple, and blue, To roof the glow-worm from the evening dew.

60

And from this undefiled Paradise The flowers (as an infant’s awakening eyes Smile on its mother, whose singing sweet Can first lull, and at last must awaken it,) When Heaven’s blithe winds had unfolded them, As mine-lamps enkindle a hidden gem,

i 54. asphodels] The asphodel is a liliaceous plant common to the south of Europe. In Homer’s Odyssey xi 539, the asphodel is a native of the Elysian fields (see i 106–9 and note): cp. Paradise Lost ix 1040, Pope, Ode for Music on St. Cecilia’s Day 74. i 55. An allusion to the sleep-movements of plants. Darwin (note to II ii 165) describes Linnaeus’ ‘Watch of Flora’, which catalogues forty-six species of flower possessing sensibility towards changes in light according to the time of day. Following Linnaeus, Darwin notes: ‘tropical flowers open in the morning and close before evening every day, but the hour of the expanding becomes earlier or later, as the length of day increases or decreases’. i 56. pavilions] See note to i 23–4. i 57. Cp. the hymn to the sun in Darwin I i 193–94: [the office of fire-nymphs is to] ‘Warm on her mossy couch the radiant Worm,/Guard from cold dews her love-illumin’d form’. Darwin notes that several ‘bell-flowers hang their apertures downwards, as many of the lilies . . . and by this pendant attitude of the bell . . . these are at the same time sheltered as with an umbrella from rain and dews’ (note to II i 152). i 58. undefiled Paradise] Emphasising associations between the garden of S.’s poem and the prelapsarian Eden of Genesis and Paradise Lost. The draft in Nbk 11 (146a) includes the canc. line: ‘And in this Republic of odours & hues’, an image adapted from Calderón (Wasserman 159). Cp. PU IV 398–9, ‘The unquiet republic of the maze/Of planets’, and IV 533. i 59–60. For the association of flowers and infancy, cp. Adonais 440–41: ‘Where, like an infant’s smile, over the dead,/A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread’, and My lost William, thou in whom [To William Shelley] (Longman iii 185–8, no. 254) 10–18. See also note to i 64, ii. 12. i 60–61. Darwin (note to II i 301) points out that ‘their [the leaves] situation after being exposed to external violence resembles their sleep’; that is, the plant’s ‘conscious’ responses imitate lack of ‘consciousness’, raising the question whether these two states may not be indistinguishable. i 63. mine-lamps] S. originally wrote the sunlight, canc. this and substituted lamps (Nbk 11 145); minelamps must have been a revision on his fair copy. The topic was given currency in 1815 by Humphry Davy’s development of a safety-lamp which could be used in underground mines without igniting the inflammable methane gas (‘firedamp’) present and causing it to explode. S.’s notes on Davy’s Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (2nd edn 1814) in Nbk 14 seem to date from the first half of April 1820. See L ii 182, Claire Jnl 139–40, and BSM v pp. xlvi–xlvii. enkindle] cause to glow and sparkle as though set on fire. Cp. PU II iii 86–87: ‘Like a diamond which shines/On the dark wealth of mines.’ Newton conjectured that the diamond was an inflammable body; it was later discovered to be phosphorescent rather than combustible. See Darwin I ii 228n., L&C 586–90 and note, PU II iii 86–7 and note.

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Shone smiling to Heaven, and every one Shared joy in the light of the gentle sun; For each one was interpenetrated With the light and the odour its neighbour shed, Like young lovers whom youth and love make dear Wrapped and filled by their mutual atmosphere.

70

75

But the Sensitive-plant which could give small fruit Of the love which it felt from the leaf to the root, Received more than all — it loved more than ever, Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver. For the Sensitive-plant has no bright flower; Radiance and odour are not its dower;

i 64. Shone smiling] S. frequently plays on the ambiguity of the Latin verb ridere, meaning both to ‘laugh’ and to ‘shine’. Cp. i 59–60 and note, ii 12 and note, PU II i 121 and note. i 66–69. These lines carry echoes of S.’s observations on the Italian climate as well as recalling, in condensed form, the dialogue between Moon and Earth in PU IV 319–502. S. often wrote of the climate of Italy as conducive to love, harmony and beauty (e.g. L ii 3 and L ii 72). However, as in SP, the Italian atmosphere was also favourable to contagious disease. Following the death of Clara Shelley in September 1818, S. wrote to Peacock (18 October 1818), attributing her death to ‘a disorder peculia{r} to the climate’ (L ii 42). On the death of Elena Adelaide in June 1820, he wrote to the Gisbornes: ‘It seems as if the destruction that is consuming me were as an atmosphere which wrapt & infected everything connected with me’ (L ii 211). Cp. the physical deterioration of the garden in iii 74–81. i 66. interpenetrated] Cp. Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, 313–14 in which speaker and landscape ‘interpenetrated lie/By the glory of the sky’. OED cites this as the first use of the verb in this form. James O. Allsup, The Magic Circle (1976) 67 points out that the word interpenetrate was coined by Coleridge in The Friend (1809–1810) I xiii and III iv. i 69. Wrapped] The spelling ‘wrapt’ in Harvard Nbk 1 suggests the additional sense ‘transported, enraptured’. i 70–73. The involved syntax and difficult sense of these lines have made them the subject of much exegesis. See, e.g., W. M. Rossetti, N&Q 4th s. i (1868) 360, H. Buxton Forman, N&Q 6th s. xii (1885) 376, A.J.M., N&Q 6th s. xii (1885) 376–77; Swinburne, Essays and Studies (1875) 185–6; Forman 1876–7, Rossetti 1878, Locock 1911. The stanza asserts a paradox: the Sensitive-plant contributes little to the mutual atmosphere of love described in the previous stanza even though it experiences the passion intensely, receiving more love than the other plants in the garden which are themselves able to share their love with those around them — yet it alone remains unsatisfied. The explanation of the Sensitiveplant’s peculiar state, offered only in the following stanza, is twofold: (1) it lacks the radiance and perfume that the other flowers communicate; and (2) like the daemon (a being partaking of both the divine and mortal natures) Love in Plato’s Symposium (see note to i 76–7), the Sensitive-plant’s very nature consists in desiring what it does not possess. Ultimately, this is absolute Beauty, in which all material instances of beauty participate and by virtue of which they are beautiful. Until that supreme Beauty is attained, Love — and the lover — remain in a perpetual state of unfulfilled desire. i 74–75. These lines do not state that the sensitive-plant has no flower at all, but that it has no bright flower. P.P., N&Q 5th s. vi (1876) 156 and 6th s. xii (1885) 475 point out that the sensitive-plant produces a brush-like lilac flower. Nicholson’s Encyclopedia (1807–9) describes mimosa pudica as bearing yellow flowers, and mimosa sensitiva (or the mimosa tree) purple flowers.

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shelley: selected poems It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full, It desires what it has not — the beautiful!

80

85

The light winds which from unsustaining wings Shed the music of many murmurings; The beams which dart from many a star Of the flowers whose hues they bear afar; The plumèd insects swift and free, Like golden boats on a sunny sea, Laden with light and odour, which pass Over the gleam of the living grass; The unseen clouds of the dew, which lie Like fire in the flowers till the Sun rides high, Then wander like spirits among the spheres, Each cloud faint with the fragrance it bears;

i 76–77. As many commentators have pointed out, these lines allude to the exchange between Socrates and Agathon in Plato’s Symposium, which S. read and translated from 7 to 17 July 1818: ‘ “It is conceded, then, that Love loves that which he wants but possesses not?” — “Yes, certainly.” — “But Love wants and does not possess beauty?” — “Indeed it must necessarily follow” ’ (Julian vii 195). Later in the dialogue, Socrates reports the words of the prophetess Diotima on the true lover’s pursuit of eternal and perfect Beauty through the various manifestations of the beautiful (Julian vii 205–7). In the dialogue between Socrates and Diotima, Love is further revealed to possess characteristics similar to those attributed to the mimosa in SP. Just as the sensitive-plant ‘received more than all’ (i 72), yet remains in ‘want’ (i 11), Love is ‘the child of Poverty and Plenty . . . He is for ever poor, and so far from being delicate and beautiful, as mankind imagine, he is squalid and withered . . . he is ever the companion of Want’ (Julian vii 198). Like the position of the mimosa on the border between the plant and animal domains, Love is a being intermediate between the divine and the mortal (Julian vii 197), and, according to Agathon, ‘his life is spent among flowers . . . for the winged Love rests not in his flight on any form . . . but remains most willingly where is the odour and radiance of blossoms, yet unwithered’ (Julian vii 190). See also S.’s review of Peacock’s Rhododaphne (1817): ‘Love is not itself beautiful but seeks the possession of beauty’ (Prose Works i 287 and note). i 78. unsustaining] Fragile, able to bear only the murmurings of the next line. i 80–81. Darwin (additional note to II iii 45) records the phenomenon of light suddenly emitted from certain flowers including the marigold, orange lily and Indian pink. It was thought that this flash of light was electrical and was caused by the bursting and scattering of pollen. i 82–85. plumèd] Winged, or perhaps referring to the plumate hairs of an insect (OED plume 4c.) to which pollen or seeds become attached. For a consideration of insect life in SP and in S.’s poetry in general, see Lloyd N. Jeffrey, K-SJ xxv (1976) 103–21. i 82. The] And the Harvard Nbk 1. i 83. on] in Harvard Nbk 1. i 86–89. These lines, referring to the cycle of evaporation and condensation, anticipate The Cloud. When heated by the sun, the dew that nourishes the flowers carries their fragrance aloft as clouds of vapour. Cp. To a Sky-Lark 54–55: ‘Till the scent it [a rose] gives/Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-wingèd thieves’ [i.e. warm winds]. Cp. L&C 868–9: ‘like some radiant cloud of morning dew,/ Which wanders through the waste air’s pathless blue’ and PU IV 431–6. i 88. spirits among the spheres] In older astronomy, the heavens were imagined as a series of revolving concentric spheres, each the proper domain of a celestial body or bodies and piloted in its motion by a spirit or angel. Cp. Epipsychidion 116–17 and 285–86. S. here likens the clouds of odorous vapour released by the sun’s heat from the flowers to such guiding spirits set free from their spheres to wander at will.

33  the sensitive-plant 90

95

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The quivering vapours of dim noontide, Which like a sea o’er the warm earth glide, In which every sound, and odour, and beam Move, as reeds in a single stream; Each, and all, like ministering angels were For the Sensitive-plant sweet joy to bear Whilst the lagging hours of the day went by Like windless clouds o’er a tender sky.

And when evening descended from Heaven above, And the Earth was all rest, and the air was all love, 100 And delight, though less bright, was far more deep, And the day’s veil fell from the world of sleep, And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were drowned In an ocean of dreams without a sound Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress 105 The light sand which paves it — Consciousness; (Only overhead the sweet nightingale

i 97. Like bright [alt. soft] clouds over a tender sky Nbk 11 p. 46., S.’s substitution of windless, properly qualifying sky rather than clouds seems intended to establish a material analogy for the lagging hours of l. 96: the clouds are not driven by the wind but move with the slow speed of the passing summer day. tender sky] Pale, unglaring, softly coloured. i 101. the day’s veil] Reversing the traditional metaphor of night as a veil; cp. Paradise Lost vi 10–11, ix 52. In PU III iii 113–14, ‘Death is the veil which those who live call life:/They sleep, and it is lifted’. The day is as a veil since the sun obscures the light of other heavenly bodies (see ii 20 and iii 1–2); when it has fallen, we receive glimpses of ‘a different, or higher, or deeper order of reality’ (M. O’Neill, Cambridge Quarterly xxv (1996) 112). The veil falls here rather than is lifted since the sun drops behind the horizon. i 102–105. Commentators have remarked on the similarity between these lines and S.’s articulation of the transitory nature of poetic inspiration in DP: ‘It is as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over a sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it’ (Reiman (2002) para. 40). Like poetry, sleep intimates a mode of existence beyond the limits of what is consciously known; however, just as the mimosa’s response to stimuli mimics its sleep movements, the impressions we receive in sleep shape our waking thoughts and desires. i 106–9. In DP, ‘A Poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness, and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds’ (Reiman (2002) para. 12). Elysian chant] In Greek mythology, Elysium was the resting-place of the souls of the blessed. Elysian is a favoured poeticism in S.’s late verse; cp. PU II v 91, Epipsychidion 559. S. visited the Elysian fields on 8 December 1818 (Mary Jnl i 242), ‘the spot on which Virgil places the scenery of the 6th Aeneid’ (L ii 61). Cp. the blissful spirits in Elysium in Aeneid vi 644: ‘pars pedibus plaudunt choreas et carmina dicunt’ (‘Some tread the rhythm of a dance and chant songs’).

406

shelley: selected poems Ever sang more sweet as the day might fail, And snatches of its Elysian chant Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive-plant).

110 The Sensitive-plant was the earliest Upgathered into the bosom of rest; A sweet child weary of its delight, The feeblest and yet the favourite — Cradled within the embrace of night.

part second There was a Power in this sweet place, An Eve in this Eden; a ruling grace Which to the flowers did they waken or dream, Was as God is to the starry scheme. i 110–14. It is possible that these lines carry a private reference to William Shelley, who died aged 3 on 7 June 1819. In a letter to Hogg of 25 July 1819, S. wrote: ‘Your little favourite had improved greatly both in mind and body before that fatal fever seized him’ (L ii 104). See iii 111. 111. Upgathered] As Darwin (note to II i 301) explains, the sensitive-plant folds or gathers its leaves during sleep. Botanical studies of mimosa pudica have established that levels of sensitivity decline in the evening and are lowest at night; see W. E. Burge, G. C. Wickwire and H. J. Fuller, Botanical Gazette xcvii (1936) 672–77. The feeblest and yet the favourite] Cp. Wordsworth, The Oak and the Broom (1800) 73–4: ‘Am I not/In truth a favoured plant!’; cp. also To the Daisy (1807) 79–80: ‘thou not in vain/Art Nature’s favourite’. ii 1. Power] The word occurs frequently and with various meanings in S.’s work. The primary sense here is genius loci or tutelary spirit (of the garden). Cp. Milton, Arcades, in which the Genius declares: I am the power Of this fair Wood, and live in Oaken bower, To nurse the Saplings tall . . . And all my Plants I save from nightly ill. (44–8) S. elsewhere attaches to Power: (1) a metaphysical sense, ‘the capability of any thing to be or act’: A Refutation of Deism (1814; Prose Works 121) — and see Mont Blanc, esp. 96–7 and note; and (2) a theological sense, e.g. L&C 732, Adonais 375–7: ‘where’er that Power may move . . . Which wields the world with never-wearied love’. ii 2. grace] In classical myth, the three Graces or (in the Gk form) Charites were goddesses of beauty, joy and natural affection. Traditionally said to be daughters of Venus by either Jupiter or Bacchus, and represented as three beautiful naked young women, they attended upon Apollo in his office as god of music. One of their number, Euphrosyne, is invoked by Milton in L’Allegro (11 ff.) where her conception is imagined as having taken place on ‘Beds of Violets blue,/And fresh-blown Roses washt in dew’ (21–2). ii 4. God] The principal attribute of S.’s female deity is formulated by Mrs  Mason, the benevolent governess in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life (1788), who identifies ‘the greatest pleasure life affords, — [as] that of resembling God, by doing good’ (MWW iv 368). For S.’s conception of God as ‘another word for the essence of the universe’, see L i 101.

33  the sensitive-plant 5

10

15

407

A Lady, the wonder of her kind, Whose form was upborne by a lovely mind Which, dilating, had moulded her mien and motion Like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean, Tended the garden from morn to even: And the meteors of that sublunar Heaven, Like the lamps of the air when night walks forth, Laughed round her footsteps up from the Earth! She had no companion of mortal race, But her tremulous breath and her flushing face Told, whilst the morn kissed the sleep from her eyes That her dreams were less slumber than Paradise:

ii 5. the wonder of her kind] S. first wrote ‘a Spirit descended from Heaven’ (Nbk 11 137). ii 6. lovely mind] Cp. Claire Clairmont’s appreciation of Lady Mountcashell: ‘Her countenance beamed mildly, with the expression of a refined, cultivated, and highly cheerful mind’ (Dowden Life ii 317). ii 6–7. The belief that mental and spiritual qualities influence appearance and bearing hardly needs referring to a source; interesting parallels have nonetheless been noted in S.’s reading. Butter (1970) cites Plato, Republic (Mary Jnl i 230): ‘the good soul, by her own excellence, improves the body as far as this may be possible’; while Webb (1995) cites Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): ‘that superior gracefulness which is truly the expression of the mind’. ii 6. upborne] Both ‘sustained’ and ‘elevated’. ii 8. Cp. OL (Longman iii 378–418, no. 322) ‘like unfolded flowers beneath the sea’ (54) and OWW 38–40. ii 10–12. The garden is imagined as a terrestrial sky and the flowers as heavenly bodies: just as the stars and planets appear when darkness falls, so blossoms spring up when the lady walks through the garden. Cp. MA 122: ‘As flowers beneath May’s footstep waken’ and note. ii 10. sublunar] A term from traditional cosmology, i.e. situated beneath the sphere of the Moon and ‘subject to the moon’s influence’ (OED), hence to alteration and decay. Cp. L&C 1726. ii 12. Cp. Darwin I i 68: ‘And steps celestial press the pansied grounds.’ Laughed] displayed their bright colours, shimmered as if manifesting joy and pleasure (OED v. 1c). Cp. Gray, The Progress of Poesy 5: ‘The laughing flowers, that round them blow’, and see notes to i 59–60, i 64. ii 13–20. These lines condense and adapt L&C 478–513, which recount an erotic dream of the female narrator of Canto I in which she is loved by a celestial being (a manifestation of the Spirit of Good) who afterwards appears to her in the shape of ‘A wingèd youth, [whose] radiant brow did wear/The Morning Star’, and who thenceforth accompanies her invisibly to guide her actions. ii 13–16. As R. S. Caldwell points out (SiR xv (1976) 243), these lines introduce clear parallels between the Lady and the Sensitive-plant; the plant is also companionless (i 12) and folds its leaves under the kisses of night (i 4). ii 15. morn] Harvard Nbk 1; moon 1820. The misprint in 1820 was corrected in 1829 and 1839.

408

20

shelley: selected poems As if some bright Spirit for her sweet sake Had deserted heaven while the stars were awake, As if yet around her he lingering were, Though the veil of daylight concealed him from her. Her step seemed to pity the grass it pressed; You might hear by the heaving of her breast, That the coming and going of the wind Brought pleasure there and left passion behind.

25

30

35

And wherever her airy footstep trod, Her trailing hair from the grassy sod Erased its light vestige, with shadowy sweep, Like a sunny storm o’er the dark green deep. I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet; I doubt not they felt the spirit that came From her glowing fingers through all their frame. She sprinkled bright water from the stream On those that were faint with the sunny beam; And out of the cups of the heavy flowers She emptied the rain of the thunder showers. She lifted their heads with her tender hands And sustained them with rods and ozier bands;

ii 17–18. some bright Spirit . . . deserted heaven] See i 88 and note, ii 13–20 and note. ii 20. The bright Spirit, like the stars which are his realm, cannot be seen by day; his brightness also obscures him to human sight, as in the Conclusion, 23–4. Cp. Epipsychidion 199–200: ‘She met me, robed in such exceeding glory,/That I beheld her not.’ See note to ii 13–20. ii 23. and going] and the going Harvard Nbk 1, 1839. ii 25–28. Cp. the description of poetry as an evanescent, fleeting inspiration in DP, quoted in the note to i 102–5, and TL 363–6, 405–7. ii 31–2. The Lady communicates vital energy to the plants when she touches them. Based on experiments with dead and inanimate matter, contemporary science had suggested that the vital principle animating the body was electricity, raising the possibility that dead bodies might be restored to life by the application of an electrical charge. In her Preface to Frankenstein (1818), Mary records a discussion on the subject of Galvanism between S. and Byron at Lake Geneva in June 1816. Cp. The Magnetic Lady to her Patient 5–6: ‘And from my fingers flow/The powers of life.’ ii 37–8. S. is evidently recalling one of Eve’s gardening labours in Paradise Lost: oft stooping to support Each flower of tender stalk, whose head though gay . . . Hung drooping unsustained, them she upstays Gently with myrtle band. (ix 427–31) ii 38. ozier] Any of several willows with tough pliant branches.

33  the sensitive-plant

40

409

If the flowers had been her own infants she Could never have nursed them more tenderly. And all killing insects and gnawing worms And things of obscene and unlovely forms She bore, in a basket of Indian woof, Into the rough woods far aloof,

45

50

55

60

In a basket of grasses and wild flowers full, The freshest her gentle hands could pull For the poor banished insects, whose intent, Although they did ill, was innocent. But the bee and the beam-like ephemeris Whose path is the lightning’s, and soft moths that kiss The sweet lips of the flowers, and harm not, did she Make her attendant angels be. And many an antenatal tomb Where butterflies dream of the life to come She left, clinging round the smooth and dark Edge of the odorous Cedar bark. This fairest creature from earliest spring Thus moved through the garden ministering All the sweet season of summer tide, And ere the first leaf looked brown — she died!

41–4. Cp. the governess Mrs  Mason’s instructions to her young charges in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life (1788): ‘Do you know the meaning of the word Goodness? I see you are unwilling to answer. I will tell you. It is, first, to avoid hurting anything; and then, to contrive to give as much pleasure as you can. If some insects are to be destroyed, to preserve my garden from desolation, I have it done in the quickest way’ (MWW iv 368). 41. gnawing worms] One of the woodland tasks of the Genius in Milton’s Arcades is to ‘heal the harms of . . . hurtful Worm with cankered venom bites’ (51–3). ii 43. woof] Woven material or woven pattern. S.’s draft in Nbk 11 first read ‘Indian dyed willow’ (p. 186). ii 44. aloof] At a distance. ii 47–48. These lines revise the strict judgement of God on Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. A canc. alt. for l. 48 in Nbk 11 explicitly evokes the human parallel: ‘Was like ours, who do ill yet are innocent’ (187). S.’s views on the punitive God of the Old Testament are expressed, for example, in A Refutation of Deism (Prose Works 100–1). Cp. Eve to Adam in Paradise Lost, ‘Who for my wilful crime art banished hence’ (xii 619). ii 49. beam-like] Concordance glosses as ‘sparkling as a flash of light’; the adjective combines the senses ‘evanescent’, ‘frail’ and ‘swift-moving’. ephemeris] the ephemerid (the more usual spelling) is an insect whose brief life (as a winged adult) may last no more than one day. At this stage, following metamorphoses through egg, larva and pupa, it is classed as an imago or ‘perfect insect’. See WA 9–16, Adonais 253–5. ii 51. Echoing Caliban’s words in The Tempest III ii 139: ‘sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not’. ii 53. antenatal tomb] I.e. a chrysalis. The case which encloses the mature or ‘perfect’ butterfly represents a state prior to (re)birth. See Athanase (Longman ii 311–28, no. 146) 91 and note. ii 59. All] Through all Nbk 11 (186), Harvard Nbk 1. The absence of Through in 1820 is no doubt owing to its removal on the press copy to avoid repetition with through in the previous line.

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part third Three days the flowers of the garden fair, Like stars when the moon is awakened, were; Or the waves of Baiae, ere luminous She floats up through the smoke of Vesuvius. 5

10

15

20

And on the fourth, the Sensitive-Plant Felt the sound of the funeral chant And the steps of the bearers heavy and slow, And the sobs of the mourners deep and low; The weary sound and the heavy breath And the silent motions of passing death And the smell, cold, oppressive and dank, Sent through the pores of the coffin plank; The dark grass, and the flowers among the grass, Were bright with tears as the crowd did pass; From their sighs the wind caught a mournful tone And sate in the pines and gave groan for groan. The garden once fair became cold and foul Like the corpse of her who had been its soul, Which at first was lovely as if in sleep, Then slowly changed, till it grew a heap To make men tremble who never weep.

iii 1–4. ‘During the day the flowers appeared as brightly as stars in the night sky while at night they glowed like the waves of Baiae under the veiled light of the moon before it rises clear of the smoke of Mt Vesuvius’. S. visited Baiae on the Bay of Naples on 8 December 1818 and Vesuvius on 16 December 1818 (Mary Jnl i 242, 244). iii 2. moon] morn Harvard Nbk 1, moon Nbk 11 220. The Harvard Nbk 1 reading is no doubt Mary’s error of transcription. iii 6. funeral chant] Cp. i 110–14 and note. iii 12. pores] Openings or interstices in a membrane or material, particularly in plant or animal tissue. As Sharon Ruston points out (Shelley and Vitality (2005) 138): ‘In a sense the wood was once alive . . . but it is now inanimate matter, likened in this instance to the operations of an animate body’. Cp. ii 64–5. iii 13–16. This elegiac scene recalls Milton’s Lycidas, which was to influence Adonais (see headnote to that poem): Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffadillies fill their cups with tears, To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies. (149–51) iii 19. lovely] lively 1820; lovely Harvard Nbk 1, 1829, 1839. Most eds have emended 1820 to lovely, and its presence in 1829 suggests that it derives from S.’s list of errata for 1820. But 1820’s lively, in the sense of ‘life-like, animated or vivid’ (OED a. 3) makes sense, and may possibly have been the reading of the press copy. iii 20. heap] Given the analogy in the stanza between the dead Lady and the garden, S. might intend a play on the early-nineteenth-century sense of the word, ‘a slovenly woman’ (OED n. 1 e).

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25

411

Swift summer into the autumn flowed, And frost in the mist of the morning rode Though the noonday sun looked clear and bright, Mocking the spoil of the secret night. The rose leaves, like flakes of crimson snow, Paved the turf and the moss below: The lilies were drooping, and white, and wan, Like the head and the skin of a dying man.

30

35

40

45

And Indian plants, of scent and hue The sweetest that ever were fed on dew, Leaf after leaf, day after day, Were massed into the common clay. And the leaves, brown, yellow, and grey, and red, And white with the whiteness of what is dead, Like troops of ghosts on the dry wind passed; Their whistling noise made the birds aghast. And the gusty winds waked the wingèd seeds Out of their birthplace of ugly weeds, Till they clung round many a sweet flower’s stem Which rotted into the earth with them. The water-blooms under the rivulet Fell from the stalks on which they were set; And the eddies drove them here and there As the winds did those of the upper air. Then the rain came down, and the broken stalks Were bent and tangled across the walks; And the leafless network of parasite bowers Massed into ruin; and all sweet flowers.

iii 23. of the morning] of morning Harvard Nbk 1. iii 24–25. Cp. Adonais for similar visions of beauty which mocks or defies death: ‘flowers that mock the corse beneath’ (17); ‘they illumine death/And mock the merry worm that wakes beneath’ (175–6). iii 26. snow] Nbk 11 162, Harvard Nbk 1, 1839; now 1820, 1829. iii 28. The lilies were chapped & white & wan Nbk 11 (161); And lilies were drooping white & wan Harvard Nbk 1. iii 32. day after day] day by day 1839. Harvard Nbk 1 reads ‘Leaf by leaf, day [by day canc.] after day’. Several eds have adopted the 1839 reading. iii 34–41. Cp. OWW 2–8 and notes. iii 37. aghast] Terrified. iii 44–5. Cp. the correspondence between the wind of the upper air or atmosphere and the foliage beneath the sea in OWW 36–42 and note. iii 48. parasite bowers] A parasite is a climbing plant which grows supported by trellis-work, trees,

412 50

55

60

shelley: selected poems Between the time of the wind and the snow All loathliest weeds began to grow, Whose coarse leaves were splashed with many a speck Like the water-snake’s belly and the toad’s back. And thistles, and nettles, and darnels rank, And the dock, and henbane; and hemlock dank Stretched out its long and hollow shank And stifled the air, till the dead wind stank. And plants at whose names the verse feels loath Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth, Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue, Livid, and starred with a lurid dew.

etc. (OED parasite n. 2 b) without necessarily feeding off a host (contrast iii 40–1). Parasite bowers are enclosed by or overarched with such plants. iii 50–61. Cp. similar descriptions of infected or disease-stricken landscapes in PU I 170–79 and Mazenghi (Longman ii 352–61, no. 166) 86–102. In ll. 54–7, S. appears to be remembering Cordelia’s description of her mad father in King Lear IV iv 3–6: Crowned with rank fumitor, and furrow-weeds, With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn. iii 54–5. henbane;] Harvard Nbk 1; henbane, 1820, 1839. The five weeds named before the semicolon are apparently the subjects of ‘began to grow’, understood as carried over from l. 51, as Rossetti 1870 conjectured. Forman 1876–7 disagreed, considering them rather as the subjects of stifled in l. 57, despite the singular its in l. 56. Rossetti 1878 accepted Forman’s judgement. iii 54. darnels] Destructive grasses, weeds. rank] Combines a range of possible senses: vigorous, abundant, coarse and offensive. iii 55. henbane] A poisonous plant with an unpleasant odour. hemlock] A strong-smelling poisonous plant used as a powerful sedative and notorious as the instrument by which Socrates was executed. iii 56. shank] Stem or footstalk. iii 58–65. These stanzas, conspicuously contrasting with the mutual atmosphere of love in i 69 (see note), make a composite figure for the perversion of the erotic impulse when no longer allied to the desire for the beautiful. In DMAG, S. wrote: ‘I should consider obscenity to consist in a capability of associating disgusting images with the act of the sexual instinct’ (Prose 223). In that essay, S. also evokes the disease commonly associated with prostitution. Cp. Cenci’s curse on his daughter Beatrice, upon whom he has forced incest, in The Cenci (Longman ii 713–863, no. 209) IV i 130–2: Heaven, rain upon her head The blistering drops of the Maremma’s dew, Till she be speckled like a toad. iii 60. blue] The colour blue is frequently associated with disease and death in S.’s poetry. Cp. L&C 2766, 3964; PU I 170.

33  the sensitive-plant

65

413

And agarics and fungi, with mildew and mould Started like mist from the wet ground cold; Pale, fleshy, — as if the decaying dead With a spirit of growth had been animated! Their mass rotted off them, flake by flake, Till the thick stalk stuck like a murderer’s stake, Where rags of loose flesh yet tremble on high Infecting the winds that wander by.

70

Spawn, weeds and filth, a leprous scum, Made the running rivulet thick and dumb,

iii 62. agarics] Fungi of the large genus agaricus — having ‘gills’ bearing seeds on the underside of the cap — which include common edible mushrooms as well as poisonous ones. fungi] Mushrooms and/ or toadstools are no doubt meant: N. Crook and D. Guiton point out that fungus ‘is a medical as well as a botanical term; it is the name given to “proud flesh”, a spongy, morbid growth for which removal by caustics was the standard treatment’ (Shelley’s Venomed Melody (1986) 205). iii 63. mist] mists Nbk 11 (168), Harvard Nbk 1. It is possible that the press copy read mists and was misread by the compositor. iii 66–9. The stanza is present in 1820, and so must have been included on the press copy, but is canc. in Harvard Nbk 1 and is absent from 1839 and 1840 though included in 1829 and 1834. Whether the cancellation in Harvard Nbk 1, by three vertical strokes, was made by S. or by Mary is impossible to tell, but it was made after the stanzas had been numbered, as MYRS v points out. The ink of the cancellation appears to be the same as that of Mary’s transcription, so it was probably made shortly after she finished transcribing, and after the press-copy was posted to England. Mary, apparently only consulting her Harvard Nbk 1 transcription when preparing 1839, chose to remove the stanza then, but whether on her own authority or on S.’s is impossible to determine. iii 66. mass] Nbk 11 168, Harvard Nbk 1; moss 1820. In the draft in Nbk 11, S. first wrote, ‘And their flesh rotted off them flake by flake’; he then substituted mass for ‘flesh’ in order to remove the repetition with ‘flesh’ in l. 68. It is unlikely that on the press-copy he would then have preferred ‘moss’, which is probably a compositorial error; and as Mary did not reprint the stanza in either 1839 or 1840, it was not corrected in either of those editions. Nor, it appears, was it corrected on S.’s list of errata for 1820 since 1829 also reads moss (Taylor 69). Cp. Cenci IV i 115: ‘this most specious mass of flesh’, and see the following note. iii 67. murderer’s stake] Formerly, the bodies of executed murderers were hanged in chains or irons on a stake with a projecting arm, known as a gibbet, as a mark of infamy and a measure of dissuasion. See Zeinab and Kathema (Longman i 171–7, no. 58) 121–38 and note. In the previous stanza, mushrooms spring from the ground like resurrected corpses; in this one, the flesh of their caps gradually rots from them as would that of a gibbeted murderer. iii 69. Disease and infection had long been associated with bad air; this is the literal meaning of ‘malaria’, which was a danger to health in early-nineteenth-century Italy (cp. Adonais 457 and note). Some areas of the country were highly malarial, such as the infamous Maremma described in Mazenghi; see also the lines from The Cenci quoted in note to iii 58–65. On 26 April 1819, Mary wrote to Maria Gisborne: ‘We already begin to feel or think that we begin to feel the effects of the Roman air — producing colds — depression & even fever’ (Mary L i 94). For the unburied dead as source of infection, see L&C 3908–9 and note. iii 70. Spawn] The fibrous, filament-like substance of the vegetative part of a mushroom or other fungus (OED spawn n. 7).

414

shelley: selected poems And at its outlet flags huge as stakes Dammed it up with roots knotted like water-snakes.

75

80

85

And hour by hour, when the air was still, The vapours arose which have strength to kill: At morn they were seen, at noon they were felt, At night they were darkness no star could melt. And unctuous meteors from spray to spray Crept and flitted in broad noonday Unseen; every branch on which they alit By a venomous blight was burned and bit. The Sensitive-plant like one forbid Wept, and the tears, within each lid Of its folded leaves which together grew, Were changed to a blight of frozen glue. For the leaves soon fell, and the branches soon By the heavy axe of the blast were hewn;

iii 72. flags] A plant growing in moist areas; applicable to any reed or rush (OED flag n. 1 a). iii 78–81. This stanza develops a variation on the view, common in older natural philosophy, that blight in plants is caused by a ‘baleful influence of atmospheric or invisible origin’ (OED blight n. 1). See the following note. iii 78. unctuous meteors] The phrase, which has puzzled commentators, signifies the will-o’-the-wisp or ignis fatuus, glowing vapours resulting from the decaying vegetation of the garden. Cp. Darwin I  i 189–90 (‘lamps nocturnal .  .  ./Which dance and glimmer o’er the marshy mead’) and L&C 625 and note. Here these luminous vapours are imagined as flitting from plant to plant spreading disease wherever they touch, although like comets (see note to iii 78–81) in the heavens they are invisible in daylight. For unctuous as ‘inflammable’, see OED unctuous 3 which cites Sir H. Davy’s Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812): ‘unctuous or inflammable gas’. For the present sense of meteors, see OED meteor n. 2b. iii 82–5. Cp. Darwin II i 317–20: All wan and shivering in the leafless glade The sad ANEMONE reclined her head; Grief on her cheeks had paled the roseate hue, And her sweet eye-lids dropp’d with pearly dew. Crook and Guiton (Shelley’s Venomed Melody (1986) 206) note: ‘the effect of this blight on the sensitive plant is the nearest thing to a venereal ophthalmia that a plant could be imagined to display’. iii 82. forbid] Accursed: cp. Macbeth I iii 20 ‘He shall live a man forbid’, and see note to iii 91. iii 86–9. These lines seem to allude to the physiological explanation for the plant’s sensitivity, which was first put forward in the seventeenth century (see C. Webster, Isis lvii (1966) 15–18). Based on knowledge of the circulatory system in animals, the mimosa’s reaction was established as a decrease in the turgidity of the sap in the vessels or pores of the plant, resulting in the collapse of the leaves and their stalks. The word heart in l. 89 has personifying rather than scientific force. Cp. Darwin I Additional Note xxxvi, which observes that, although plants possess a circulatory system, ‘the vegetable circulation . . . is carried forwards without a heart’.

33  the sensitive-plant

415

The sap shrank to the root through every pore As blood to a heart that will beat no more. 90

95

For Winter came — the wind was his whip — One choppy finger was on his lip: He had torn the cataracts from the hills And they clanked at his girdle like manacles; His breath was a chain which without a sound The earth and the air and the water bound; He came, fiercely driven in his Chariot-throne By the tenfold blasts of the arctic zone.

Then the weeds which were forms of living death Fled from the frost to the Earth beneath. 100 Their decay and sudden flight from frost Was but like the vanishing of a ghost! And under the roots of the Sensitive-plant The moles and the dormice died for want. The birds dropped stiff from the frozen air 105 And were caught in the branches naked and bare. First there came down a thawing rain And its dull drops froze on the boughs again; Then there steamed up a freezing dew Which to the drops of the thaw-rain grew; 110 And a northern whirlwind, wandering about Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out, Shook the boughs thus laden and heavy and stiff And snapped them off with his rigid griff.

iii 90–3. GM cps. James Hogg, The Queen’s Wake (1813), Introduction 359–62: December came; his aspect stern Glared deadly o’er the mountain cairn; A polar sheet was round him flung, And ice-spears at his girdle hung. iii 91. choppy] Chapped; cracked. Cp. Macbeth I iii 42–3: ‘By each at once her choppy finger laying/ Upon her skinny lips’; see note to iii 82. iii 100. Their decay, & their sudden flight from [the] frost Harvard Nbk 1. iii 102. And under] Under Harvard Nbk 1. iii 109. grew] Became united. iii 113. griff] Claw (OED griff n.3).

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shelley: selected poems

When winter had gone and spring came back 115 The Sensitive-plant was a leafless wreck; But the mandrakes and toadstools and docks and darnels Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels.

conclusion Whether the Sensitive-plant, or that Which within its boughs like a spirit sat Ere its outward form had known decay, Now felt this change, — I cannot say. 5

10

Whether that Lady’s gentle mind, No longer with the form combined Which scattered love, as stars do light, Found sadness, where it left delight, I dare not guess; but in this life Of error, ignorance and strife —

iii 116. mandrakes] brambles Harvard Nbk 1. The mandrake is a poisonous Mediterranean plant formerly used as a narcotic and held to possess magical powers. Its root, thought to resemble a human form, was supposed to shriek when torn from the ground and to cause the death of the person extracting it. iii 117. charnels] Burial-places. Cp. The Cloud 83–84. Conclusion S. inserted the word in pencil at this point in Mary’s transcription in Harvard Nbk 1. The page (32(B)r rev.) on which the first two stanzas of the Conclusion were drafted has been torn from Nbk 12. Concl. 1. Whether] And if Harvard Nbk 1. or] the sense is ‘or rather’. Concl. 4. Cp. Wordsworth, The Waterfall and the Eglantine (1800) 51: ‘What more he said I cannot tell.’ Concl. 5. Whether] Or if Harvard Nbk 1. Concl. 9–24. In 1840 (ELTF), Mary took these lines as text for an eloquent statement of faith in the eternal reality of her love for S.: the ‘stanzas express, in some degree, the almost inexpressible idea, not that we die into another state, when this state is no longer, from some reason, unapparent as well as apparent, accordant with our being — but that those who rise above the ordinary nature of man, fade from before our imperfect organs; they remain in their “love, beauty, and delight”, in a world congenial to them — we, clogged by “error, ignorance, and strife”, see them not, till we are fitted by purification and improvement for their higher state. For myself, no religious doctrine, nor philosophical precept, can shake the faith that a mind so original, so delicately and beautifully moulded, as Shelley’s, so endowed with wondrous powers and eagle-eyed genius — so good, so pure, would never be shattered and dispersed by the Creator; but that the qualities and consciousness that formed him, are not only indestructible in themselves, but in the form under which they were united here, and that to become worthy of him is to assure the bliss of a reunion’ (i pp. xv–xvi).

33  the sensitive-plant

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Where nothing is, but all things seem, And we, the shadows of the dream,

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It is a modest creed, and yet Pleasant if one considers it, To own that death itself must be, Like all the rest, — a mockery. That Garden sweet, that Lady fair, And all sweet shapes and odours there, In truth have never passed away — ’Tis we,’tis ours, are changed — not they. For love, and beauty, and delight There is no death nor change: their might

Concl. 11–12. Cp. The Tempest IV i 156–57: ‘We are such stuff/As dreams are made on.’ The lines also seem to allude to the title and principal theme of Calderón’s La vida es sueño (Life is a dream), which Claire Clairmont, then living in the Shelley household, was reading from 7 to 9 January 1820 (Claire Jnl 116). Cp. La vida es sueño: ‘porque en el mundo, Clotaldo,/todos los que viven sueñan’ (Primera Parte de Comedias (1636) in Comedias (1973) ii f. 10v). Nbk 18 contains the fair copy (in the hand of either Medwin or Edward Williams) of a translation of an abridged version of the central passage of the play, Segismundo’s soliloquy (III i 4–17, 21–4, 28–30, 35–40): BSM xix 124–5. The editors of BSM xix (lxiv– lxviii) conclude that S. probably either translated the passage himself or contributed to the translation. Relevant passages would be: ‘Man thinks he is — and dreams of that he is/And never wakes to know he does but dream’ (4–5). ‘And all, to Sum up all, dream that they are/None understanding what or why he is’ (14–15). ‘What is this Life that we should cling to it?/A phantom-haunted frenzy — a false nature/A vain and empty shadow . . . (17–19). ‘All life and being are but dreams and dreams/Themselves are but the dreams of other dreams’ (21–2). Although variations on the theme are commonplace, another relevant example would be Pindar, Pythian viii 95–7, which S. transcribed into Nbk 14, p. 143 rev. some time in or before early May 1820 (see BSM v 418): ‘Creatures of a day! What is someone? What is no one? A dream of a shadow/is man’. Concl. 13–16. The sense of the word mockery in these lines recalls that of mimosa, imitation or mimic. If ‘nothing is — but all things seem’ (Conclusion 11), then Death itself may also be an illusion. In a letter of 26 November 1811 to Elizabeth Hitchener, S. conjectures: ‘perhaps a future state is no other than a different mode of terrestrial existence to which we have fitted ourselves in this mode’ (L i 193). Concl. 13. modest creed] S. develops a more assertive and hopeful variant on the belief tentatively advanced from here to l. 24 in Epipsychidion 174–89. Concl. 15. own] admit, acknowledge. Concl. 19–20. Cp. Lines Written among the Euganean Hills 370: ‘They, not it, would change’ and note; cp. also Faerie Queene III vi 38: ‘The substance is not chaunged, nor altered,/But th’only forme and outward fashion.’ Concl. 21. S. first wrote ‘For love & thought there is not death’ (Nbk 12 33r rev.). love, and beauty, and delight] These cardinal ideas have been represented in Part First of the poem in terms that prefigure the assertion of their permanence here at its close: beauty (32, 79), love (74–9), delight (100). Cp. Song (Rarely, rarely comest thou).

418

shelley: selected poems Exceeds our organs — which endure No light, being themselves obscure.

34  To —— [Lines to a Reviewer] This irregular sonnet was first published in the Original Poetry section of Leigh Hunt’s The Literary Pocket-Book for 1823 (LPB) 115, where it is entitled To —— and signed with the Gk capital letter sigma Σ. Hunt appears to have printed it from a fair copy in S.’s hand, originally in Harvard Nbk 1 but torn from it (no doubt to allow him to make a copy for the press), and now in Box 1 f. 75r: see headnote to To —— [Lines to a Critic]. S. transcribed the fair copy himself from his draft of ll. 1–8 in Nbk 11 179–80 and of ll. 9–13 in Nbk 10 f. 28v rev. Neither draft is titled. In Harvard Nbk 1, the text is headed To ——, which is written with a different pen-point, probably (as MYRS v suggests) by Mary. In the list of Contents that she made at the end of Harvard Nbk 1, the poem is identified as To —— a sonnet, even though it contains only thirteen lines and lacks a sonnet’s rhyme-scheme. In 1824 it is called simply Sonnet III and is undated, only acquiring the title by which it has generally been known, Lines to a Reviewer, in 1839 (iv 48), where it is included among the Poems Written in 1820. The draft of the first four couplets in Nbk 11, though it includes three rejected lines, shows no sign of having been intended for a sonnet. Nor does the draft of ll. 9–13 in Nbk 10. BSM xiv 306 suggests possible connections between the Nbk 11 draft and other draft material in the same nbk. Certainly, the isolated draft phrase ‘this is the common cant/ Of those who hate’ (161) has affinities with this poem and with To —— [Lines to a Critic]. Lines to a Reviewer would seem to have begun life as a series of couplets in the manner of A Satire upon Satire (Longman ii 269–76, no. 290) 44–9, which (see note thereto) imagines a conversation with an antagonist in the course of which censure of his ‘public conduct’ towards the speaker would be tempered by friendly professions. The first draft of l. 1, ‘You hate? alas what profit can there be’, might serve as a dramatic opening of such a conversation. The draft of ll. 9–13 (see note), the concluding triplet condensing the story of Echo and Narcissus, evidently marks S.’s decision to fix the poem in the form it has in the fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1. Together, the Harvard and 1839 titles confirm Mary’s conviction, no doubt based on acquaintance with Concl. 23. Exceeds our organs] S. first wrote ‘Outlives our feelings/visions’ (Nbk 12 33r rev.). His revision brings the transient/immutable opposition elaborated in the Conclusion to a close by emphasising the limits of our perception. In the midst of experience, we cannot discern the permanence of love, beauty and delight any more than during daylight hours we can see the stars that are present in the sky. The sentiment derives from the Platonic tradition (e.g. Sophist 254 A, B): ‘the eyes of the soul of the multitude are not strong enough to endure the sight of the divine’. Concl. 24. Christine Gallant (Shelley’s Ambivalence (1989) 133) notes: ‘human perception shapes what it beholds — quite literally, given the construction of the human eye . . . The primary meaning of “obscure” is “lacking or inadequately supplied with light”. So the word “obscure” describes our organs of perception well, for it is only in the dark that the iris allows the pupil to open to its widest so that as much light as possible might be let in.’ The Platonic note struck in the previous line might be extended in this one to the camera obscura (or ‘dark chamber’), a device invented centuries before, which was in the eighteenth century used to copy natural objects accurately. It consisted of a box with a pinhole or lens in one side to let in light; images of objects outside the box would thus be projected onto its opposite interior side. Cp. Darwin II Proem: ‘GENTLE READER! LO, here a CAMERA OBSCURA is presented to thy view, in which are lights and shades dancing on a whited canvas, and magnified into apparent life!’

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-34

34 to —— [lines to a reviewer]

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S.’s intentions, that the poem was addressed to an individual reviewer. In her Note on Poems Written in 1820 in 1839, she recalls S.’s ‘character and virtues; which, in those days, it was the mode to attack with the most flagitious calumnies and insulting abuse’ (iv 52). Her phrase would aptly qualify the vituperative ad hominem critique of L&C/RofI in the April  1819 Quarterly Review (see headnote to PB3, Longman iii, 70). Both the present Lines and To —— [Lines to a Critic] could be, and probably were, addressed to the author of that anonymous review (actually John Taylor Coleridge), which S. read on or shortly before 15 October 1819 (L ii 126–8). Although Southey is not named in either poem, S. then believed that he had written the review and continued to do so until Southey denied his authorship in a letter (in response to S.’s of 26 June 1820), which S. received on 10 August (L ii 205; Claire Jnl 168). See headnotes to PB3, A Satire upon Satire, To —— [Lines to a Critic], and Adonais. Southey’s letter condemns the ‘pernicious’ tendency of S.’s writings and regrets the ‘misery’ he has brought upon others and the ‘guilt, which is all but irremediable’ that attaches to him in consequence. These are in effect a repetition of the charges against S. in the Quarterly, and they might well have prompted both the present poem and To —— [Lines to a Critic]. MYRS v p. xxvi argues on this basis for a date of composition in August or early September 1820. While this is possible, S.’s conviction that he was the object of Southey’s hatred was of longer standing and might have elicited the poem at an earlier date. In a letter to Leigh Hunt of c. 20 December 1818, S. had expressed his conviction that Southey had written the review of Hunt’s collection Foliage in the Quarterly Review for January 1818, in which S. is personally vilified by clear insinuation though not by name. He is persuaded that Southey has spread slander about him as the ‘blackest of villains’, is convinced that the older man holds him in ‘dreadful hatred’, and conceives the fitting reply to be ‘silence & a smile’ (L ii 66, Mary L i 191). See K. N. Cameron, ‘Shelley vs. Southey: New Light on an Old Quarrel’, PMLA lvii (1942) 489–512; SC vi 931–4. If indeed, as seems probable, Lines to a Reviewer responds to what S. believed to be a renewed attack on him by Southey in the Quarterly, it might have been composed at any time from mid-­ October 1819 through summer 1820. The MS evidence presented in BSM xviii 306, Shelley’s Guitar 145, and in MYRS iv pp. xxvi–xxxiv seems to narrow the likely date to between midOctober 1819 and Spring 1820, and probably later rather than earlier in this range. A rejected phrase of the draft in Nbk 11 accuses the addressee: ‘You have loved St Dominic.’ The bigoted zeal of the Spanish founder of the Dominican order (1170–1221) in violently persecuting heresy is insisted upon in S.’s allusions to him in PB3 573–8 and LMG 24–6. But in this poem, with its carefully balanced tone, such polemical comparison would be out of place, although both the reviewer of L&C/RofI in the Quarterly and Southey in his response to Shelley of July 1820 profess Christian sentiments and convictions while dispensing personalised moral condemnation. S.’s letter to Southey of 26 June 1820 points out the contradiction forcefully: ‘That an unprincipled hireling, in default of what to answer in a published composition, should, without provocation, insult the domestic calamities of a writer of the adverse party . . . is too common a piece of charity among Christians (Christ would have taught them better)’ (L ii 204). Lines to a Reviewer is rhetorically ordered so as conspicuously to display S.’s refusal to be drawn into the cycle of attack and counterattack which marked much contemporary reviewing, while nonetheless evoking an appropriate fate for the reviewer it addresses by means of the allusion in the final three lines. See note to ll. 11–13. Text from Box 1 f. 75r. The punctuation in this fair copy is minimal. The texts in LPB, 1824 and 1839 have been consulted, and an exclamation point and a comma have been added in l. 1, a full stop substituted for a full stop plus dash in l. 4, and a comma for a dash in l. 6. Published in The Literary Pocket-Book for 1823 115; MYRS v 101 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

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To —— [Lines to a Reviewer]

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Alas! good friend, what profit can you see In hating such a hateless thing as me? There is no sport in hate where all the rage Is on one side. In vain would you assuage Your frowns upon an unresisting smile In which not even contempt lurks, to beguile Your heart, by some faint sympathy, of hate. O conquer what you cannot satiate! For to your passion I am far more coy Than ever yet was coldest maid or boy In winter noon. Of your antipathy If I am the Narcissus, you are free To pine into a sound with hating me.

35  ‘Arethusa arose’ Composed probably in mid–late April 1820 for Mary’s drama Proserpine, which she finished on 3 May (Mary Jnl i 363). The only complete, extant MS is Mary’s fair copy in Mary Nbk ff.5v — 7r, part of the text of Proserpine, which Mary marked with the marginal gloss ‘By Shelley’ to indicate authorship. S.’s first draft of lines 37–90 survives in Nbk 14 pp. 151–3

¶ 34. 2 a] an 1824. 3. sport] As well as ‘amusement, diversion’, there may be a hint of the older sense, ‘amorous dalliance’ (OED n. I 1. b) in anticipation of ll. 9–13. 4–7. The passage, adopting the language of erotic passion, depends upon an analogy between hate and love — one like the other must be mutual if it is to flourish: ‘You cannot satisfy your hate by discovering even the faintest answering hatred in me which would allow you to deceive yourself into thinking that we hated each other.’ For a ‘hate song’ as an inversion of a love song, see headnote to To —— [Lines to a Critic]. 5. smile] smile, 1824, LPB, 1839. 6–7. The draft in Nbk 10 reads: ‘to beguile/Your heart [of its rude passion]’. 7. sympathy] sympathy, 1824, LPB, 1839. 9. coy] ‘reticent’, ‘unresponsive’: without a sense of affectation or teasing. Cp. To —— [Lines to a Critic] 7–8. 11. In winter noon] in cold daylight rather than a warm evening, traditional time and season for love. Of] In transcribing from his draft S. appears first to have written ‘To’, then altered it to ‘of ’, which is the reading in Nbk 10. Both 1824 and LPB read Of as does 1839. 11–13. The speaker of the poem compares the addressee’s unreturned hate to the unrequited love of Echo for Narcissus (Ovid, Met. iii 356 ff.). When the beautiful boy Narcissus scorns her love, shame and grief cause the nymph Echo to waste away until only her voice remains. The implications of the mythical dimension in these lines are subtly drawn out by Steven E. Jones, Shelley’s Satire (1994) 30–2.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-35

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rev. It seems reasonable to infer that lines 1–36 were drafted on the two pages now missing between the current pp. 154 rev. and 155 rev. Metrically speaking, the extant part of S.’s Nbk 14 draft is very different from Mary’s fair copy. In the draft, the lines are arranged as alternating tetrameters and trimeters, while the fair copy has pairs of dimeters followed by a trimeter (so, for example, the first two lines of the extant draft read O save me! O guide me, and bid the deep hide me/For he grasps me now by the hair, while the corresponding lines (37–39) of Mary’s fair copy read O save me! O guide me/And bid the deep hide me/ For he grasps me now by the hair!). By extension, while in the draft each stanza has twelve lines, in the fair copy, each stanza has eighteen lines, the extra six lines resulting from the different metrical arrangement. The highly disrupted condition of the early part of the Nbk 14 draft, and the substantial textual variants between the draft and the fair copy at lines 40 and 59, suggest that Mary copied her text from a now-lost intermediate draft or fair copy by S. While Adamson suggests (BSM v p. xlii) that it would be unusual for there to be such a pronounced metrical difference between a draft and a fair copy by S., it is impossible to say, on the basis of the available evidence, whether the metrical variants were introduced by S. into a now-lost intermediate draft or fair copy, or whether they were introduced by Mary into her fair copy with S.’s approval, or even whether Mary introduced them on her own authority, although that would seem unlikely. On balance, given the commissioned nature of the lines and Mary’s indication of the authorship ‘By Shelley’, the present text follows Mary’s fair copy. The lines were first published in 1824 under the title Arethusa, and Mary subsequently omitted them from the text of Proserpine published in The Winter’s Wreath (1832), perhaps, as Mary Jnl i 316–17n.3 observes, because she had already printed them as S.’s work. They first appeared as part of Proserpine in André Koszul’s edition of Proserpine and Midas: Two Unpublished Dramas by Mary Shelley (1922). The present text notes only substantive variants with 1824 and the partial Nbk 14 draft. The lines form part of the opening dialogue in Act 1 of Proserpine, where the nymph Ino tells the story of Arethusa, who was transformed into a fountain after being pursued from Greece to Sicily by the river god Alpheus. S. expands Ovid’s version of the myth in Met. v 572–641, adapting it to have Alpheus and Arethusa eventually united as lovers, a hint he might have picked up from Pausanias, who comments: But that the Alpheius passes through the sea and mingles his waters with the spring at this place [i.e., Ortygia, in Sicily] I cannot disbelieve . . . For this reason, therefore, because the water of the Alpheius mingles with the Arethusa, I am convinced that the legend arose of the river’s love-affair. (Description of Greece V vii 3–4) S. also relocates the scene of Arethusa’s initial encounter with Alpheus from the pastoral scene described in Ovid to a more ‘Romantic’, quasi-Alpine landscape. For S.’s other engagements with the myth, cp. the companion piece, Arethusa was a maiden, and Could Arethusa to her fountain run (Longman v, no. 411Appendix K). Text from Mary Nbk ff. 5v — 7v (punctuation has been added at the end of lines 33, 42, 77 and 81). Indentation follows Mary Nbk. Published in 1824 157–60; André Koszul (ed.), Proserpine and Midas (1922) 10–15; BSM v 314–21 (facsimile and transcription of S.’s draft of lines 37–90); and BSM x 34–43 (facsimile and transcription of Mary’s fair copy).

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shelley: selected poems Arethusa arose From her couch of snows, In the Acroceraunian Mountains, — From cloud and from crag, With many a jag, Shepherding her bright fountains. She leapt down the rocks With her rainbow locks, Streaming among the streams, — Her steps paved with green The downward ravine Which slopes to the Western gleams: — And gliding and springing, She went, ever singing In murmurs as soft as sleep; The Earth seemed to love her And Heaven smiled above her, As she lingered towards the deep. Then Alpheus bold On his glacier cold, With his trident the mountains strook; And opened a chasm In the rocks; — with the spasm All Erymanthus shook. And the black south wind It unsealed behind The urns of the silent snow, And earthquake and thunder Did rend in sunder The bars of the springs below: —

¶ 35. 3. the Acroceraunian Mountains] The Kanalit range, running along the northwest coast of Epirus (Ipeiros) and the southwest coast of Albania. 5. jag] ‘A sharp or rugged piece of rock’ (OED n.14); cp. The Cloud 35. The parallel of so distinctive a rhyme suggests that the two poems were broadly contemporary. 19. Alpheus] The river Alpheios rises in the central Peloponnesus and flows west-northwest into the Ionian Sea. 21. strook] ‘Struck’; to preserve the rhyme with line 24. Cp. L&C 2675 and Hymn to Mercury (Longman iii 508–43, no. 336) 672. 24. Erymanthus] Mt. Erymanthos, in the northwestern Peloponnesus; site of the fourth labour of Heracles and mentioned in Met. v 608 as one of the locations through which Arethusa passed in her flight from Alpheus. Pausanias, Description of Greece V vii 1, identifies a stream which rises on Erymanthos as a tributary of Alpheios. The glacial setting of lines 19–27 may be expanded from Ovid’s reference to ‘gelidumque Erymanthon’ (‘icy Erymanthus’) in Met. v 608. 26. unsealed] concealed 1824. 30. The bars] Presumably because the springs are frozen.

35  ‘arethusa arose’

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And the beard and the hair Of the river God were Seen through the torrent’s sweep, As he followed the light Of the fleet nymph’s flight To the brink of the Dorian deep. ‘Oh, save me! oh, guide me! And bid the deep hide me, For he grasps me now by the hair!’ The loud ocean heard, To its blue depth stirred, And divided at her prayer, And under the water The earth’s white daughter Fled like a sunny beam; Behind her descended Her billows, unblended With the brackish Dorian stream: — Like a gloomy stain On the emerald main Alpheus rushed behind, As an eagle pursuing A dove to its ruin, Down the streams of the cloudy wind.

31. And the] The 1824. 36. the Dorian deep] The exact sense is not clear. Although Latin writers occasionally use Dorian as a synonym for the sea (adapting the name Doris, one of the daughters of Oceanus), Dorian is normally an adjective referring to one of the four tribes of ancient Greece who settled in the Peloponnesus, and so S. probably means the ocean (deep) off the southwest coast of Greece (i.e., the Mediterranean), into which the river Alpheios flows. Cp. notes to lines 48 and 72; cp. also Arethusa was a maiden 30. 37. Cp. Arethusa’s appeal to Artemis in Met. v 618: ‘fer opem deprendimur’ (‘O help me or I am caught’). 40. The just God heard Nbk 14; meaning Artemis. 45–8. The punctuation of these lines follows 1824. 47. billows] Waves. 48. the brackish Dorian stream] As in line 36, Dorian functions as a synonym of Greek, specifically Peloponnesian; again, the exact sense is not clear, but perhaps S. means that Alpheus’ waters are brackish (salty) compared to those of innocent Arethusa. The source is probably Virgil; cp. S.’s translation ‘From Virgil’s Tenth Eclogue’ (Longman ii 361–2, no. 167) 6, describing Alpheus as ‘the bitter Dorian dew’, from the Latin ‘Doris amara’. Cp. also Could Arethusa to her fountain run 1–2. 50. the emerald main] The green sea. 52–53. As an eagle . . . ruin] Cp. Met. v 604–6: sic ego currebam, sic me ferus ille premebat, ut fugere accipitrem penna trepidante columbas, ut solet accipiter trepidas urguere columbas (‘so did I flee and so did he hotly press after me, as doves on fluttering pinions flee the hawk, as the hawk pursues the frightened doves’). 54. Down the] Through the Nbk 14.

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shelley: selected poems Under the bowers Where the Ocean Powers Sit on their pearlèd thrones, Through the coral woods Of the weltering floods, Over heaps of unvalued stones; Through the dim beams, Which amid the streams Weave a network of coloured light, And under the caves, Where the shadowy waves Are as green as the forest’s night: — Outspeeding the shark, And the swordfish dark, Under the Ocean foam, And up through the rifts Of the mountain clifts, They passed to their Dorian home, And now from their fountains In Enna’s Mountains, Down one vale where the morning basks, Like friends once parted, Grown single hearted, They ply their watery tasks. At sunrise they leap From their cradles steep In the cave of the shelving hill; At noon-tide they flow Through the woods below And the meadows of Asphodel, —

59. Of the swinging floods Nbk 14. weltering floods] Rolling waves. 60. unvalued] Invaluable (OED 1). Cp. PU IV 281 and n. 66. the forest’s] a forests Nbk 14. 68. swordfish] xiphias Nbk 14; the classical name for the swordfish. 69. Ocean foam] Nbk 14, 1824. Koszul notes that Mary’s fair copy reads ‘Ocean’ foam as if a genitive was meant; but cf. Ocean foam in the Song of Apollo [line 9]’, written shortly after for Midas, Mary’s other mythological drama. 71. clifts] Cliffs (OED n2). Cp. May-day Night (Longman vi, no. 440) ii 47. 72. their Dorian home] S. identifies Sicily as a Greek (Dorian) outpost. 74. Enna’s Mountains] Enna is a raised plateau in central Sicily from which, according to Greek myth, Proserpine was abducted by Pluto. S. relocates the sources of Alpheus and Arethusa from Greece to Sicily. 76–77. Like friends .  .  . hearted] Cp. These are two friends whose lives were undivided (Longman iv 108–9, no. 389) 84. meadows of Asphodel] Odyssey xxiv 8 mentions ασφόδελόν λειμώνα (‘the mead of asphodel’ (a flower native to the Mediterranean)) in Elysium, the heavenly paradise of Greek and Roman myth. Cp. also SP i 54 and note.

36  ‘arethusa was a maiden’ 85

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And at night they sleep In the rocking deep Beneath the Ortygian shore; — Like spirits that lie In the azure sky When they love, but live no more.

36  ‘Arethusa was a maiden’ Drafted in mid–late April 1820 as an ironic counterpart to Arethusa arose, which S. contributed to Mary’s drama Proserpine. While Arethusa arose remains relatively faithful to Ovid’s account of the innocent nymph Arethusa, who is pursued from Greece to Sicily by the lustful river god Alpheus, these lines appear to develop the version of the story given in Pausanias, Description of Greece V vii 2: They say that there was a hunter called Alpheius, who fell in love with Arethusa, who was herself a huntress. Arethusa, unwilling to marry, crossed, they say, to the island opposite Syracuse called Ortygia, and there turned from a woman to a spring. Alpheius too was changed by his love into the river. S., in these lines, has Alpheus and Arethusa as mortals who are transformed into semi-divinities through the destructive action of vanity and frustrated desire, incorporating Ovid’s account of Alpheus’ pursuit of Arethusa, but breaking off before the two reach Sicily. GM observes the extent to which S. is unsympathetic to Arethusa, no longer presented as Alpheus’ innocent victim (as in Ovid), or as an unwilling bride (as in Pausanias), but rather as a vain and conceited character; Alpheus, by contrast, is transformed from Ovid’s lustful aggressor into a lovelorn victim (Stand v (1961) 2–3). GM suggests that S. took the hint for this altered perspective from Met.: ‘Ovid had hinted that Arethusa was rather prudish (she says, “crimque placere putavi” — “I thought it wrong to be attractive” [Met. v 584]), and Shelley disliked prudery as much as he did vanity’. S. evidently did not intend this version of the story for Proserpine; whether he ever conceived its publication, or whether it was simply a jeu d’esprit, remains unknown. Text from Nbk 14 pp. 150 rev. — 149 rev. (punctuation has been added at the end of lines 2, 6, 7–10, 12, 17–18, 20, 26). Indentation follows the MS. Published in Stand v (1961) 2–3 under the title The Pursued and the Pursuer; and BSM v 310–13 (facsimile and transcription of the MS).

87. the Ortygian shore] Pausanias and Ovid both assert that Alpheus pursued Arethusa from Greece to the island of Ortygia, off the coast of Sicily (see headnote). 90. When they] Where they Nbk 14.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-36

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shelley: selected poems Arethusa was a maiden Bred among the rocks, And Alpheus, a shepherd, laden With the love of her sweet looks. More than all his flocks He loved those sweet looks. A proud and an ungentle creature, In her human form, Arethusa was by nature, And though fair and soft to see, Like a winter’s storm To her love, was she. On a flattering fountain She would ever stare — Till the maiden of the Mountain Grew the thing she gazed upon And, mixed with waters there, Fell from stone to stone. Alpheus would weep and languish In a dell of dew, Till his deep and liquid anguish Changed him to a gloomy river Whose dark waters must pursue Her bright waves, ever! The pursued and the pursuer To the salt sea foam, Through the rocks and [woods] obscure Wound with?[murmur] and with?[motion] To the threshold of their home In the Dorian Ocean —

¶ 36. 13–16. Echoing the vanity of Narcissus, described in Met. iii 339–510. 16. Grew . . . upon] Cp. PU IV 483–7: As a lover or a chameleon, Grows like what it looks upon, As a violet’s gentle eye Gazes on the azure sky Until its hue grows like what it beholds. 30. the Dorian Ocean] Off the southwest coast of Greece, into which the river Alpheios flows. See note to Arethusa arose 36. S. wrote and then cancelled Arethusa at the top of the following page, suggesting either that he meant to continue the poem or, as BSM v 419n.141 suggests, to make a fair draft.

37  ‘god save the queen!’ [a new national anthem]

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37  ‘God save the Queen!’ [A New National Anthem] Mary published in 1840 (251–2) six untitled stanzas of this polemical rewriting of the national anthem God Save the King. She does not place it among the other political poems of 1819, inserting it instead into her Note on the Poems of 1819, where she introduces it thus: ‘He sketched also a new version of our national anthem, as addressed to Liberty.’ Her ‘sketched’ acknowledges the rough and unfinished nature of the draft materials from which she had to construct the text. The mixed pencil and ink draft, in places rough indeed, runs from pp. 19 to 22 of Nbk 14. S. appears to have drafted the first, third, fourth, and fifth stanzas of the present text (which follows the order of the stanzas in 1840) in pencil on pp. 19–20, then corrected these pages in ink and made some additions, including the second stanza. Further additions in ink on pp. 21 and 22 include a draft of the final stanza as well as incomplete drafts of two more stanzas, which are given in the next paragraph. The additional lines on p. 21 are written across a draft of ll. 59–66 and 71–2 of The Cloud; those on p. 22 below drafts for the first stanza of Song of Apollo. As both these poems can be dated to late April or early May 1820, the drafting of God save the Queen! was probably completed in that period. It seems all but certain that this was one of the poems intended by S. for the ‘little volume of popular songs’ that he proposed to Leigh Hunt in a letter of 1 May (L ii 191); it may even be that it was the composition of this ‘new version’ of the national anthem that prompted him to test the idea for such a collection on Hunt. See headnote to Song: To the Men of England. Mary made a partial and untitled fair copy of the anthem on pp. 90–1 of Mary Copybk 2 which comprises only the first five stanzas of her 1840 text, all of them from pp. 19–20 of Nbk 14. Her transcription seems clearly to derive from this nbk: as Carlene Adamson points out (BSM v p. xxxvi), gaps and uncertain readings in S.’s draft are left as blank spaces in Mary’s fair copy, which also prefers to incorporate some cancelled lines where the draft provides uncancelled alternatives. No holograph fair copy is known to survive, nor — to judge from the drafts, from Mary’s fair copy, and from the 1840 text — is there any reason to think that one was made to which she had access. When preparing copy for 1840, therefore, she must have returned to the draft in Nbk 14 and scrutinised it more attentively, transcribing (as 1840’s final stanza) one of the two stanzas on p. 21 which are written in ink across the lines for The Cloud. The patchy draft of the other she chose not to complete and include. It may be transcribed as follows: O fairest hands?[strow] flowers In sum []festal showers Spread laurel oak & pine ?[Marking] her path divine, Fresh as our hopes are A further stanza is drafted on the following page of the nbk, below the draft for Song of Apollo, in a different ink and with a different nib: Empire & Victory Like leashed bloodhounds lie At her feet tremblingly God save

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The order in which S. might have decided to arrange the six complete or nearly complete stanzas cannot be deduced with entire confidence from the unfinished draft. The order of Mary’s 1840 text, on the MS evidence a plausible inference as to what S. intended, is adopted here. The complex history of the words and music which eventually became the National Anthem has been traced by Percy Scholes in God Save the Queen (1954), to which the following remarks are indebted. The anthem seems to have begun life in the late seventeenth century as a Jacobite and Tory song before being appropriated to the Hanoverian cause in 1745. Its first recorded performance in this new form and with this altered political allegiance took place on the night of 28 September of that year at Drury Lane Theatre, as an expression of defiant patriotism: Jacobite forces under the command of the Young Pretender Charles Edward Stuart having occupied Edinburgh, an invasion of England was feared to be imminent. The song, in two seven-line stanzas, had appeared in print the previous year, and both words and music were quickly and widely reprinted, while the practice of singing it at the end of a dramatic performance soon caught on in other London and provincial theatres. A third stanza was added later in 1745, thus fixing (subject to minor variations) the words of the principal part of the anthem up to the present day (Scholes p. 10): God save great George our King, Long live our noble King, God save the King. Send him victorious, Happy and glorious, Long to reign over us, God save the King. O Lord our God arise, Scatter his enemies, And make them fall; Confound their Politicks, Frustrate their knavish Tricks, On Thee our hopes we fix. God save us all. Thy choicest gifts in store On him be pleased to pour, Long may he reign. May he defend our laws, And ever give us cause, To say with Heart and Voice, God save the King. Through the eighteenth century, stanzas were regularly added to these three in response to contemporary events and circumstances, such as George III’s bouts of mental derangement and his recovery therefrom, and the failed attempt on his life at Drury Lane Theatre in 1800. New poems were also written to be sung to the tune of the anthem — for the wedding of George III and Queen Charlotte in 1761, for example, or for the King’s jubilee in 1810. Comic parodies appeared at intervals, some with political reference, including both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary versions. It may be to one of these that S. refers in two letters of 1812 (L i 332, 334). The anthem was also variously recast as more directly satirical: as an attack on the monarchy, on the Prince of Wales’s extravagance, or as an expression of support for Queen Caroline in 1820 and 1821.

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S.’s contribution to this protean tradition adapts the religious and military elements of the original to the praise of Liberty while ironically contrasting this true Queen to the impostors of the current political regime. The poem’s principal motifs of execution, resurrection, and second coming — borrowed from the Gospel narrative of Christ’s life — are also appropriate to the historical moment. George III had died on 29 January 1820, and the Prince Regent had succeeded him as King George IV. The disappointed hopes of those who had expected a change for the better from the succession are redirected in S.’s hymn to their only genuine sovereign, Liberty, whom the poet clothes in the attributes of divinity. Political specifics are avoided in favour of a more generalised mode of religious myth in which S. recombines favoured images and themes from his own earlier work: see note to l. 3. Versions of the anthem making more direct reference to contemporary events and ideas provide a revealing contrast with S.’s practice here. The New God save the King published in the British Neptune (4 September 1803), for instance, addresses the Napoleonic menace: ‘See the Corse threat’ning stands/Midst all his fire-brands/Vomiting flame.’ A New Song (To the old Tune of “God save the King”), which was intended To be sung by the Corresponding Society, and the Friends of Liberty, at their Grand Meeting (1795), adopts a recognisably French Revolutionary idiom: ‘The banners of Reason spread,/And by Liberty led,/Let us advance.’ The latter is reprinted with revealing commentary by Michael Scrivener in the anthology Poetry and Reform (1992). Text from Nbk 14 pp. 19–22. Following Rossetti 1870, the title has been adopted from the first form of the refrain. Most punctuation has been supplied, taking that of 1840 into account. Published in 1840; BSM v 42–9 (facsimile and transcription of MS). The poem has been known by various titles: God Save the Queen (Rossetti 1870); National Anthem (Forman 1876–7); A New National Anthem, the title in Dowden 1891, has been followed by Hutchinson, Locock 1911, and Julian.

‘God save the Queen!’ [A New National Anthem]

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God! prosper, speed and save, God! raise from England’s grave Her murdered Queen. Pave with swift victory The steps of Liberty Whom Britons own to be Immortal Queen! See, she comes throned on high, On swift Eternity, God save the Queen! Millions on millions wait Firm, rapid, [    ], elate, On her?[approaching] state, God save the Queen!

¶ 37. 3. murdered Queen] See England in 1819 l. 13 and note; MA ll. 102–25 and note. 8. throned on high] The image recalls the apocalyptic visions of ‘the throne of God and of the Lamb’ in the new Jerusalem of Revelation xxii 3. 12. Firm, rapid, and elate, 1840. In the draft a gap is left after rapid, followed by a comma, as if S. intended to supply a word later. 13. ?[approaching]] majestic 1840; ?[approvative] BSM v; ?[approaching] Massey. The word, written loosely near the edge of the page, is very difficult to decipher.

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shelley: selected poems She is thine own pure soul ?[Moulding] the mighty whole, God save our Queen! She is thine own deep love Rained down from Heaven above Wherever she rest or move, God save our Queen! Wilder her enemies In their own dark disguise, God save our Queen! All earthly things that dare Her sacred name to wear, Strip them, as Kings [    ] bare; God save our Queen! Be her eternal throne Built in our hearts alone, God save our Queen! Let the Oppressor hold Canopied seats of gold, She sits enthroned of old O’er our hearts, Queen. Lips, touched by seraphim, Breathe out the choral hymn, God save the Queen!

22–3. enemies . . . dark disguise] The oppressors, domestic and foreign, who conceal their true nature beneath the robes of established power. 25. earthly things] In the draft S. originally wrote, then canc. ‘adored worms’ (Nbk 14 p. 20): his first thought makes the sense of ll. 25–7 clearer; they apply to those who appropriate the name of Liberty without right. 26. wear] bear 1840. 27. as Kings [  ]] as kings are 1840. As in l. 12, S. has left a gap in the draft to be filled in later. Cp. What men gain fairly, that should they possess ll. 8–10 and note. 36. Adapting a celebrated passage in Isaiah vi 5–7 in which the prophet is consecrated to his divine mission: ‘I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: 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.’ S. read Isaiah aloud to Mary between 2 and 10 February 1820 (Mary Jnl i 308). 38. the] S. has left the word out of the draft. See note to l. 42.

38  song (‘rarely, rarely comest thou’)

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Sweet as if Angels sang, Loud as that [] clang Wakening the world’s dead gang, God save the Queen!

38  Song (‘Rarely, rarely comest thou’) Published in 1824 without date but included among the Poems Written in 1821 in 1839. S.’s holograph fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1 81–3 is the only recorded MS. It evidently served as Mary’s text for 1824, where the only difference of substance — ‘thou’ for the holograph’s that in line 11 — may be accounted for as either a mistranscription or Mary’s alteration. Below the Harvard holograph Mary has inscribed ‘Pisa — May — 1820’; it is not clear why she re-dated the poem to 1821 in 1839. In the absence of a holograph draft, which might help resolve the discrepancy, the position of S.’s fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1 provides the only additional piece of MS evidence for dating the Song. It is closely preceded in the nbk by fair copies of A Vision of the Sea (Longman iii 365–77, no. 321), An Exhortation, and Ode to Heaven, all of them written between late 1819 and spring 1820 — so presumably copied into the nbk before being sent to England for publication in 1820 — and followed after some 20 pages by To a Sky-Lark, also published in 1820 and very probably posted to England on 12 July 1820. The disposition of these titles in the nbk is consistent with Mary’s dating of the Song to May 1820, which appears a more likely time of composition than 1821. Text from Harvard Nbk 1 pp. 81–3. S.’s holograph is not punctuated for the press; some punctuation has been supplied after consulting both 1824 and 1839. Published in 1824; MYRS v 82–4 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

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Rarely, rarely comest thou, Spirit of Delight! Wherefore hast thou left me now Many a day and night? Many a weary night and day ’Tis since thou art fled away. How shall ever one like me Win thee back again? With the joyous and the free Thou wilt scoff at pain.

40. In the draft in Nbk 14 p. 21 S. has cancelled a word, which appears to be ‘triumphal’, as BSM v suggests, leaving a gap in the line. 1840 reads ‘trumpet’s’; that might well have been S.’s choice had he revised the draft, as this and the following line refer to the biblical tradition that at the general resurrection the dead will be awakened by the sound of a trumpet: see 1 Corinthians xv 52. 42. S. wrote only the word ‘God’, then left the remainder of the line blank. See note to l. 38.

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As a lizard with the shade Of a trembling leaf, Thou with sorrow art dismayed; Even the sighs of grief Reproach thee, that thou art not near, And reproach thou wilt not hear. Let me set my mournful ditty To a merry measure; Thou wilt never come for pity — Thou wilt come for pleasure; Pity then will cut away Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay. I love all that thou lovest, Spirit of Delight! The fresh Earth in new leaves dressed, And the starry night, Autumn evening, and the morn When the golden mists are born. I love snow, and all the forms Of the radiant frost; I love waves and winds and storms — Every thing almost Which is Nature’s, and may be Untainted by man’s misery. I love tranquil Solitude, And such society

¶ 38. 11. that] thou 1824, 1839. 13–15. S. may be recalling Horace, Odes I xxiii, an appeal to ‘Chloë’ not to flee the poet like a fawn seeking its mother: nam seu mobilibus veris inhorruit adventus foliis, seu virides rubum dimovere lacertae, et corde et genibus tremit. (‘For it quivers in heart and limb, if through the light hung leaves hath run the shiver of spring’s approach, or the green lizards have pushed aside the bramble’). 19. ditty] poem (OED ditty n. 2.b). 20. measure] air, tune, melody (OED measure n. 14).

39  song of apollo

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As is quiet, wise and good; Between thee and me What difference? but thou dost possess The things I seek — not love them less. I love, Love — though he has wings, And like light can flee — But above all other things, Spirit, I love thee — Thou art Love and Life! O come, Make once more my heart thy home.

39  Song of Apollo Drafted by S. in Nbk 14, with its companion Song of Pan, for the first act of Midas, one of the two ‘mythological dramas’ written by Mary in 1820. Mary’s jnl confirms that she completed the other drama, Proserpine, to which S. contributed Arethusa arose, on 3 May 1820 (Mary Jnl i 136). Medwin’s brief mention of Mary’s dramas (Medwin 252) suggests that Midas was composed after Proserpine, and the order of Mary’s fair copies in Mary Nbk supports this. Mary’s jnl records her reading Ovid, from whose Met. both dramas are adapted, on 26 April, presumably while working on Proserpine, and again on 4 May, probably in preparation for Midas (Mary Jnl i 315, 317). The position of S.’s Nbk 14 drafts of the two songs, following The Cloud and God save the Queen! [A New National Anthem], also supports a composition date in late April or early May. Mary fair-copied both songs into Mary Nbk ff.22r — 22v and 22v — 23v (facsimile and transcription in BSM x 96–103), adding the marginal gloss ‘(Shelley)’ to indicate the authorship. While these fair copies may have had S.’s approval, they appear unreliable at a number of points (see notes); hence, the present texts are based on S.’s drafts. The songs were first published in 1824, entitled ‘Hymn of Apollo’ and ‘Hymn of Pan’ (Midas remained unpublished until André Koszul’s edition of Proserpine and Midas in 1922). Neither song is titled in Nbk 14 or in Mary’s transcripts. However, as a number of commentators have noted, hymns are usually addressed to gods rather than sung by them. For this reason, the 1824 titles have been emended to ‘Songs of’. Adapting Met. xi 146–93, Mary’s Midas opens with Midas arriving at Mt Tmolus (now generally identified with Bozdag, in western Turkey) at the beginning of a singing contest between Apollo and Pan, which is to be judged by Tmolus, patron-god of the eponymous mountain. Midas announces that he will favour Pan, his ‘guardian god’ (Mary Nbk f.22r), even before the contest begins, but after hearing both gods Tmolus awards victory to Apollo, telling him that: The Fauns may dance To the blithe tune of ever merry Pan: But wisdom, beauty, and the power divine Of highest poesy lives within thy strain, Named by the Gods the king of Melody. (Mary Nbk f.23v) Wasserman 46–56 suggests that S.’s Apollo and Pan represent the claims of ‘two opposing orders’, Apollo championing abstract intellectual values, and Pan the earthly and physical;

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Apollo singing in the present tense, because the values he represents are eternal, and Pan singing in the past tense, connoting the transience of earthly experience. This ontological contest, Wasserman suggests, is also reflected at the level of form: each song has thirty-six lines, reflecting the equality of the gods, but with different rhythms embodying the different emphases: Apollo sings in regular, ten-syllable lines, while Pan’s metre fluctuates, signalling the vicissitudes of earthly experience. Text from Nbk 14 pp. 23–5 (punctuation has been added at the end of lines 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 14, 24, 25, 30, 32 and 36). Indentation follows the MS. Published in 1824 167–8, as ‘Hymn of Apollo’; and BSM v 50–5 (facsimile and transcription of the MS).

Song of Apollo

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The sleepless Hours who watch me as I lie Curtained with star-enwoven tapestries From the broad moonlight of the open sky, Fanning the busy dreams from my dim eyes, Waken me when their mother, the grey Dawn, Tells them that Dreams and that the moon is gone. Then I arise; and climbing Heaven’s blue dome I walk over the mountains and the waves, Leaving my robe upon the Ocean foam. My footsteps pave the clouds with fire; the caves Are filled with my bright presence, and the air Leaves the green Earth to my embraces bare. The sunbeams are my shafts with which I kill Deceit, that loves the night and fears the day. All men who do, or even imagine ill Fly me; and from the glory of my ray Good minds, and open actions, take new might Until diminished by the reign of night. I feed the clouds, the rainbows and the flowers With their ethereal colours; the moon’s globe

¶ 39. 1. Hours] Recalling the horae of Greek myth, goddesses of the hours and seasons. 3. the open sky] the sky Mary Nbk. sky,] sky; Nbk 14. 7–12. Then . . . bare] Cp. the description of sunrise in TL 1–20; and The Cloud 77–84. 13–14. The sunbeams . . . Deceit] Cp. Epipsychidion 163–69, on the ‘light’ of the ‘Imagination’, which ‘fills’: The Universe with glorious beams, and kills Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow Of its reverberated lightning. 13. my shafts] Arrows; Apollo’s numerous attributes included skill in archery (he lists further attainments in lines 33–35). Cp. Could Arethusa to her fountain run (Longman v, no. 411Appendix K) 3–4. 17. actions,] actions Nbk 14. 19–20. Cp. The Cloud 1–4. 19. clouds,] clouds Nbk 14. 20. ethereal] Delicate. colours;] colours, Nbk 14.

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And the pure stars in their eternal bowers Are cinctured with my power as with a robe; Whatever lamps on Earth or Heaven may shine Are portions of one spirit; which is mine. 25

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I stand at noon upon the peak of Heaven; Then with unwilling steps, I?[linger] down To the clouds of the Atlantic even. For grief that I depart they weep and frown — What look is more delightful, than the smile With which I soothe them from the Western isle? I am the eye with which the Universe Beholds itself, and knows it is divine; All harmony of instrument and verse, All prophecy and medicine are mine; All light of art or nature — to my song Victory and praise, in its own right, belong.

40  Song of Pan For textual history and commentary, see headnote to the companion Song of Apollo. Text from Nbk 14 pp. 27–29 (punctuation has been added at the end of lines 2, 5, 6–12, 16–17, 21–22, 23, 25, 27, 29, 31, and 33–36; indentation follows the MS). Published in 1824 169–70, as ‘Hymn of Pan’; and BSM v 58–63 (facsimile and transcription of the MS). 22. cinctured] Encircled, surrounded. robe;] robe Nbk 14. 23. on] Alt. by S. from in, which would better fit Heaven. Some canc. lines follow in Nbk 14, alluding to Ceres, Bacchus and Vertumnus, deities of agriculture, wine, and the changing seasons. 24. spirit] power Mary Nbk. 26. ?[linger]] Replacing wander canc. in Nbk 14; wander Mary Nbk. 27. To] Into Mary Nbk; S. first wrote Into but then struck through In. even] Evening. 28. they] The clouds. 31–2. Wasserman 47 cps Apollo’s speech in Met. iv 226–8: ‘ille ego sum . . . qui longum metior annum, omnia qui video, per quem videt omnia tellus, mundi oculus’ (‘Lo, I am he who measures out the year, who beholds all things, by whom the earth beholds all things — the world’s eye’). Apollo’s arrogance is traditional. 33. and verse] or verse Mary Nbk. 34. All prophecy, all medicine is mine Mary Nbk. 36. This line is at the foot of p. 25. The following page is blank, raising the possibility that S. considered extending Apollo’s song, although it appears complete. Song of Pan begins at the top of page 27.

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shelley: selected poems From the forests and highlands We come, we come; From the river-girt islands Where loud waves were dumb Listening my sweet pipings. The wind in the reeds and the rushes, The bees in the bells of thyme, The birds in the myrtle bushes, The cicadae above in the lime, And the lizards below in the grass, Were silent as even old Tmolus was, Listening my sweet pipings. Liquid Peneus was flowing — And all dark Tempe lay In?[Ossa’s] shadow, outgrowing The light of the dying day, Speeded with my sweet pipings. The sileni and sylvans and fauns And the nymphs of the woods and the waves To the edge of the moist river-lawns And the brink of the dewy caves, And all that did then attend and follow, Were silent for love, as you now, Apollo, For envy of my sweet pipings.

¶ 40. 3. river-girt] Encircled by rivers. 4. Where . . . were] Were . . . are Mary Nbk. 5. Listening my] Listening to canc. my Mary Nbk; Listening to my 1824. The transitive form is common in Milton. 7–8. In the Nbk 14 draft of both lines, S. either superimposed in over an original on, or vice versa. Mary transcribed on in both cases, but in was probably S.’s final intention. Cp. note to line 33. 9. cicadae] Insects native to Mediterranean countries, which produce a loud, distinctive chirping sound. 11. old Tmolus] The god judging the singing contest between Apollo and Pan, but probably also comprising a reference to the eponymous mountain, of which he was the patron deity (see headnote to Song of Apollo). as even] as ever Mary Nbk. 12. pipings] piping Nbk 14; the text has been emended to maintain consistency with the other stanza endings. 13–15. The river Peneus (Pineios) flows into the Aegean Sea through the valley of Tempe, in north-eastern Thessalia; the valley is flanked by Mt Ossa (Kissavos) and Mt Pelion (Pelio), to the southeast, and Mt Olympus, to the northwest. S.’s first draft of line 15 reads In Ossa’s shadow, outgrowing but he subsequently struck through Ossa and wrote an illegible word, which Mary transcribed as Pelion, directly above. Although this second word was certainly intended to replace Ossa, the reading is so uncertain that S.’s first draft has been retained (Reiman (2002) conjectures ‘Olympus’). Cp. note to line 27. 16. of] Surely the intended reading, although there is no f in Nbk 14. 17. Speeded with] Speeded by Mary Nbk. 18–19. The sileni . . . nymphs] Rural semi-divinities from Greek and Roman mythology; typically associated with and often personifying specific natural objects, e.g. rivers (waves) and trees (woods). 18. fauns,] fawns Nbk 14, but S. clearly means the mythological figures and not young deer (Mary also transcribed fauns). 23. Were silent] Were as silent Mary Nbk. now, Apollo,] The commas are editorial.

41  the cloud 25

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I sang of the dancing stars, I sang of the daedal Earth, And of Heaven, and the giant wars, And Love and Death and Birth; And then I changed my pipings, Singing how down the vales of Maenalus I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed: Gods and men, we are all deluded thus! — It breaks on our bosom and then we bleed; They wept as I think both ye now would, If envy or age had not frozen your blood, At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.

41  The Cloud The Cloud was published in the ‘Miscellaneous Poems’ section of 1820. No complete holograph MS is known to survive, but there are drafts of ll. 59–66 and 71–2 on p. 21 of Nbk 14, and of ll. 77–84 on p. 31; and there is a very clean and legible fair copy in S.’s hand of ll. 35–84 on pp. 35–7 of the same nbk. A missing leaf immediately preceding p. 35 no doubt carried the fair copy of the first thirty-four lines, as BSM v points out (xxxviii). The Cloud was not transcribed into Harvard Nbk 1, as were seven of the nine poems published with PU in 1820, probably because Nbk 14 already contained a fair copy. In 1839 Mary included The Cloud among the Poems Written in 1820, although in the Preface she indicates that it was composed in England at some earlier date: the “Ode to the Sky Lark”, and “The Cloud” . . . were written as his mind prompted, listening to the carolling of the bird, aloft in the azure sky of Italy; or marking the cloud as it sped across the heavens, while he floated in his boat on the Thames. (i p. xi) Her grouping of The Cloud with the poems of 1820 clearly contradicts this memory of its spontaneous composition, and there seems no entirely satisfactory way of reconciling the two assertions. It may be that she is confusing her recollection here with another — of S. writing L&C at Marlow in 1817 ‘in his boat, as it floated under the beech groves of Bisham’ (Note on The Revolt 26. the daedal Earth] A Lucretian epithet (e.g. De Re. Nat. i 7, v 234), registering the cunning intricacy of the world. Cp. Mont Blanc 86. Cp. also OL (Longman iii 378–418, no. 322) 18 and note. 27. the giant wars] According to Greek myth, the race of giants, the offspring of Gaia (the Earth), fought and lost a war against the Olympian gods, led by Zeus. 30–31. Singing . . . reed] Ovid, Met. i 689–712, tells how the nymph Syrinx, pursued by a lusting Pan, was transformed into a reed, which Pan fashioned into a musical pipe. Maenalus (Mainalo) is a mountain range in Arkadia, traditionally sacred to Pan. Ovid locates the story of Pan and Syrinx in the Arkadian mountains but does not name the range. 30. vales] vale Mary Nbk. 33. It breaks on] As in lines 7–8, S. here either superimposed on over an original in or vice versa. Mary transcribed in, but on seems more likely: Pan, trying to clasp the fleeing Syrinx, instead clasps the reed (line 33’s It) into which she has been transformed, breaking it against (on) his bosom. 34. They wept] All wept Mary Nbk. both ye] Apollo and Tmolus.

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of Islam in 1839 i 376). Certainly, the various landscapes of L&C abound with cloud-effects. However that may be, MS and other evidence — Nbk 14 was manufactured in Italy (BSM v pp. xxvi — xxx) and contains the only MSS of the poem known to survive — support a period of composition between mid-April and mid-May 1820. The pencil draft for ll. 59–66 on p. 21 of Nbk 14 is overwritten by drafts in ink for God save the Queen! [A New National Anthem] — which appears to date from late April — so the draft lines for The Cloud must have preceded it on the page. Wasserman 244 identified S.’s revision of a couplet from the draft in Nbk 14 (22) of the first stanza of Song of Apollo for ll. 5–6 of The Cloud — ‘The Hours, when from their wings the dews are shaken/Whose silver sounds the dreaming flowers awaken’ (Song) becoming ‘From my wings are shaken the dews that waken/The sweet buds every one’. Song of Apollo was probably composed between late April and mid-May. On 14 May, S. wrote to Charles Ollier, ‘Mrs. Shelley is now transcribing for me the little poems to be printed at the end of Prometheus; they will be sent in a post or two’ (L ii 197). His fair copy of The Cloud, which is very likely to have been among the ‘little poems’ he mentions, must therefore have been completed on or before the date of the letter. The fair drafts for both Song of Apollo and Song of Pan (25–7) fall between the drafts (Nbk 14 pp. 21, 31) and the fair copy (35–7) of The Cloud. In Spring 1820, a time for S. of intense and varied poetic creation, of which Nbk 14 furnishes ample evidence, the composition of a number of poems, considered as extending from initial drafting to finished fair copy, must have overlapped. The point is reinforced by the intricate similarities that can be adduced between the poems of this period. In the case of Song of Apollo and The Cloud, besides the couplet adapted from the former, which is noted, there is a common celestial theatre and vantage-point as well as shared language and imagery derived from the diurnal and seasonal changes in the heavens and the earth. S.’s letter to Ollier of 14 May provides a strong indication that printer’s copy for The Cloud in 1820 was a transcription by Mary of his fair copy in Nbk 14. As was his practice, S. would have read over Mary’s transcription, making any necessary alterations and corrections at that point. 1829 corrects an error in l. 6 of the 1820 text, probably on the authority of S.’s list of errata for the volume which was sent to Galignani by Mary: see headnote to PU; but 1829 also introduces an error at l. 3. See note to these two lines. The literary pedigree of The Cloud reaches back to Aristophanes’ The Clouds, which S. read in June 1818 (Mary Jnl i 214–15). The eponymous chorus in Aristophanes’ comedy are nature-­ deities, daughters of Ocean and Aether, who take care to remind characters and spectators of the beneficial functions they perform in a world dependent on both rain and shade. The Clouds had been recalled to S.’s attention in November 1819 in an article on Friedrich Schlegel’s Lectures on the History of Literature in the April 1819 issue of the Quarterly Review xlii, which he read on or after 15 October. The author of the article charges Socrates (who appears as a character in the play) with a predilection for low company and (by insinuation) for homosexual practices, blames his coarse language, notes his ugliness and habitual disdain for his appearance — before going on to insist on the superiority of Christian over Socratic ethics. S. took issue with this portrait of a philosopher whose doctrines he revered, promising a more developed consideration of the subject at a later date, in his letter of 3 November 1819 to the Examiner in defence of Richard Carlile who had been charged with blasphemous libel for publishing Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason (L ii 145–6). A more recent influence is Leigh Hunt’s poem The Nymphs, published in Foliage (1818). S. greatly admired Hunt’s poem, praising it as ‘truly poetical, in the intense and emphatic sense of the word’ (L ii 2–3), and later declaring it to be: original and intense, conceived with the clearest sense of ideal beauty and executed with the fullest and most flowing lyrical power, and yet defined with the most intelligible outline of thought and language. (L ii 152)

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As this was written some five months before S. composed The Cloud, we can take it as defining the criteria by which he would wish his own poem to be judged. The second part of The Nymphs introduces the ‘Nepheliads’ (apparently Hunt’s own coinage on the model of Dryads), nymphs who guide clouds in their passage through the skies, one attending on each, and who combine the figure of a minor divinity with the function of the intelligent spirits who were imagined as conducting the heavenly spheres in traditional cosmology. Hunt’s nymphs are decidedly erotic beings whose extended song (ii 135–229; Hunt Works v 222–4) describes the activities and appearances of the clouds they pilot in relation to the sky, the sun and the moon, the earth, and the water. Like the chorus of Aristophanes and Hunt’s nymphs, S.’s Cloud is a female. Only lightly personified, she is dissociated from explicit religious or mythical connection. Her song — playful, sensual, exhilarated, joyful — specifies the roles she assumes through the diurnal and across the seasonal cycle, setting her eventful existence at various dramatic locations in the grand theatre of earth, sky, and ocean. Traveller-adventurer, nourisher and protector, artificer and destroyer, the Cloud clearly models her utterance on that of Hunt’s Nepheliads. But the model is also a point of departure. S. modifies his principal source to achieve an elemental lyric and thematic simplicity, varying the stresses and the number of syllables within each of the two basic line-patterns so as to avoid the monotony that might have resulted from the rhyme-scheme. He differentiates his poem from Hunt’s too by displaying an awareness of scientific meteorology, as critics have recognised. The studies of Grabo, King-Hele, and Hamblyn listed in the bibliography have proposed resemblances to the ideas on cloud-formation of Giambatista Beccaria, Erasmus Darwin, Adam Walker, and Luke Howard. The role assigned to electricity in the life-cycle of clouds, for example, appears to inform the second stanza; and S. shows a clear understanding of the process of atmospheric evaporation — condensation — precipitation. What is specifically owing to modern science in the images of The Cloud is not always easy to identify, however. That clouds were the product of evaporation and condensation, for example, had been speculated upon since antiquity. In De Re. Nat. Lucretius notes that ‘The clouds also often take up a great deal of seawater besides . . . when the winds carry clouds above the great sea’ (vi 503–5); while Pliny held that ‘clouds are formed out of moisture rising to a height or air condensed into moisture’ (Hist. Nat. II xlii 111). Constantly shifting in shape and function yet still retaining her identity, S.’s Cloud would seem to illustrate the contention, first given currency by Luke Howard’s essay On the Modification of Clouds (1803), that although clouds could be organised into distinct modifications according to appearance and elevation (cirrus, cumulus, stratus), these were not fixed conditions and could pass from one to another producing intermediate (e.g. cirrostratus) and compound states (e.g. cumulo-cirro-stratus, otherwise known as nimbus). In lines 1–12, S.’s Cloud broadly displays characteristics typical of the following modifications as identified by Howard: nimbus (raincloud), cumulus (a dense cloud, hence affording shade) and cumulostratus (producing rain, snow or hail, and a herald of approaching thunder). It is not unreasonable to conjecture that S. was acquainted with Howard’s nomenclature as well as with his principal conclusion on the instability and interchangeability of cloudforms. Howard’s views had gained currency and had been the object of debate, in the sixteen years since he published them, in both scientific media and general ones such as GM, which adopted his terminology from 1809, and discussed his work in 1810 and 1811. S.’s own observations on the climate in Italy in 1818, which include his observation of clouds and their varied forms, do not adopt Howard’s nomenclature, though this is perhaps not surprising in view of the novelty and technical character of Howard’s categorization. S. wrote to Peacock on 25 July 1818, ‘The atmosphere here [in Bagni di Lucca], unlike that of the rest of Italy, is diversified with clouds, which grow in the middle of the day, and sometimes bring thunder and lightning, and hail about the size of a pigeon’s egg, and decrease towards

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the evening, leaving only those finely woven webs of vapour which we see in English skies, and flocks of fleecy and slowly moving clouds, which all vanish before sunset’ (L ii 25). Desmond King-Hele notes that, although S.’s cloud is of no single type, the predominant forms in the poem are ‘cumulus and cumulonimbus, the forms with most individuality’ (King-Hele (1971) 220). The importance of natural history to The Cloud can be exaggerated. Whether the representation of a natural phenomenon in the medium of poetry, which has its own language and conventions, derives from scientific understanding or is simply the result of close observation can be a delicate judgement. The poem hardly incorporates ‘a scientific monograph’ (King-Hele (1971) 220), nor is the Cloud herself exactly ‘the messenger of a scientific understanding’ (E. Blunden, Shelley: A Life Story (1946) 230). And while an awareness of the physical processes by which clouds are created, modified, exhausted, and re-created does appear to inform some passages of the poem, as indicated in the notes, this strain is integrated with and subordinated to the Cloud’s delighted account of the cycle of her own existence whose pure vitality passes through a series of metamorphoses which guarantee her perpetual life. In S.’s verse from 1819 the operations of nature often function as a figure for social and political advance and as a symbol of hope in general, as they do in PU IV or Ode to the West Wind. The meteorology of The Cloud is considered in Grabo (1930) 118–21 and King-Hele (1971) 219–27. Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds (2001) follows the career of Luke Howard and estimates his contribution to early nineteenth-century meteorology, as well as considering The Cloud (215–17). Text from 1820. Some capitalisation has been adopted from S.’s fair copy in Nbk 14; small modifications in punctuation have also been introduced after comparison with the fair copy; these latter are recorded in the notes. Published in 1820; BSM v pp. 47, 67, 75–9 (facsimile and transcription of MSS).

The Cloud I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams.

¶ 41. 1–2. In Aristophanes’ Clouds l. 299 the clouds are παρθένοι ὀμβροφόροι (‘rain-bearing maidens’). Cp. Hunt, The Nymphs ii 135–40: Ho! We are the Nepheliads, we, Who bring the clouds from the great sea, . . . We it is with soft new showers Wash the eyes of the young flowers. (Hunt Works v 222) 3–4. Cp. Luke Howard on the cumulus: ‘Independently of the beauty and magnificence it adds to the face of nature, the cumulus serves to skreen the earth from the direct rays of the sun’ (Philosophical Magazine xvi (1803) 101).

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From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother’s breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder. I sift the snow on the mountains below, And their great pines groan aghast; And all the night’tis my pillow white, While I sleep in the arms of the blast. Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers,

3. shade] shades 1829, 1839. 5. wings] The Cloud is compared to a bird here and in l. 43. 6. buds] 1829, 1839; birds 1820. The correction is made in what appears to be S.’s hand in the copy of 1820 he presented to Leigh Hunt, and which is now in the Huntington Library: RB22460. An identical error is corrected by S. on the Examiner copy of Hymn to Intellectual Beauty 58 (see note thereto). 8. The diurnal revolution of the earth around the sun is here driven by the same cosmic joy as the dance of Hours in PU IV 61–160. 9. flail] An implement for threshing grain, a staff to which a heavy pole or club is attached so as to swing freely; also a medieval weapon resembling this: a handle to which a spiked ball or chains is fastened. 14. Cp. Athanase (Longman ii 311–27, no. 146) 31–2: ‘Vexed by the blast, the great pines groaned and swung/Under their load of snow.’ 11. it] I.e. the hail. Of the poem’s loose use of pronouns, King-Hele (1971) 221 comments: ‘The floating pronouns are part of the adventure’. 15–16. The physical basis of the image has been described thus: ‘The cloud is capping the peak, remaining stationary and fixed in shape, though the particles composing it are constantly changing because of the strong winds raging round’ (King-Hele (1971) 221–2); and more particularly: ‘A “banner” cloud hangs motionless on the lee of a mountain-peak, while the wind blows round it on either side’ (GM, 1964). When air currents are forced upwards over a mountain and cool in the higher altitude, the water vapour condenses into the droplets that constitute clouds. Walker 306 notes simply that ‘Clouds are attracted by mountains, and [are] also driven against their tops and sides by the wind’. 17–30. These lines, though not expressed with scientific precision, appear to derive from contemporary opinions, like that in Beccaria’s Treatise upon Artificial Electricity (Engl. trans. 1776: see Grabo 119–21), and which are no longer accepted by meteorologists, on the role of electricity in the formation and behaviour of clouds. Similarly, Adam Walker’s theory of the process of evaporation held that water was drawn into the air by an electrical force. Conceiving the rays of the sun as a stream of electricity, he argued that ‘it lies quiescent till called forth by frictions or affinities. One of those affinities is water, to which it adheres with great affection, separating its particles, and giving them volatility . . . as the particles of electricity repel each other . . . the evaporation goes on, water rises through the air, flying on the wings of electricity’ (Walker 358). For Walker, see King-Hele (1971) 158–9. The electrical charge of the cloud’s lightning is attracted to a similar but opposite charge in ocean or stream or the earth, causing it, in an implicitly sexual image, to discharge itself, dissolving in rains. Chernaik comments pertinently: ‘What remains with the reader . . . is not the meteorological “fact”, which is mistaken, but the image of the eternal desire of the Lightning for the Spirit he loves in seas and streams’ (133). It should be noted that the Lightning loves both genii and a Spirit. S. commonly represents the forces of attraction in nature in erotic terms, as in the dialogue between Moon and Earth in PU IV. See also PU III iv 1–19 and note, IV 270–9 and note.

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shelley: selected poems Lightning my pilot sits; In a cavern under is fettered the thunder, It struggles and howls at fits; Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion, This pilot is guiding me, Lured by the love of the genii that move In the depths of the purple sea; Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills, Over the lakes and the plains, Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream The Spirit he loves remains; And I all the while bask in heaven’s blue smile, Whilst he is dissolving in rains. The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes, And his burning plumes outspread, Leaps on the back of my sailing rack, When the morning star shines dead, As on the jag of a mountain crag, Which an earthquake rocks and swings, An eagle alit one moment may sit

18. sits;] sits, 1820, 1839. 19–20. Cp. Lucretius, De Re. Nat. vi 189–98: ‘for do but apply your scrutiny when the winds carry clouds like mountains across through the air . . . then you will be able to recognize the great masses of them, and to perceive the similitude of caverns reared with vaulted roofs, which when a tempest arises the winds do fill, and with loud roaring resent their imprisonment in the clouds . . .’. 20. at fits] fitfully, in violent spasms. 22. Lightning, the cloud’s pilot, here assumes the role of the spirits which, in older astronomy, were imagined as guiding the motions of heavenly bodies. Cp. PU III iv 6–15, SP i 88. Leigh Hunt’s The Nymphs employs similar mythological machinery: ‘. . . every cloud had a bright Nymph to it, —/Each for a guide’ (ii 49–50, Hunt Works v 220). S. associates the image of lightning-driven clouds with intellectual advances in OL 39–40: ‘I hear the pennons of her [i.e. Wisdom’s] car/Self-moving, like cloud charioted by flame.’ 23. genii] The natural forces of the Ocean imagined as localised spirits. Cp. the genii of the stormy sea in Alastor 330. 27. stream] stream, 1820, 1839. The comma has been removed to avoid an ambiguity by attaching the adverbial phrase to the verb remains which it qualifies. 29. Cp. OL 46–9: ‘[Greece] basked glorious in the open smiles/Of favouring heaven.’ The sky above the cloud is always blue, regardless of conditions underneath. 30. he] I.e. the cloud’s pilot, lightning, which discharges itself in rain. See note to ll. 17–30. 31–58. These lines adopt the supernatural and cosmological perspectives offered by the nepheliads in Leigh Hunt’s Nymphs ii 172–204. As in that poem, S.’s cloud is portrayed in lines 31–44 as attendant upon the sun as it rises and sets. In lines 55–8 the mutable sublunary world, through the agency of the cloud, temporarily reflects in the calm rivers, lakes, and seas the immutable nature of the celestial realm. 31–32. sanguine] Blood-red in colour. meteor eyes] The sunrise is imagined as a flaming eagle here and in ll. 37–8 (see note); here its eyes are illuminated by the sun into which it gazes. 33. rack] Clouds, or a mass of cloud, driven before the wind in the upper air (OED rack n1 3a). 34. dead,] dead. 1820, 1839. The star shines dead in the sense that its brightness diminishes and is then obliterated as the sun rises and daylight increases. Cp. SP ii 20 and To a Sky-Lark 18–25. 37–8. The association of the sun with the eagle is a literary commonplace; traditionally the eagle was supposed to be the only living creature that could look directly into the sun.

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In the light of its golden wings. And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit Sea beneath, Its ardours of rest and love, And the crimson pall of eve may fall From the depth of Heaven above, With wings folded I rest, on mine aëry nest, As still as a brooding dove. That orbèd maiden with white fire laden, Whom mortals call the moon, Glides glimmering o’er my fleecelike floor, By the midnight breezes strewn; And wherever the beat of her unseen feet, Which only the angels hear, May have broken the woof of my tent’s thin roof, The stars peep behind her, and peer; And I laugh to see them whirl and flee, Like a swarm of golden bees, When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent,

39–40. breathe] The implicit analogy is between the sunset reflected from the sea and the perfume exhaled by flowers: for similar synaesthesia cp. SP, Part First. ardours] glowing brilliancy, suggesting intense desire: cp. WA 292, 340. 40. love] Nbk 14; of love 1820, 1839. Chernaik (232) compares ‘of lawn and moss’ in the fair copy (Harvard Nbk 1 p. 49) of SP 49 which becomes ‘of lawn and of moss’ in 1820. 42. depth] depths Nbk 14. 43. aëry] Nbk 14; airy 1820, 1839: both ‘elevated’ and ‘composed of air’. 44. An echo of the apostrophe to the Holy Spirit in Paradise Lost i 19–21: thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss. 45. white fire laden] See PU IV 219–23 and note. 47. fleecelike] The comparison of cumulus clouds to fleece is a venerable commonplace: Aristophanes, The Clouds 340–1; Lucretius, De Re. Nat. vi 504; L ii 25. 52. her,] Nbk 14; her 1820, 1839. 53–4. whirl and flee] The primary reference is to the illusion of the stars’ movement when clouds are driven by the wind across the night sky. S. writes to Peacock from Rome on 23 March 1819 of ‘the keen stars [which] are seen thro the azure darkness hanging immoveably, or driving after the driving moon among the clouds’ (L ii 87–8). An allusion may also be intended to the ancient doctrine of the rotation of the universe or ‘cosmic whirl’, to which Socrates attributes the motion of clouds in The Clouds 380. 55–8. The moon and stars shining through a gap in the Cloud are reflected in the waters below. Cp. J&M 65–7: Looking upon the evening and the flood Which lay between the city and the shore Paved with the image of the sky . . .

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I bind the Sun’s throne with a burning zone, And the moon’s with a girdle of pearl; The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim, When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl. From cape to cape, with a bridgelike shape, Over a torrent sea, Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof; The mountains its columns be! The triumphal arch, through which I march With hurricane, fire, and snow, When the Powers of the Air are chained to my chair, Is the million-coloured Bow; The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove, While the moist earth was laughing below.

58. these] the stars of l. 52. 59–60. High cirrostratus clouds form a halo around the sun and moon. 59. with a] with the 1839. 63. cape] A headland projecting into the sea (Concordance). 65. roof;] roof, 1820, 1839. 66. be!] Nbk 14; be 1820, 1839. 67. arch,] Nbk 14; arch 1820, 1839. S. had seen the triumphal arch of Augustus in Susa in 1818 (for which see L ii 4) and the arch of Constantine in Rome in 1819. Of the latter he wrote to Peacock on 23 March 1819: ‘Four Corinthian fluted columns support on each side a bold entablature, whose bases are loaded with reliefs of captives in every attitude of humiliation & slavery. The compartments above express in bolder relief the enjoyment of success, the conqueror on his throne or in his chariot . . .’ (L ii 86). 69–70. Cp. Darwin I i 115–18: ETHEREAL POWERS! You chase the shooting stars, Or yoke the vollied lightenings to your cars, Cling round the aërial bow with prisms bright, And pleased untwist the sevenfold threads of light. 69. Powers of the Air] The natural forces of the atmosphere imagined as divinities, benign or malevolent. Cp. Hellas (Longman v, no. 411) 230, Arethusa arose 56–7. ‘The Prince of the Powers of the Air’ was a traditional title of Satan. chained to my chair] Attached as captives to my chariot as prisoners were in the triumph of a Roman general: cp. TL 252, ‘chained to the triumphal chair?’ S. draws on the Roman triumph in MA 57 (see note) and in TL generally. 71. sphere-fire] I.e. the sun. Cp. Song of Apollo 19–20: ‘I feed the clouds, the rainbows and the flowers/ With their ethereal colours.’ 72. ‘The moist earth is laughing because we most often notice rainbows as the sun emerges after a shower . . . and the raindrops on grass and leaves glint in the sunlight’ (King-Hele (1971) 224). S. is drawing here on the ambiguity of the Latin ridere, meaning both ‘to laugh’ and ‘to shine’; cp. SP i 64 and ii 12.

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I am the daughter of Earth and Water, And the nursling of the sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die — For after the rain, when with never a stain, The pavilion of Heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex gleams, Build up the blue Dome of Air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise, and unbuild it again.

73–4. ‘Earth and Water are parents if a dust particle acts as a nucleus for the cloud droplets, or if the water molecules evaporated from land; and, even if oceanic water condenses on a salt particle, the salt was originally washed off the land’ (King-Hele (1971) 224–5). Or the line may simply mean that the earth and bodies of water supply the Cloud’s substance. Less matter-of-factly S. is following the example of ancient mythographers in providing a vital phenomenon with a genealogy reaching back to the original constituents of Nature. In L&C 705–6, 3777 the parents of the clouds are Sun and Ocean; in Aristophanes’ The Clouds they are Ocean (278) and Aether (569–70). 75. oceans] Nbk 14, ocean 1820. pores] See SP iii 12 and note. Cp. Darwin I i 85–6: ‘From each nice pore of ocean, earth and air,/With eye of flame the sparkling hosts repair’. Cp. also Walker 306: ‘by far the greatest part [of water] sinks into the chinks and pores of the ground and rocks, running in promiscuous channels, or percolating, through the gravel, till it finds a convenient place to break out; there it commences a spring, or a fountain, or perhaps the head of a large river.’ 76. die —] Nbk 14; die. 1820, 1839. 77. rain,] Nbk 14, 1839; rain 1820. Cp. Adonais 89–90: ‘She knew not ’twas her own; as with no stain/ She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain.’ 79. sunbeams,] Nbk 14; sunbeams 1820, 1839. convex gleams] ‘The earth’s atmosphere bends a ray of sunlight into a curve concave downwards, or convex to an observer in a cloud looking down’ (KingHele (1971) 225). Cp. Darwin I i 123–6: Where lighter gases, circumfused on high, Form the vast concave of exterior sky; With airy lens the scatter’d rays assault, And bend the twilight round the dusky vault. 81. cenotaph] Gk ‘empty tomb’: the word can signify either 1. a monument raised to one whose body lies elsewhere; or 2. an ‘empty sepulchre (whence one has risen)’: OED cenotaph n. a and b. Both senses are appropriate here: as she is reborn from the action of the sun on earth and water, the Cloud ruins the blue-domed memorial that the winds and sunbeams have erected for her; in the process she emerges from her own vacant tomb. The Cloud’s perpetual death and resurrection in the natural cycle may be considered as an alternative to the Resurrection celebrated by Christians on Easter Sunday (2 April) a few weeks before S. composed his poem. 82. caverns of rain] Places in the earth in which rainwater has collected; see the quotation from Walker in the note to l. 75. See also the note to PU IV 284–7 for the theory that the earth contained water-filled caverns. 83–4. A common collocation in S.’s poetry; e.g. SP ii 53, The babe is at peace within the womb (Longman ii 711, no. 207) 1–2. 84. arise,] Nbk 14; arise 1820, 1839. Cp. Song of Apollo 7–8: ‘Then I arise; and climbing Heaven’s blue dome/I walk over the mountains and the waves.’

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42  Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa Roughly drafted in ink in Nbk 15, this unfinished poem is untitled. Beneath the second stanza on p. 346 (which has a burn to the left edge), reverso, is a translation of the beginning of the first sentence of Plato, Republic vi. Beneath the fourth stanza on p. 347 are numerical figures. In pencil, on an otherwise blank page later in the nbk (p. 370 rev.), is a version of the poem’s second line: ‘The bats were flitting in the moonlight?[air]’ (BSM xiv 264–5). Mary placed it amongst ‘Poems written in 1821’ in 1839, but it was almost certainly written the previous year, since a passage in it appears to pre-date the draft of OL (Longman iii 365–77, no. 322) 76–9 in Nbk 14 (see note to ll. 13–16). The reference to summer (l. 6) makes it likely to have been written shortly before their abrupt departure for the Gisbornes’ house at Livorno on 15 June (see headnote to LMG). However, the addition, then cancellation, of ‘Indies’, following the injunction ‘Go to the’ (l. 17), may have an autobiographical reference, as noted by Dawson and Webb in BSM xiv 290, and possibly dates from late summer 1821. In a letter of 22 October 1821, S. told Hogg ‘I have some thoughts, if I could get a respectable appointment, of going to India’ (L ii 361). He had sought Peacock’s help to this end in a (now lost) letter of 25 September (see Peacock L i 183). The poem, also untitled in Mary Copybk 1, has become known by the title Mary assigned it in 1824: Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa (it is listed as Evening in the Contents of 1824). Of the three bridges over the Arno at Pisa, Ponte a Mare was furthest to the west. A contemporary engraving by Angiolo Cappiardi may be found in Giuseppe Rossi, Collezione delle più interessanti vedute e monumenti della cittá di Pisa (1823) (Tavola XVI ‘Ponte a Mare visto fuori la Porta che conduce a Livorno’). Contrary to its name, it was not close to the Mediterranean, as it had been when it was built in the twelfth century because, as noted by Hunt, in ‘Letters from Abroad. Letter 1.-Pisa’, The Liberal i (1822) 97–120, the city now stood ‘five miles from the sea’, having been ‘deserted’ by it (99, 97). Medwin, referring to his winter 1820–1 stay, remembers watching with S. ‘the sunsets of Pisa, which are gorgeous beyond any I have ever witnessed; when the waters, the sky, and the marble palaces that line the magnificent crescent of the Lung’ Arno, were glowing with crimson — the river a flood of molten gold, — and I seem now to follow its course towards the Ponte al Mare, till the eye rested on the Torre del Fame, that frowned in dark relievo on the horizon.’ (Medwin (1913) 238) It may have been this perspective, from their rooms at Palazzo Galetti on the north side of the Lung’Arno, where they moved on 29 October 1820 (see L ii 242), that led Mary to her title, which fixes on a feature unmentioned in the poem and forces a loco-descriptive specificity notably absent from it. Nevertheless, the deserted ‘Town’ of l. 12 refers unmistakably to contemporary Pisa. S. described it after his first visit in a letter to Peacock of 5 June 1818 as ‘a large disagreeable city almost without inhabitants.’ (L ii 18) Mary called it a ‘quiet, half-unpeopled town’ (1839 iv 54). Its melancholy character, resulting from a dramatic decline in population between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is confirmed in Miss [i.e. Elizabeth Frances] Batty, Italian Scenery from Drawings made in 1817 (1820) 42: ‘Pisa is large and well built, the streets are wide and paved with footways; but her size, compared with her inadequate population, only adds to the feeling of regret caused by her deserted appearance.’ However, the parallel with OL 76–8, where the city reflected in water is Athens, allows Pisa in the third stanza to be viewed as likewise symbolising a republic that ‘never fades away’. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, prior to its defeat by Genoa, Pisa had been a powerful city-state; only later, becoming overshadowed by Florence, did it decline dramatically in prosperity and influence, a trajectory recorded in Sismondi’s Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge (1818). The contrast between ‘cinereous’ and ‘watery blue’ in the fourth stanza points to the poem’s dialogue with Dante’s Divina commedia in which Pisa has specific associations. In a letter to Hunt of 29 December 1820, Mary reported S. telling the improvisatore Sgricci that ‘He appeared in Pisa

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-42

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as Dante among the ghosts — Pisa is a city of the dead and they shrunk from his living presence’ (Mary L i 172). The portrayal of an uninhabited city may be seen to represent the effects of the curse upon the Pisans for their treatment of Ugolino and his children in Inferno xxxiii 79–84: Ahi Pisa, vituperio de le genti del bel paese là dove’l sì suona, poi che i vicini a te punir son lenti, muovasi la Capraia e la Gorgona, e faccian siepe ad Arno in su la foce, sì ch’elli annieghi in te ogne persona! (‘Oh thou Pisa! shame Of all the people, who their dwelling make In that fair region, where th’Italian voice Is heard, since that thy neighbours are so slack To punish, from their deep foundations rise Capraia and Gorgona, and dam up The mouth of Arno, that each soul in thee May perish in the waters!’) But Holmes is right to say that the poem ‘is essentially English in character’ (Holmes 683). There are clear debts to Wordsworth (e.g. Sonnet 13. Written in very early Youth and Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm, painted by Sir George Beaumont in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807)), and to descriptions of evening in Collins, Ode to Evening, Coleridge, This Lime-tree Bower my Prison and Dejection: An Ode (ll. 27–36) and, especially, the opening two stanzas of Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, with which S.’s poem shares an iambic metre. Locock 1911 ii 522 comments that ‘[the] style of the poem reminds one strongly of A Summer-Evening Churchyard’, i.e. A Summer-Evening Churchyard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire (Longman i 451–3, no. 109). For informative commentary on Pisa in the writings of S. and Mary, see Mario Curreli, Scrittori inglesi a Pisa: viaggi, sogni, visioni dal Trecento al Duemila (2005) 169–83. Text from Nbk 15 pp. 346–8. The draft is very lightly punctuated. Missing full stops have been supplied at the ends of stanzas and a comma removed from l. 12. Commas have been added at the end of the first line and in ll. 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 22 and 26; semicolons have been added in ll. 2, 8 and 16. Indentation follows the MS. Published in 1824 156 (ll. 1–24); BSM ii 188–93 (complete); BSM xiv 252–5 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa

5

The sun is set, the swallows are asleep, The bats are flitting fast in the grey air; The slow soft toads out of damp corners creep, And evening’s breath, wandering here and there Over the gleaming [surface] of the stream,

¶ 42. 1–2. Cp. Coleridge, This Lime-tree Bower my Prison ll. 57–8: ‘and though now the Bat/Wheels silent by, and not a Swallow twitters’. 4. breath, wandering] Written above winds [?] moving canc. in Nbk 15. 5. gleaming] Written in pencil, now faded, above glimmering uncanc. in Nbk 15; quivering 1824. [surface]] Written above bosom canc. in Nbk 15; surface 1824. stream] Written beneath pool canc. in Nbk 15.

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shelley: selected poems Wakes not one ripple from its summer dream.

10

15

20

There is no dew on the dry grass tonight, Nor damp within the shadow of the trees; The wind is intermitting, dry and light, And in the inconstant motion of the breeze The dust and straws are driven up and down And whirled about the pavement of the Town. Within the surface of the fleeting river The wrinkled image of the city lay Immoveably unquiet — and forever It trembles but it never fades away; Go to the [Indies] [               ] You, being changed will find it then as now. The chasm in which the sun has sunk is shut By darkest barriers of cinereous cloud

6. one] Written beneath its canc. in Nbk 15. summer] silent 1824, 1839. 7. is] Written above are canc. in Nbk 15; are 1840. dew] Altered from dews in Nbk 15; dews 1840. 8. damp within] Written beneath freshness in canc. in Nbk 15. trees] Written above leaves canc. in Nbk 15. 13–16. These lines seem to pre-date the draft of the similar, though more elaborate lines that formed the basis of OL 76–9 in Nbk 14 p. 132 rev. and p. 129 rev. They are a revision and extension of Within the surface of the fleeting river (Longman iii 198–200, no. 258) which was written in the summer or autumn of 1819. Cp. the later prose fragment in Nbk 21 p. 236 rev., probably written in autumn 1821 (reproduced with transcription in BSM xvi 220–1 and first published in Relics 89): ‘Why is the reflexion in that canal far more beautiful than the objects it reflects. The colours are more vivid, & yet blended with more harmony & the openings?[point] [?] within into the soft & tender colours of the distant wood & the intersection of the mountain [?] surpass and misrepresent truth.’ 14. lay] The disconcerting switch to the past tense may be due to S. reproducing from memory the second line of Within the surface of the fleeting river; ‘lies’ is used in the later version of this line in Nbk 14 p. 132 rev. 15–16. and forever/It trembles but it never fades away] Cp. Wordsworth, Elegiac Stanzas, ll. 7–8: ‘thy Image still was there;/It trembled, but it never pass’d away.’ 17. Go to the [Indies canc.] Mary Copybk 1; Go to the [] 1824. Indies canc. in Nbk 15 is in darker ink and a smaller hand than the rest of the draft. 18. changed] The idea, introduced earlier in this stanza, and indebted to the opening two stanzas of Wordsworth’s Elegiac Stanzas, that the reflection of an image of a building on the water’s surface lends it permanence, is now contrasted with the mutability of a human life. 19–27. These lines appear to contain echoes of the view of the sunset described by the Solitary in Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814) ii 834–60. 20. cinereous] enormous 1824; cinereous is written above enormous canc. in Nbk 15. Forman, who had consulted Nbk 15, provides the correct reading in Forman 1876–7. In respect of the cancelled reading in Nbk 15, Locock 1911 cps. ‘enormous Barrier’ in Wordsworth’s Fidelity in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) l. 33 and ‘enormous clouds’ in A Night-Piece in Poems (1815) l. 21. ‘Cinereous’, from cinereus (Lat.), means ‘resembling ashes, ashen’. On its use to describe colour, see Pliny, Hist. Nat. xiv 42 and xxix 87. cloud] The last four letters are covered by an ink blot in Nbk 15.

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Like mountain over mountain huddled but Growing and moving upwards in a crowd, And over it a space of watery blue Which the keen evening star is shining through. 25

And overhead hangs many a flaccid fold Of lurid thundersmoke most heavily, A streak of dun and sulphureous gold

43  Letter to Maria Gisborne Date. Mary’s date is ‘Leghorn, July 1, 1820’ in 1824 but ‘Leghorn — June 1820’ beneath her transcription of the poem now in the Huntington Library (HM 12338, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, referred to here as MT). N. I. White, ‘Probable dates of composition of Shelley’s “Letter to Maria Gisborne” and “Ode to a Skylark” ’, Studies in Philology xxxvi (1939) 524–8 suggests LMG was written on the evening of 15 June when S., Mary and Claire occupied Casa Ricci, the residence in Livorno vacated by the Gisbornes on their departure for London on 2 May (Mary Jnl i 316n.1). In support, he cites from S.’s letter to the Gisbornes of 30 June — 2 July 1820: ‘I write from Henry’s study, and I send you some verses I wrote the first day I came, which will show you that I struggle with despondency’ (L ii 207). Assuming LMG to be ‘the verses’ referred to here, even S.’s rapid rate of composition would preclude a single evening’s exertion, given its length. Furthermore, the original not being extant, the most authoritative available text of S.’s letter, John Gisborne’s nbk transcription in Bod. [Abinger] Dep. d. 475 ff. 45v — 48r, probably made in 1831 (see Shelley’s Guitar 131), gives ‘verses I spawned’ (47r) instead

20–2. Turner 279 cps the description of clouds in Lucretius, De Re. Nat. iv 136–42: nam saepe Gigantum ora volare videntur et umbram ducere late, interdum magni montes avolsaque saxa montibus anteire et solem succedere praeter, inde alios trahere atque inducere belua nimbos. nec speciem mutare suam liquentia cessant et cuiusque modi formarum vertere in oras. (‘For often giants’ countenances appear to fly over and to draw their shadow afar, sometimes great mountains and rocks torn from the mountains to go before and to pass by the sun, after them some monster pulling and dragging other clouds; they never cease to dissolve and change their shapes and turn themselves into the outlines of figures of every kind.’) 21–2. The incomplete drafts of the beginnings of these lines read Whose solid bars canc. and Ashen grow canc. in Nbk 15. Cp. Wordsworth, ‘Sonnet XII’ ll. 1–2 in The Waggoner, A Poem. To which are added, Sonnets (1819): ‘Eve’s lingering clouds extend in solid bars/Through the grey west’. 25–7. Omitted in eds. 25. hangs many a flaccid fold] S. first wrote hang canopying folds and flaccid is written above heavy canc. in Nbk 15. 26. thundersmoke] See WA 447 and note.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-43

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of ‘verses I wrote’, indicating LMG was begun, or perhaps even just meditated, on 15 June. Whether LMG was finished by 1 or 7 July is a source of scholarly disagreement. B. C. BarkerBenfield (Shelley’s Guitar 137) follows Betty Bennett (Mary L i 152n.) and Donald Reiman (MYRS iii 95) in inferring from a note by Gisborne (‘The letter in verse which precedes — ’), keyed to the words ‘some verses’ in the passage cited, that it was enclosed in the 30 June — 2 July letter, thus corroborating the precision of date in 1824. However, White, in this article, suggests that, while ready for fair copying by 30 June, it was in fact enclosed in Mary’s letter to Maria Gisborne of 7 July 1820 where it is referred to thus: ‘I send you a letter from Shelley which as it is not addressed to any of the trinity in particular he as a courteous knight begs you as the lady fair to accept laying it humbly before the happy footstool which receives the envied weight of your most ladylike foot hoping that from thence not by its own worth but by your most gracious favour it may rise to your hands & thence be distilled into the precious fishponds of Heshbon namely your mild, bright eyes.’ (Mary L i 153) Jones (L ii 210 n. 1), Bennett (Mary L i 154 n. 1) and Barker-Benfield (BSM xxiii 117) argue that S.’s undated and unsigned letter (L ii 210–12 [No. 575]), which Jones conjectures was also written on 7 July, is the ‘letter from Shelley’ referred to here. This hypothesis goes unchallenged by Gisborne’s misdating of ‘No. 575’ in his transcription of it in Bod. [Abinger] Dep. d. 475 f. 39r (‘Florence beg. of June or end of May 1820’): its content means it must have been written after the letter of 30 June — 2 July. A solution to the puzzle may well be that LMG and ‘No. 575’ were both enclosed in Mary’s 7 July letter. The folds visible in the leaf on which the 7 July letter is written, and the postal charge of five shillings and sixpence it records, are commensurate with an enclosure more sizable than ‘No. 575’ alone. Moreover, the layout of the transcription of LMG by John Gisborne may replicate its source, which would no doubt have taken the customary form of a compact, neat copy written into a homemade booklet made up of several leaves of thin paper. That LMG is what Mary refers to in her 7 July letter seems almost certain, given her apparent allusion to the poem’s vocabulary (‘ladylike’ in the excerpt cited echoes line 304) and her postscript, with its injunction that ‘The enclosed must on no account be published’ (Mary L i 153), as well as her reference to a theme of LMG, the ‘fierce battle . . . between bella Italia & smoky London’. Maria Gisborne refers to LMG as ‘the delightful and laughable and exquisite description in verse of our house and Henry’s work-room’ in her letter to Mary of 23 August 1820 (Gisborne Jnl 66). As Mary’s injunction to Maria Gisborne makes plain, S. did not intend LMG to be published, at least not immediately. But it does seem to have been S.’s intention that the poem circulate in MS form amongst his London circle. Maria Gisborne evidently assumed so since she mentions, in the 23 August letter referred to, that ‘[w]e have not been able to show the Hunts the . . . description in verse . . . we took it on purpose one evening to read it to them, but, unluckily, Mr. Hunt was out’. Its inclusion in 1824 was presumably because Mary judged it, correctly, to be a hitherto unpublished poem of the kind that could win S. a wider audience. MS evidence. The relationship between extant MSS and early printed versions of LMG is complex. S.’s draft, untitled and heavily corrected in places, is in Nbk 15 pp. 97–111 (ll. 1–231 and part of l. 232, and ll. 250–321 excepting l. 299) and p. 115 (part of l. 232 and ll. 233–50, a later addition). There is a revised version of l. 13 on p. 96, and ll. 311–17 are partially covered by ink blots on p. 111. On the basis of their access to Nbk 15, Garnett recommended emendations to Mary’s most recently published editions of the poem in ll. 13, 101, 201, 205 and 244 in 1839 (Relics 93–4), and Mathilde Blind, in her review of Rossetti 1870, emended ll. 27, 36, 61, 84, 140, 144, 197 and 224 (Westminster Review xxxviii (1870) 81) as well as supplying ‘Hogg, Peacock and Smith’ in l. 294. The fair copy of LMG sent to the Gisbornes (‘Fair copy’) is lost. Whether it was in the hand of S., as Reiman suggests (MYRS iii 93), or of Mary, as White supposes (‘Probable Dates’ 525), is not known. The words ‘not addressed to any of the trinity in particular’ allow ‘Fair copy’ either to have been untitled, or, as proposed by GM (in his important edition

43  letter to maria gisborne

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of LMG in 1964), to have been titled ‘Letter to the Gisbornes’; though, as the excerpt from the letter cited earlier indicates, its principal intended recipient was clearly Maria Gisborne. In a letter to her of 17–20 September 1822, Mary wrote: ‘Where is that letter in verse S. once wrote to you? let me have a copy of it’ (Mary L i 262). In reply, on 8 October 1822, Maria Gisborne told Mary ‘we will transcribe the letter in verse’, and on 12 February 1823 reported that ‘The poetical letter was immediately transcribed and put into the hands of Peacock.’ (Gisborne Jnl 92, 97) This transcription of ‘Fair copy’, now lost, but almost certainly by John Gisborne, may be identified as the ‘M. S. from the Gisbornes’ which Peacock refers to having shipped a month previously, in his letter to Mary of 15 April 1823 (Peacock L i 195). The basis of 1824 seems to have been the ‘M. S. from the Gisbornes’. However, Mary appears to have either marked up the MS or transcribed it in such a way as to conceal the identities of the living persons named in ll. 202 (Coleridge), 209 (Hunt), 226 (Hogg), 233 (Peacock), 250 (Horace Smith) and 294 (Hunt, Hogg, Peacock and Smith), and omitted those parts of ll. 29 and 316 which risked incurring the publisher charges of blasphemy, as well as ll. 197–201 (where Godwin is praised), and ll. 297–9 (alluding to S.’s relations with his father) in their entirety. The second MS witness, also untitled, is MT which is reproduced in facsimile in MYRS iii 99–111. As Reiman points out, the characteristics of the paper on which it is written make it very likely to have been transcribed in June or July 1823, when Mary was staying with the Hunts at Albaro, near Genoa (MYRS iii 93). But his claim that Nbk 15 ‘was almost certainly the source from which it derives’ is doubtful. The box Peacock had shipped reached Mary at some point after 14 May 1823 (see Mary L i 339) and there is evidence that the basis of MT was, in fact, the ‘M. S. from the Gisbornes’. Mary’s mistranscriptions of ‘wind’ for ‘wine’ (l. 57), ‘besides’ for ‘beside’ (l. 265) ‘Warm’ for ‘Warn’ (l. 319), her cancelled ‘sallow’ replaced by ‘sullen’ (l. 125), ‘roar’ replaced by ‘war’ (l. 165) and ‘comes’ replaced by ‘cowers’ (l. 201), as well as her self-corrections of ‘And’ to ‘An’ (l. 183) and ‘roused’ to ‘rouse’ (l. 190) are all suggestive of the characteristic challenges of deciphering Gisborne’s hand in which the final letters of words frequently end with an elaborately extended upward flourish. Reiman suggests that MT was given ‘to Leigh Hunt, probably because it contains Shelley’s generous tribute to Hunt’s character’ (MYRS iii 93) and, as he asserts, it may well have been left with Hunt before Mary left Italy for England in July 1823. As Forman notes, a line in the margin alongside ll. 223–5 indicates ‘that this copy was made specially for Hunt’ (Forman 1876–7 iii 236). However, given that the only name of a living person anonymised in MT is that of her father (see note to l. 197), about whose reputation she was sensitive, it is possible to infer that Mary made this copy with publication in mind and that it was perhaps given to Hunt for The Liberal, which was not officially discontinued until the following month (see the Examiner, 814 (31 August 1823) 569). The Liberal adopted a deliberately outspoken policy in respect of religious matters such that the publication of ll. 29 and 316 would have been ensured. After Hunt’s death, Forman acquired MT from Samuel Townshend Mayer (MYRS iii 94) and published a complete and unexpurgated text of LMG in Forman 1876–7 on the basis of it. The third and fourth witnesses post-date 1824. One is John Gisborne’s copy of 1824, now in the British Library, shelfmark C. 61 c. 5 (G1824), which is signed on the inside cover by Elizabeth Rumble, the Gisbornes’ servant under the following inscription: ‘This Volume belonged to Mr. Gisborne (Shelley’s friend) and the corrections are in his handwriting.’ Rumble inherited the Gisbornes’ papers after they died in 1836, John in January, Maria in April (for an account of Rumble, see SC x 1115–33). Given that the Gisbornes’ journals are housed in the Ashley Collection, it seems possible that Thomas J. Wise may have had something to do with the British Museum’s acquisition of this volume, which is stamped 5 April 1892. LMG is the only poem in G1824 to be annotated in ink; the sole pencil markings are ‘Coleridge’, ‘Hunt’, and ‘Peacock’, added alongside ll. 202, 209, and 233 respectively. Gisborne’s ink annotations comprise the restoration of the omissions in ll. 29, 197–201, and 297–9, as well as corrections to ll.

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24, 36, 101, 127, 274, 317 and 319. However, not all omissions are restored, and many obvious misprints remain uncorrected. It seems likely that these annotations were made soon after the publication then suppression of the volume in 1824. The other witness is a transcription, again untitled, by John Gisborne (GT) in ff. 40r — 44r of Bod. [Abinger] Dep. d. 475, a nbk whose contents, as already mentioned, appear to have been entered in 1831. Since GT includes all but one of the thirteen corrections and additions recorded in G1824 (see note to l. 274 for the exception), both may be inferred to be based on ‘Fair copy’, with the exception of two lines whose provenance is discussed separately. As also noted, GT may have been consulted in the preparation of 1839 and 1840 as part of one of ‘the journals’ loaned to Mary in March/April 1838 (see Mary L ii 297–8) by Rumble. It has not been possible to establish whether Mary also saw G1824 at this or any other time. GT may be identified as ‘[T]he Long Letter in Verse addressed to Mrs. Gisborne’, in lot 656, ‘Transcripts of Letters [1819–1822] of Percy B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Claire Clairemont . . . in 1 vol. 4to.’, sold at the Puttick & Simpson’s auction of ‘Shelleyiana, formerly the property of Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne’, on 28 May 1878. It was bought by [?F. S.] Ellis, as reported in W. M. Rossetti, ‘A Shelley Sale’, The Academy, 318 (8 June 1878) 509–10 (510). Ellis was presumably bidding on behalf of Sir Percy and Lady Shelley. It is not certain that the couplet, ‘Or yellow-haired Pollonia murmuring/To Henry, some unutterable thing.’, first published in 1840 268, is by S., nor that it was authorized by him for inclusion in LMG. On these grounds, these lines are not published in the following text. The evidence concerning their provenance is as follows. They are written in Maria Gisborne’s hand on a slip of paper pasted into G1824 p. 67 that covers the blank line between l. 271 and l. 272 in 1824 (there is also a blank line preceding l. 272 in 1839 and 1840, but not in Nbk 15 nor in MT or GT). They appear to have been concocted either by Mary, as tentatively proposed by B. C. Barker-Benfield (Shelley’s Guitar 137), or by Maria Gisborne, or perhaps by both. They constitute an in-joke between the two about Maria’s unmarried son, Henry Reveley, who had proposed to Claire Clairmont in 1820 (Claire Jnl 469). That his bachelor status was a source of teasing at the time when LMG was composed is evident from Mary’s letter to Maria Gisborne of 18 June 1820, in which she remarks, ‘Whose voice is that? Henry, does not your heart beat? By heaven,’tis Appolonia Ricci’, and ‘if Henry is married present my congratulations to the bride — salted by a few tears from Appolonia’ (Mary L i 146, 148). Apollonia Ricci was one of two daughters of the Gisbornes’ landlord and neighbour (see SC x 1060–1). The couplet is added as a single line in the left margin of Nbk 15 p. 109, in what appears to be Mary’s later hand. It seems possible that she wrote it into Nbk 15 after she had consulted GT, which includes the couplet, while she was preparing 1840 for publication. The lines are not in MT and therefore, on the face of it, appear to have been neither in ‘Fair Copy’ nor ‘M.S. from the Gisbornes’. If, as conjectured earlier, the annotations in G1824 were done in 1824 or soon after, this paste-in may have been added at that time too, though it is uncertain when Maria Gisborne wrote the lines. That Mary knew of their existence before the printing of 1824 may possibly be inferred from the insertion of a blank line between l. 271 and l. 272. This break in the verse paragraph is not necessary grammatically, in that the sentence beginning in l. 272, with its reminder to Maria Gisborne of the contrast between the London street she now sees and the Tuscan garden she has left behind, is a continuation of an ongoing counterpoint between the two locations in this verse paragraph. Even if the couplet were in either ‘Fair Copy’ or ‘M.S. from the Gisbornes’, it may have been presented in such a way that Mary, Maria, and John Gisborne at least (and S. himself, if they were in ‘Fair Copy’) knew it was to be differentiated from the rest of the poem. In Shelley’s Venomed Melody (1986) 129, Nora Crook and Derek Guiton draw attention to a possible allusion to Polonia in Calderón’s El Purgatorio de San Patricio. (In G1824 and Nbk 15 Maria Gisborne and Mary spell the name ‘Polonia’.)

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Context. In 1839 iv 50, Mary situated LMG thus: ‘[S.] addressed the letter to Mrs. Gisborne from this house, which was hers; he had made his study of the workshop of her son, who was an engineer. Mrs. Gisborne had been a friend of my father in her younger days. She was a lady of great accomplishments, and charming from her frank and affectionate nature. She had the most intense love of knowledge, a delicate and trembling sensibility, and preserved freshness of mind, after a life of considerable adversity. As a favourite friend of my father we had sought her with eagerness, and the most open and cordial friendship was established between us.’ Maria Gisborne (née James) (1770–1836) spent her infancy in England but from the age of eight was brought up by her father in Constantinople, where he was a merchant. In her unpublished ‘Life of William Godwin’, Mary Shelley commented that Maria Gisborne’s ‘education had been wild & singular & had early developed the peculiar & deep seated sensibility which through life formed her characteristic’ (MSLL iv 101). She was to have been tutored in painting by Angelica Kauffman in Rome when, in 1788, she met Willey Reveley (b. 1760), with whom she joined in a marriage that turned out to be unhappy. Henry Willey Reveley, their only surviving child, was born in 1789. Godwin was introduced to ‘Mrs Reveley’ in 1793, and their subsequent familiarity was grounded, as Mary put it, in ‘sympathy’. She was also friendly with Mary Wollstonecraft (MSLL iv 102, 106–7). On Reveley’s untimely death in 1799, Godwin proposed to Maria but was declined, and she married John Gisborne, a merchant, in May 1800. The Gisbornes and Henry Reveley moved to Rome in 1801, ‘entertained Coleridge during his visit there from December 1805 to May 1806’ (SC x 1117) and were then ‘detained prisoners of war by the elder Napoleon and confined to Pisa for eight years’ (Henry Reveley, ‘Notes and observations to the “Shelley Memorials” ’ in SC x 1141). With a letter of introduction from Godwin (reproduced in SC v 512), Mary and S. first met Maria Gisborne at Livorno on 9 May 1818. Mary’s first impression, ‘she is reserved yet with easy manners’ (Mary Jnl i 209), is echoed in S.’s sketch for Peacock of her outlook on politics and religion: ‘a sufficiently amiable & very accomplished woman she is δεμοκρατικη & αθεη [democratic and atheistic] — how far she may be φιλανθρωπη [philanthropic] I dont know for she is the antipodes of enthusiasm’ (L ii 114). During their stays in Livorno in the spring of 1818 and the summer of 1819, there was reciprocity between S. and the Gisbornes. Maria Gisborne fuelled S.’s literary creativity first, in May 1818, by prompting his interest in the story of the Cenci family, which resulted in Mary copying John Gisborne’s ‘MS’ on that subject (see headnote to The Cenci, Longman ii 713–863, no. 209). During the period of their greatest familiarity, between June and September 1819, Henry Reveley noted that S. ‘was attracted by our library of ancient and modern books, with almost every variety of dictionary and lexicon in a variety of languages, but more so by the deep literary studies of my mother and Mr Gisborne.’ (‘Notes’ in SC x 1142) As noted in LMG 175–86 and the headnote to Within the surface of the fleeting river (Longman iii 198–200, no. 258), Maria Gisborne taught S. Spanish by making him read Calderón. In exchange, S. made significant financial investment in Henry Reveley’s construction of a steamboat that the Shelleys had first seen in May 1818 (Mary Jnl i 211). It was to ply between Livorno and Marseilles, and was an extension of his earlier, aborted ventures in setting up a foundry and a steam-driven grain mill in Tuscany (SC x 1117). Mary Shelley later noted that the steamboat project appealed to S.’s interests in science and enlightened progress, as well as to his benevolent philanthropy, and, in respect of the Gisbornes and Reveley, alludes to his characteristic willingness to lend money to what he thought were progressive causes: ‘He set on foot the project of a steam-boat to ply between Marseilles and Leghorn, for their benefit, as far as pecuniary profit might accrue; at the same time that he took a fervent interest in the undertaking, for its own sake. It was not puerile vanity, but a nobler feeling of honest pride, that made him enjoy the idea of being the first to introduce steam navigation into the Gulf of Lyons, and to glory in the consciousness of being in this manner useful

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to his fellow-creatures.’ (1840 (ELTF) i pp. xxii — xxiii) S. took an active interest in the scientific detail of the ambitious project in the autumn of 1819 and was delighted (L ii 157–8) with Henry’s description of the casting of the cylinder, ‘the first . . . of such a size cast in Italy’. (Henry Reveley to S., 10 November 1819, Gisborne Jnl 55) Henry’s fine training as a nautical engineer, evident in the detailed description of his study in LMG, according to a letter of 1832 from Maria Gisborne to Jeremy Bentham (whom she had first met in Constantinople in 1785), was ‘under some of the most able and eminent Professors of mathematics and Natural Philosophy both at Rome and Pisa . . . It was then, with more or less success, that he went through the three years course of the University of Pisa’ (SC x 1117). However, Henry’s later reflections on his irregular education drew attention to its deficiencies: ‘I was taken from England by my mother and Mr. Gisborne [in] 1801 I being then twelve years old, and from that time I was never more put to school, but received instruction from Mr Gisborne with the help of various Italian Masters and professors for Latin and Greek, Mathematics in all it’s branches, Astronomy, dancing and fencing. For reasons unnecessary to state here, my studies never embraced Writing and Composition.’ (SC x 1145) This latter observation partly explains S.’s lofty tone of address to Henry, a man nearly four years older than himself, in a letter of 28 October 1819: ‘You know that you are writing to a person persuaded of all the confidence & respect due to your powers in those branches of science to which you have addicted yourself; & you will not permit a false shame with regard to the mere mechanical arrangement of words, to overbalance the advantage arising from the free communication of ideas. — Thus you will become day by day more skilful in the management of that instrument of their communication on which the attainment of a person’s just rank in society depends.’ (L ii 132) As S. noted in a letter to Claire of 15 November 1820, soon after the later break in S.’s relations with Henry’s mother and stepfather, Henry could come across as timorous and gauche: ‘I have not the heart to put my interdict in effect upon Henry, he is so very miserable, and such a whipped and trembling dog.’ (L ii 250) The Gisbornes left Italy for London on 2 May, apparently to arrange a financial settlement on Henry and perhaps a situation for him in England, and, at Mary’s insistence, wrote a travel journal which was clearly ‘written for perusal by the Shelleys.’ (Gisborne Jnl 8) It records social encounters in London with Coleridge, Godwin, Hogg, Hunt, Peacock, Horace Smith, and Keats (‘under sentence of death from Dr. Lamb. He never spoke and looks emaciated’, Gisborne Jnl 40), all of whom, except the last, are mentioned in LMG. LMG was written during a period of the most consummate anxiety in the Shelleys’ personal and financial affairs, Mary noting in her letter to Maria Gisborne of 30 June 1820 that S. ‘is far from well, being nervous to an extraordinary degree’ (Mary L i 151). First, as Mary recorded on 12 June (Mary Jnl i 321) and in her letter to Maria Gisborne of 18 June (Mary L i 147), their servant Paolo Foggi had circulated rumours against S. Although Mary does not say so, Foggi had sought to blackmail S. by suggesting that Claire was the mother by S. of Elena Adelaide Shelley, a child born in Naples in late 1818 or early 1819 (for an account of the mysterious episode of S.’s ‘Neapolitan charge’, see Bieri ii 102–15). This accusation prompted their abrupt removal to the Gisbornes’ house on 15 June in order for S. to seek advice from Frederico Del Rosso, the Livorno-based lawyer (Mary L i 147 and 149 note 1). As a result of Del Rosso’s intervention, Foggi was expelled from the town the following month (Mary L i 155). At the same time, S. was acutely anxious for Elena’s health, noting to the Gisbornes, on 30 June, reports of her fever and then, on 7 July, the shocking news of her death (L ii 206, 211). Secondly, Mary was in extreme agitation about her father’s precarious financial situation (see headnote to If the good money which I lent to thee (Longman iii 549–51, no. 340)). In this regard, the Gisbornes were sent, simultaneously, a request from Mary, endorsed by S., asking if they would lend Godwin £400 to be paid back to them by S. and letters from S. directing them not to do so (Mary L i 151–2, L ii 206–8). Yet further complications included

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S.’s desire, stated to the Gisbornes, that he wanted to protect Mary by intercepting Godwin’s insistent demands for money even as he now blocked the fulfilment of her wish to help her father financially, and the fact that S.’s ability to draw on credit had been diminished by his investment in Henry Reveley’s steamboat project. Regarding the latter, Mary may have felt that there was some onus on the Gisbornes to oblige her request since, according to Reiman, S. in 1819 had ‘contributed at least £250 and possibly £350 to Henry Reveley’s steamboat’ (SC vi 943), substantially more than Maria Gisborne’s advance of 140 crowns (the equivalent of £35), mentioned in her letter to Mary Shelley of 11 October 1819 (Gisborne Jnl 54). LMG may be characterised, then, as in some respects a letter of praise to a patroness from whom the writer is asking a favour of an extraordinarily complicated financial kind. On the Gisbornes’ return to Livorno in October 1820, a rift ensued as a consequence of Maria Gisborne writing a letter to Mary (referred to by the latter in Mary L i 161) which appears to have touched on exactly those two issues most to the fore during the period of composition of LMG, namely the Godwins’ disgust at S. allegedly fathering children born after his marriage to Mary (specifically their belief that Allegra was S.’s child by Claire), and their view that he obstinately withheld financial help from Godwin. Both had been the topic of an exchange recorded between the Godwins and the Gisbornes on 28 August (Gisborne Jnl 47–8), further to Godwin’s receipt of S.’s angry letter to him of 7 August noted in the headnote to If the good money which I lent to thee. The subsequent announcement of the Gisbornes’ abandonment of the steamboat project, which was in an advanced state of completion, was a profound disappointment to S., who in December 1819 (L ii 165) had been led to believe it would be ready within three months. The termination and the consequent financial losses were a source of bitterness that led to S.’s descriptions of the Gisbornes in a letter of 29 October to Claire as ‘people totally without faith. — I think they are altogether the most filthy and odious animals with which I ever came in contact.’ (L ii 243) A reconciliation followed just before their permanent return to England in July 1821, possibly, Jones speculates, because of ‘a better reimbursement for his share in the steamboat than he had expected’ (Gisborne Jnl 10). A further context for the poem is the sense of isolation and homesickness which had pervaded S.’s letters to his London circle from Livorno the previous summer. This manifested itself in letters to Peacock of ? 20–1 June and c. 20 July 1819, shortly after William’s death: ‘O that I could return to England! How heavy a weight when misfortune is added to exile, & solitude, as if the measure were not full, heaped high on both — O that I could return to England!’ (L ii 98) and ‘Our house is a melancholy one & only cheered by letters from England’ (L ii 101). The longing for a place of convivial and domestic stability of a recognizably English cast of the kind that LMG evokes was a constant feature of S.’s life abroad, as is apparent in his letter to Peacock from Geneva of 17 July 1816 (L i 488–91). Equally strong the month before he began LMG is the wish he expresses to Peacock for his London circle to visit him in Italy: ‘I wish you, and Hogg, and Hunt, and — I know not who besides — would come and spend some months with me together in this wonderful land.’ (L ii 193) LMG imagines the reconstitution of the personnel and atmosphere of the Marlow summer of 1817 that had in its hospitality, cheer, and dedication to rural pursuits encompassed Godwin, Hogg, Hunt, Peacock, and Smith. Sources. Horace’s conversational poetry of friendship and praise of country life such as the second Epode, ‘Beatus ille’ (Happy the man), underlies S.’s poem. Jonson’s ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’ in Epigrams (1616), and ‘To Penshurst’ and ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ in The Forest (1616), the latter two addressed to patrons in heroic couplets and concerned with estates, provide models for the encomium to values associated with civilized rural as opposed to corrupt urban life captured in LMG 152–3 and 300–5. It is Tuscany that constitutes the ‘estate’ described in LMG both generally — ‘ripe corn’ (119) and ‘vines’ (120) — and, in terms of ownership of land, ‘the wood’ belonging to its Grand Duke, Ferdinando III (306).

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There is a palpable early-seventeenth-century and anti-Puritanical quality to its pastoral. Milton’s poetry of the 1630s is explicitly apparent in LMG (witness its final line), and its aristocratic Caroline dimension may relate to the point made by David Norbrook in Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, rev. edn (2002) 235 that, ‘Like James, Charles called on the nobility to return to the country and exercise their traditional duties of hospitality; court poets celebrated this theme in poems that echoed “To Penshurst” and “To Sir Robert Wroth”.’ Pope’s Epistles to Several Persons (Moral Essays), especially III (To Bathurst) and IV (To Burlington) with their Arguments ‘Of the Use of Riches’, address the preoccupation of LMG with the essence of wealth: ‘What Riches give us let us then enquire:/Meat, Fire, and Cloaths. What more? Meat, Cloaths, and Fire.’ (‘To Bathurst’, ll. 81–2) Moreover, as Rognoni notes, there are strong echoes of the mood of the same poet’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, whose speaker says, ‘I sit with sad Civility’ (l. 37). LMG’s imagining of others’ companionship from a position of sedentary confinement owes something to the contrast between solitude and sociability in Coleridge’s This Lime-tree Bower my Prison, another poem circulated in MS before it was published. As does this, and other of Coleridge’s conversation poems, LMG deploys the bold technique of repeating identical or similar words in the same or successive lines (e.g. ‘destroyed destruction’ and ‘undulating . . . undulates’ in ll. 41 and 119–20). S.’s deliberate casting of himself as demonic and magically empowered (as in ‘mighty mechanist’, ‘Archimage’ and ‘devilish enginery’ in ll. 16, 106 and 107) has more serious Elizabethan and Caroline literary precedents in Spenser’s Archimago and Mammon in Faerie Queene I i and II vii and in Milton’s Comus, son of Circe and Bacchus. A very significant amount of the diction and imagery of LMG echoes Comus. It also may be indebted to S.’s reading of an article in Quarterly Review xxii (January 1820), published in March 1820, cited in the note to ll. 58–65. The article which treats of ‘[t]he legendary Satan [as] a being wholly distinct from the theological Lucifer’ (353), a topic central to S.’s essay ‘On the Devil and Devils’ dated by Dawson and Webb to the period ‘between the last months of 1819 and the middle of June 1820’ (BSM xiv p. xvii). Echoes of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound are evident in the reference to Vulcan (the Roman name for Hephaestos) in l. 23 and in the comparison of the poet’s craft to that of the artisan, or even the engineer (see note to ll. 169–72). The poem tests humorously the idea that enlightened scientific enterprises of the kind pursued by Henry are tantamount to a usurpation of divine will. Genre. Apart from the epistolary doggerel of S.’s 1811 letters in verse to Edward Fergus Graham (Longman i, nos. 56 and 57), this is S.’s only verse-letter. It is unique in his oeuvre in being a private coterie poem intended to be circulated in MS amongst S.’s London circle. Pope’s verse epistles, mentioned earlier, and Hunt’s in Foliage (1818), especially those to Thomas Moore in which he asks, ‘Can the town, after all, with the country compare?’ (p. lxxxiii) are models. LMG appears to adopt consciously the manner and idiom of Hunt’s urban pastoral with its echoes of Elizabethan poets and Theocritus (see note to ll. 214– 6). Amongst the addressees of sonnets in Foliage are S. and Horace Smith. Keats’s Poems (1817) also contains both Epistles and sonnets addressed to named friends. Of the levity of LMG, the translation of Hymn to Mercury (Longman iii, no. 336) and WA together, GM comments: ‘What the playful tone represents is a new artistic maturity in Shelley, a sort of Mozartian wryness, compounded of sadness and self-mockery, that is characteristic of some of his best work from 1820 on’, and of LMG in particular that ‘It is a true letter to close friends, not a public poem, and its deceptively careless form gives the illusion of spontaneous informality . . . The poem is a triumph of graceful craftsmanship and civilized feeling.’ Text from GT. Where their readings are clearly superior, Nbk 15, MT or 1824 are followed. All departures from GT are recorded in the notes. The layout of verse paragraphs follows Nbk 15.

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Published in 1824 59–69 (ll. 1–28, part of 29, 30–196, part of 202, 203–8, part of 209, 210–25, part of 226, 227–32, part of 233, 234–49, part of 250, 251–93, part of 294, 295–6, 300–15, part of 316, 317–21); 1839 iii 276–88 (ll. 1–28, part of 29, 30–196, 202–25, part of 226, 227–32, part of 233, 234–49, part of 250, 251–93, part of 294, 295–6, 300–15, part of 316, 317–21); 1840 266–8 (ll. 1–225, part of 226, 227–32, part of 233, 234–93, part of 294, 295–8, 300–15, part of 316, 317–21, with two additional lines, not certain to be by S., after l. 271); Forman 1876–7 iii 227–40 (complete, with the two additional lines after l. 271).

Letter to Maria Gisborne The spider spreads her webs, whether she be In poet’s tower, cellar or barn or tree; ¶ 43. Title: Letter to —/— 1824; Letter to Maria Gisborne 1839. 1–9. ‘The spider and silkworm of the opening introduce several themes — “threads of friendship”, “machinery”, and “habitation” — that permeate the poem. These verses are not to catch readers, Shelley says: ‘they are just an expendable way of making my friends remember me. What really counts is not the apparatus of constraint, but the ties of affection, natural beauty and domesticity. Later the spider’s meretricious web becomes equivalent to London, and the silkworm’s mulberry tree to the peaceful environment of Italy (silk was Italy’s chief industrial product).’ (GM) Tuscany’s particular importance for silk production is noted in J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, Tableau de l’Agriculture Toscane (1801) 265–74. Major Works 784 comments that S. ‘reverses Swift’s derogatory view of.  .  .the spider as an emblem of the modern writer’. See Aesop’s speech in ‘The Battel of the Books’ in Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 2nd edn (1704) 250: ‘Erect your Schemes with as much Method and Skill as you please; yet, if the Materials be nothing but Dirt, spun out of your own Entrails (the Guts of Modern Brains) the Edifice will conclude at last in a Cobweb’. On the comparison of poet with spider, see Akenside, The Poet; a Rhapsody (1737) ll. 139–147: Arachne so, In dusty kitchen corner, from her bowels Spins the fine web; but spins with better fate, Than the poor bard: she! caitiff! spreads her snares, And with their aid enjoys luxurious life, Bloated with fat of insects, flesh’d in blood: He! hard, hard lot! for all his toil and care, And painful watchings, scarce protracts awhile His meagre, hungry days! ungrateful world! A more scientific assessment of the instructively ingenious productivity of spiders and silkworms is supplied in Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature; Or, The Origin of Society: A Poem. With Philosophical Notes (1803) iii 415–16, 419–22, 431–4: The cunning Spider with adhesive line Weaves his firm net immeasurably fine; . . . Conscious of change the Silkworm-Nymphs begin Attach’d to leaves their gluten-threads to spin; Then round and round they weave with circling heads Sphere within Sphere, and form their silken beds . . .  . Wise to the present, nor to future blind, They link the reasoning reptile to mankind!

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shelley: selected poems The silkworm in the dark green mulberry leaves His winding sheet and cradle ever weaves; — Stoop, selfish Pride! survey thy kindred forms, Thy brother Emmets, and thy sister Worms!

Darwin notes that ‘the excellence of the sense of touch in many insects seems to have given them wonderful ingenuity so as to equal or even excel mankind in some of their arts and discoveries; many of which may have been acquired in situations previous to their present ones, as the great globe itself, and all that it inhabit, appear to be in a perpetual state of mutation and improvement’ (118–19n.). 1. spreads] Written above weaves canc. in Nbk 15. 2. poet’s tower] Locock 1911 suggests an allusion to the ‘tower something like Scythrop’s’ (L ii 100) in which S. wrote The Cenci (Longman ii, no. 209) in the summer of 1819. 3–14. The image of the silkworm has various literary precedents. It figures contrivance in Jonson, Bartholomew Fair I i 1–3, obscurity in Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada, part II (1672) I ii 224–6: I scarcely understand my own intent: But Silk-worm-like, so long within have wrought, That I am lost in my own Webb of thought. or writerly obfuscation, in Pope, The Dunciad iv 249–54: For thee we dim the eyes, and stuff the head With all such reading as was never read: For thee explain a thing till all men doubt it, And write about it, Goddess, and about it: So spins the silk-worm small its slender store, And labours till it clouds itself all o’er. The insect is used for self-censure in Edward Young, The Complaint: Or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (1749) i 156–61: O how self-fetter’d was my groveling Soul? How, like a Worm, was I wrapt round and round In silken thought, which reptile Fancy spun, Till darken’d Reason lay quite clouded o’er With soft conceit, of endless Comfort here, Nor yet put forth her Wings to reach the skies? A sense of transcendent energetic life concealed within a deathly appearance is something of a poetic commonplace. It is found in Thomson, Liberty v 11–12 (‘ “And let the little insect-Artist form,/On higher Life intent, its silken Tomb” ’) and the same poet’s The Castle of Indolence i 75–6 (‘ “See her bright Robes the Butterfly unfold,/Broke from her wintry Tomb in Prime of May” ’) as well as Samuel Rogers, ‘To the Butterfly’, in Poems (1816) ll. 7–10: — Yet wert thou once a worm, a thing that crept On the bare earth, then wrought a tomb and slept! And such is man; soon from his cell of clay To burst a seraph in the blaze of day! 3–4. Cp. Comus ll. 714–16: And set to work millions of spinning worms, That in their green shops weave the smooth-haired silk To deck her sons 3. silkworm] silk-worms MT. dark green mulberry leaves] The natural food of the silkworm. 4. His] MT, 1824; Her Nbk 15, GT. It is not certain, given the reading in GT, that S. authorised the change in the pronoun. But, as suggested in Reiman (2002), His arguably clarifies S.’s identification with the silkworm.

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So I, a thing whom moralists call worm, Sit spinning still round this decaying form, From the fine threads of verse and subtle thought — No net of words in garish colours wrought To catch the idle buzzers of the day — But a soft cell, where when that fades away, Memory may clothe in wings my living name And feed it with the asphodels of fame,

5–7. Locock 1911 cps. S.’s letter to John Gisborne of 22 October 1821: ‘We have furnished a house in Pisa, & mean to make it our headquarters. — I shall get all my books out, & intrench myself — like a spider in a web.’ (L ii 363) See Pope, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot ll. 89–94: Who shames a Scribler? break one cobweb thro’, He spins the slight, self-pleasing thread anew; Destroy his Fib, or Sophistry; in vain, The Creature’s at his dirty work again; Thron’d in the Centre of his thin designs; Proud of a vast Extent of flimzy lines. 5. An apparent allusion to the personal attack on S.’s character in the review of L&C/RofI in Quarterly Review xxi (April 1819) 460–71, the authorship of which S. had asked Southey to refute in a letter of 26 June 1820 (L ii 203–4), i.e. at the time or just before LMG was composed. worm,] Nbk 15, 1824; worm MT, GT. A play on the image of the ‘silkworm’ in l. 3, meaning ‘an object of contempt, scorn or pity’ (OED 11). 6. decaying] Written above departing canc. in Nbk 15. 7. verse] rare MT, 1824 (apparently a misreading of John Gisborne’s transcription: in his hand rare and verse are virtually indistinguishable). 9. buzzers] Insects that buzz. day —] MT, 1824; day Nbk 15; day . . . GT. 10–14. a soft cell . . . immortality.] ‘The whole image is of a silk-moth. When his caterpillar-form “fades away”, this cocoon of verse will allow the poet to emerge as a winged memory to be nourished for ever in the hearts of his friends.’ (GM) 10. cell] Written above grave canc. in Nbk 15. 11. in] with Nbk 15 (written above in canc.). name] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; name, GT. 12. asphodels] In Odyssey xxiv 13–14, the asphodel flower is associated with immortality: ἀσϕοδελὸν λειμῶνα,/ἔυθα τε ναίουσι ψυχαί, εἴδωλα καμόντων. (‘the meadow of asphodel, where the ghosts dwell, phantoms of men who have done with toils.’) fame] Fame Nbk 15. On foreseeing the death of Elena Adelaide Shelley, S. had commented to the Gisbornes in his letter of 30 June 1820: ‘What remains to me? Domestic peace and fame? You will laugh when you hear me talk of the latter; indeed it is only a shadow. The seeking of a sympathy with the unborn and the unknown is a feeble mode of allaying the love within us; and even that is beyond the grasp of so weak an aspirant as I.’ (L ii 206–7) S. may allude here to the fable of the Spider and the Silkworm, often collected in editions of Aesop’s Fables. It is told thus in R. Dodsley’s Select Fables of Esop and other Fabulists, new edn (1798) 78–9: ‘How vainly we promise ourselves, that our flimzy productions will be rewarded with immortal honour! A Spider, busied in spreading his web from one side of a room to the other, was asked by an industrious Silkworm, to what end he spent so much time in making such a number of lines and circles? the Spider angrily replied, Do not disturb me, thou ignorant thing: I transmit my ingenuity to posterity, and fame is the object of my wishes. Just as he had spoken, a chambermaid, coming into the room to

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shelley: selected poems Which in those hearts which most remember me Grow, making love an immortality. Whoever should behold me now, I wist, Would think I were a mighty mechanist, Bent with sublime Archimedean art To breathe a soul into the iron heart Of some machine portentous, or strange gin, Which, by the force of figured spells might win Its way over the sea, and sport therein; For round the walls are hung dread engines, such

feed her Silkworms, saw the Spider at his work, and with one stroke of her broom swept him away, and destroyed at once his labours, and his hopes of fame.’ 13. which most] that must Nbk 15 (most seems to be altered from must in GT). 14. A possible allusion to Plato’s description of the soul in Phaedrus 246c (see note to OL (Longman iii, no. 322) 250). 15–105. Cp. the description of Henry Reveley’s study with the narrator’s description of the Solitary’s abode (‘ “my domain, my cell,/My hermitage, my cabin, what you will” ’ (650–1)) in Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814) ii 660–70. Rognoni cps the description of S.’s study at Oxford in Hogg i 69–70. 15–21. The subtly humorous sense in which the construction of the boat is likened to a divine act of creation is present in S.’s letter to Henry Reveley of 17 November 1819: ‘Your volcanic description of the birth of the Cylinder is very characteristic both of you & of it. One might imagine God when he made the earth, & saw the granite mountains & flinty promountories flow into their craggy forms, & the splendour of their fusion filling millions of miles of the void space, like the tail of a comet, so looking, & so delighting in his work. God sees his machine spinning round the sun & delights in its success, & has taken out patents to supply all the suns in space with the same manufacture. — Your boat will be to the Ocean of Water what the earth is to the Ocean of Aether — a prosperous & swift voyager. — ’ (L ii 157–58) 16. mighty] Cp. the description of Comus as excelling ‘his mother [Circe] at her mighty art’ in Comus l. 63. mechanist,] Most obviously ‘a person who makes or contrives something’ (OED 1) but with overtones of ‘a person who holds to a mechanical view of the universe’ (OED 2), a type of philosophical outlook S. associated with Francis Bacon (see The Advancement of Learning book II in Works, ed. Spedding (1876) iii 332–3). In PVR, S. comments of the eighteenth century that ‘[t]he mechanical sciences attained to a degree of perfection which, though obscurely foreseen by Lord Bacon, it had been accounted madness to have prophesied in a preceding age.’ (Julian vii 10) 17. Archimedean art] The most famous saying of Archimedes, a Greek mathematician and engineer, ‘Give me a place to stand on, and I  will move the earth’, adapted in English revolutionary writings of the 1790s, is the third and final epigraph to Q Mab and the epigraph to L&C (see notes thereto in Longman i and ii). 19. gin,] MT, 1824; gin Nbk 15, GT. ‘A mechanical contrivance or device’ (OED 3). The same usage is found in Hobbes, Considerations (1680) 54: ‘not every one that brings from beyond Seas a new Gin, or other janty device, is therefore a Philosopher’. S. read Hobbes in March 1820 (Mary Jnl i 311–13) though this work is not specified. 20. figured spells] written spells, Nbk 15. I.e. ‘magical calculations’ (GM). 21. sport] move Nbk 15. therein;] MT, 1824; therein Nbk 15; therein: GT. 22. engines,] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; engines — GT.

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As Vulcan never wrought for Jove to clutch Ixion or the Titans: — or the quick Wit of that man of God, St. Dominic, To convince Atheist, Turk, or Heretic; Or those in philanthropic council met, Who thought to pay some interest for the debt They owed to Jesus Christ for their salvation, By giving a faint foretaste of damnation To Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser and the rest Who made our land an island of the blest, When lamp-like Spain, who now relumes her fire

23. Vulcan] The Roman name for the Greek deity Hephaestos, god of fire, blacksmiths, and artisans. His smithy is located on the summit of Etna in Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound l. 365. He is described as endowed with cunning as well as craftsmanship in Odyssey vii 92. 24. Ixion] Zeus had Ixion bound to a wheel made by Hephaestos for trying to seduce his wife, Hera. His story is told in Pythian ii 21–48. S. transcribed ll. 50–2 of this ode of Pindar’s on f. 27r rev. of Nbk 10 which he used between spring 1819 and spring 1820 (MYRS iv p. xxxii). At the bidding of Zeus (Jupiter), Hephaestos (Vulcan) fastens Prometheus to a rock in Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound ll. 1–81. Titans] Titan 1824 (corrected to Titans in G1824). 25. God,] 1824; God Nbk 15; God — MT, GT. St. Dominic,] 1824; St  Dominic Nbk 15, MT, GT. Dominic (1170–1221), founder of the Dominican Order, preached against the Albigensian heretics in Languedoc and was active in the Inquisition. His life is recounted in Paradiso xii 55–105 where his ‘quickness’ and zeal are praised in ll. 55–7 and 97–105. Cp. PB3 574 and note (Longman iii 136). 26. Turk,] 1824; Turk Nbk 15, MT, GT. 27–35. ‘A sardonic reference to Philip II’s council that planned the Catholic crusade against England in 1588. The grammatical structure is: “who thought to pay interest . . . by giving a foretaste . . . with thumbscrews” ’ (GM). See Hume, History of England, 10 vols, Regent’s edition (1819) vi 162: ‘The point on which [Philip] rested his highest glory, the perpetual object of his policy, was to support orthodoxy and exterminate heresy; and as the power and credit of Elizabeth were the chief bulwark of the protestants, he hoped, if he could subdue that princess, to acquire the eternal renown of re-uniting the whole Christian world in the catholic communion.’ S. read Hume’s History, often aloud, between 19 June and 15 August 1818 (Mary Jnl i 215–23). 27. philanthropic council] philanthropic counsel Nbk 15; philosophic council MT; philosophic councils 1824. The source of the misreadings in MT and 1824 is probably John Gisborne’s mistranscription from ‘Fair copy’ in ‘M. S. from the Gisbornes’. Hume notes that ‘notwithstanding the secrecy of the Spanish council, and their pretending to employ this force in the Indies, it was easily concluded, that they meant to make some effort against England’ (History vi 165). 29. to Jesus Christ for their salvation,] G1824, 1840; to J. C. for their salvation, Nbk 15 (their salvation is written beneath saving them canc.); * * * * * * 1824, 1839; to Jesus Christ for their salvation GT. 30. faint] Written above sweet canc. in Nbk 15; fain MT. 31. That is ‘England’s prophets’, referred to in OL 145 (see note to that line, Longman iii 404). 32. an island of the blest] The ‘Islands of the Blessed’, mentioned in Hesiod, Works and Days 171, were a Gk mythical realm, located in the far west, where dead heroes were sent. Cp. Byron, Don Juan iii 700. 33–4. The reference is to the constitutional revolution in Spain that was preceded by a military uprising at Cadiz in January 1820. Cp. the imagery that relates this event in OL 1–5. In the context of the earlier references to St Dominic (l. 25) and Philip II’s plans to invade England (l. 27), it is significant that the Examiner, 639 (26 March 1820) 193, had announced the constitutional government’s abolition of the Inquisition in Spain. The word relume also signals political hope in L&C 1472 (the source of this word, used again in The Cenci III ii 51, appears to be Othello V ii 13).

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shelley: selected poems On Freedom’s hearth, grew dim with Empire — With thumbscrews, wheels, with tooth and spike and jag, Which fishers found under the utmost crag Of Cornwall and the storm-encompassed isles, Where to the sky the rude sea rarely smiles Unless in treacherous wrath, as on the morn When the exulting elements in scorn Satiated with destroyed destruction, lay Sleeping in beauty on their mangled prey,

34. Empire —] Nbk 15; Empire, MT; Empire: — 1824, Empire . . . GT. 35. A reference to Elizabeth I’s anti-Catholic campaign in advance of the Spanish Armada related in Hume, History vi 168: ‘the horrid cruelties and iniquities of the inquisition were set before men’s eyes: a list and description was published, and pictures dispersed, of the several instruments of torture with which, it was pretended, the Spanish Armada was loaded.’ spike] ‘A stout sharp-pointed projecting part of a metal object’ (OED 2). jag,] MT, 1824; jag Nbk 15, GT. ‘a sharp projection or tooth on an edge or surface’ (OED 4). 36. Which fishers] Which fishes 1824; With fishes 1839, 1840 (fishes is corrected to fishers in G1824). 37. Cornwall] Written beneath Of Albion free canc. in Nbk 15. S. appears to conflate the anti-Catholic propaganda referred to in the note to l. 35 with a reference to an incident at the close of the English expedition against Portugal in 1589: ‘[The Earl of] Cumberland sailed towards the Terceras, and took several prizes from the enemy; but the richest, valued at a hundred thousand pounds, perished in her return, with all her cargo, near St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwal.’ (Hume, History vi 180) the storm-encompassed isles] A reference to the fate of the Spanish navy after the failure of the projected invasion of England in 1588 related in Hume, History vi 173–4: ‘The Spanish admiral . . . prepared therefore to return homewards; but as the wind was contrary to his passage through the channel, he resolved to sail northwards . . . A violent tempest overtook the Armada after it passed the Orkneys: the ships had already lost their anchors, and were obliged to keep to sea: the mariners, unaccustomed to such hardships, and not able to govern such unwieldy vessels, yielded to the fury of the storm, and allowed their ships to drive either on the western isles of Scotland, or on the coast of Ireland, where they were miserably wrecked.’ the] its (written above the canc.) Nbk 15. isles,] MT, 1824; isles Nbk 15, GT. 38–9. the rude sea . . . treacherous wrath] Turner 275 comments that the laughing waves ‘doubtless derives from an association in Shelley’s mind’ of the ‘waves of ocean’ in Aeschylus Prometheus Bound ll. 89–90 with Lucretius, De Re. Nat. i 8 and v 1004–5: ‘tibi rident aequora ponti’ and ‘nec poterat quemquam placidi pellacia ponti/ subdola pellicere in fraudem ridentibus undis’ (‘for you the wide stretches of ocean laugh’ and ‘nor could anyone be enticed to his ruin by the treacherous witchery of a quiet sea with laughing waves’). 38. sky ] Written above moon canc. in Nbk 15. rude] Written above wild canc. in Nbk 15. rarely] seldom 1824, 1839, 1840. 39. on] Written above even canc. in Nbk 15. 41–3. lay . . . sleep] See Pantherlike Spirit! beautiful and swift (Longman iii 329–31, no. 307). Cp. also Thomas Medwin, ‘The Pindarees’ in Sketches from Hindoostan with Other Poems (1821) p. 49: ‘Like tigers dreaming o’er their mangled prey’. S. commented on Medwin’s poem in a letter of 16 April 1820 (L ii 183–84). 41. destroyed destruction] Cp. Cowper, The Task vi 525–6: ‘again he sought/Destruction with a zeal to be destroyed’. 42. beauty] Nbk 15 (written above smiles; canc.), MT, 1824; beauty, GT.

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As panthers sleep; — and other strange and dread Magical forms the brick floor overspread — Proteus transformed to metal did not make More figures, or more strange; nor did he take Such shapes of unintelligible brass, Or heap himself in such a horrid mass Of tin or iron not to be understood; And forms of unimaginable wood To puzzle Tubal Cain and all his brood: Great screws and cones, and wheels and groovèd blocks, The elements of what will stand the shocks Of wave, and wind and time. — Upon the table More knacks and quips there be than I am able To catalogize in this verse of mine: — A pretty bowl of wood — not full of wine,

43–51. On the strangeness of the composite parts of the steamboat, see S.’s letter to John and Maria Gisborne of 26 May 1820: ‘Will Henry write me an adamantine letter, flowing not like the words of Sophocles with honey, but molten brass & iron, & bristling with wheels & teeth? I saw his steamboat asleep under the walls. I was afraid to waken it & ask it whether it was dreaming of him for the same reason that I wd. have refrained from waking Ariadne after Theseus had left her — unless I had been Bacchus. — ’ (L ii 203) 43. panthers] 1824; Panthers Nbk 15, MT, GT. sleep; —] MT; sleep. — Nbk 15; sleep: — 1824; Sleep — GT. 44. forms] Nbk 15 (written above shapes canc.), MT, 1824; forms, GT. 45. Proteus] In Odyssey Proteus is ‘the Old Man of the Sea’, a sea-god who changes shape to elude his captor. See note to PU III iii 65. 47. shapes] Written above aspects canc. in Nbk 15. 49. or] and Nbk 15, 1824. iron] Written above lead canc. in Nbk 15. 51. puzzle] Written above baffle (which is underlined as if for possible reinstatement) in Nbk 15. Tubal Cain] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; Tubal Cain, GT. In Genesis iv 22, ‘Tubal-cain’, the son of Zillah (one of Lamech’s two wives), is ‘an instructer of every artificer in brass and iron’, that is, the first metal-worker in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Lamech’s other wife, Adah, bore Jabal and Jubal, fathers of pastoral civilization and music respectively. 52. Great screws] Circles Nbk 15. cones,] MT, 1824; cones Nbk 15, Cones, GT. 53–4. The elements . . . and time. —] ‘The elements, that is, of a steam-boat’ (Locock 1911). Locock cps. S.’s letter to Henry Reveley of 28 October 1819: ‘Well, how goes on all? the Boilers, & the Keel of the Boat, & the Cylinder, & all the other elements of that soul which is to guide our “Monstruo de fuego e agua” over the sea? Let me hear news of their birth, & how they thrive after they are born.’ (L ii 132) On the quotation from Calderón in this letter, see the headnote to It is a singular world we live in (Longman vi Appendix E). 55. knacks] Ingenious contrivances (OED 3). quips] Knick-knacks (OED 2b). there be] Omitted in MT. 56. catalogize] ‘Make a list of ’ (Concordance). According to OED the word has an exclusively seventeenth-century usage. this] the MT. 57. wine] wind MT.

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shelley: selected poems But quicksilver, that dew which the gnomes drink When at their subterranean toil they swink, Pledging the daemons of the earthquake, who Reply to them in lava — cry halloo! And call out to the cities o’er their head, — Roofs, towers, and shrines, the dying and the dead, Crash through the chinks of earth — and then all quaff Another rouse, and hold their sides and laugh. This quicksilver no gnome has drunk — within The walnut bowl it lies, veinèd and thin, In colour like the wake of light that stains

58–65. the gnomes . . . laugh.] In the Dedication to The Rape of the Lock (1714), Pope notes a French source, Le Comte de Gabalis, for the idea that gnomes are associated with the earth’s interior and are demonic: ‘According to these Gentlemen, the four Elements are inhabited by Spirits, which they call Sylphs, Gnomes, Nymphs and Salamanders. The Gnomes, or Daemons of Earth, delight in Mischief ’ (ed. G. Tillotson (1962) 143). The review of J.-A.-S. Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire Infernal; ou Recherches et Anecdotes sur les Démons, les Esprits, les Fantômes, les Spectres, les Revenans, les Loup-garoux, les Possédés, les Sorciers, les Sabats, les Magiciens, les Salamandres, les Sylphes, les Gnomes, etc. 2 vols (1818) and other works in Quarterly Review xxii (January  1820) 348–80, with the running-head ‘Popular Mythology of the Middle Ages’ (referred to in the headnote), notes that ‘Malignity is constantly ascribed to the goblins of the mine’ (365), and continues, ‘But the Demons who haunted mines were considered as most tremendous. “The nature of such is very violent; they do often slay whole companies of labourers, they do sometimes send inundations that destroy both the mines and miners, they bring noxious and malignant vapours to stifle the laborious workmen; briefly their whole delight and faculty consists in killing, tormenting and crushing men who seek such treasures.” ’ (365–6). Rognoni 1589 cps this passage to the Furies’ chorus in PU I 499 ff. 58. quicksilver] I.e. Mercury, ‘so called from its liquid mobile form at room temperatures’ (OED). drink] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; drink, GT. 59. swink,] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; swink GT (written below shrink canc.). I.e. ‘labour’ (OED 1). The word ‘swinke’ is used in Spenser, Mother Hubberds Tale l. 163 and Thomson, The Castle of Indolence ii 13 (‘swink and moil’); ‘swinked’ occurs in Comus l. 292. 60–4. daemons of the earthquake . . . chinks of earth] Cp. William Lisle Bowles, St Michael’s Mount, A Poem (1798) ll. 82–92. There is also a possible reference to the eyewitness account of the destruction of Caracas by a volcano in Alexander de Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, during the years 1799–1804 (1819) in Quarterly Review xxi (April  1819) 322: ‘Thousands of the inhabitants (between nine and ten thousand) were buried under the ruins of the houses and churches. The procession had not yet set out; but the crowd was so great in the churches, that nearly three or four thousand persons were crushed by the fall of their vaulted roofs.’ 60. daemons of the earthquake] Cp. Mont Blanc l. 72. Milton refers to ‘demons that are found/In fire, air, flood, or under ground’ in Il Penseroso ll. 93–4. daemons] Nbk 15; demons MT, 1824, GT. 61. lava — cry] lava-cry 1824; lava, cry Nbk 15. 62. cities] city Nbk 15. head, —] dead Nbk 15. 63. towers,] towers MT; towns 1824; towns, 1839. shrines,] MT; shrines, — 1824; shrines — GT. dead,] MT; dead Nbk 15, GT, 1824. 64. of earth —] 1824; of the earth — Nbk 15, GT (scansion requires omission of the); of earth, MT. 65. rouse] A  full draught of liquor (OED). and] then MT. hold their sides and laugh.] Cp. Milton, L’Allegro l. 32: ‘And Laughter holding both his sides.’ sides] ribs Nbk 15.

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The Tuscan deep, when from the moist moon rains The inmost shower of its white fire — the breeze Is still — blue heaven smiles over the pale seas. And in this bowl of quicksilver — for I Yield to the impulse of an infancy Outlasting manhood — I have made to float A rude idealism of a paper boat: A hollow screw with cogs — Henry will know The thing I mean and laugh at me — if so He fears not I should do more mischief — next Lie bills and calculations much perplexed, With steamboats, frigates and machinery quaint Traced over them in blue and yellow paint. Then comes a range of mathematical Instruments, for plans nautical and statical; A heap of rosin, a queer broken glass With ink in it, a china cup that was What it will never be again, I think, A thing from which sweet lips were wont to drink The liquor doctors rail at — and which I

69. deep,] MT, 1824; deep Nbk 15 (written above sea canc.), GT. moist] Written beneath clear uncanc. and above serene canc. in Nbk 15. 71. still] Written after silent canc. in Nbk 15. pale] Written above white canc. in Nbk 15. 72–5. for I . . . paper boat] In his Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley Peacock recalled S.’s ‘passion for sailing paper-boats’ in 1814–15 (Peacock Works viii 97), as did Medwin (Medwin 1913) 91. 73. infancy] Nbk 15, 1824; Infancy MT, GT. 75. A rude idealism of] I.e. a crude approximation to. a paper boat:] 1964; paper boat Nbk 15; a paper boat — MT, 1824; a paper boat. GT. 76. cogs —] MT, 1824; cogs Nbk 15; cogs. — GT. 78. He . . . mischief] I.e. ‘He need not fear that I will do more mischief than floating the paper boat’. more] some Nbk 15. 79. Lie] Written above Are canc. in Nbk 15; See MT. perplexed,] 1824; perplext Nbk 15, MT, GT. Meaning ‘confused’ (Concordance), from Lat. perplexus. 81. in] Written above with canc. in Nbk 15. paint.] MT, 1824; paint Nbk 15; paint — GT. 82. comes] come Nbk 15. 83. nautical] Written above dynamic canc. in Nbk 15. statical] The adjective derives from ‘statics’, that is, ‘the science relating to weight and its mechanical effects’ (OED 1a). The original Nbk 15 reading suggests S. had in mind the distinction in his day, noted in OED, between the branches of physical science concerned with the action of forces in producing equilibrium or relative rest (statics) and the action of forces in producing motion (dynamics). 84. queer] Nbk 15; green BSM (a misreading of Nbk 15), MT, 1824, GT. 85. it,] Nbk 15; it — MT, GT; it; — 1824. 86. think,] MT, 1824; think Nbk 15, GT. 88. The liquor doctors rail at] Thomas Trotter, A View of the Nervous Temperament (1807) 72, warned that tea was harmful: ‘however agreeable may be its immediate flavour, the ultimate effects are debility and nervous diseases.’ See Morton 140: ‘Shelley criticizes Trotter’s position on tea . . . in a sequence of lines which withhold the article until the final word, thus prompting an association with alcohol.’ doctors] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; Doctors GT.

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Will quaff in spite of them — and when we die We’ll toss up who died first of drinking tea, And cry out heads or tails, where’er we be. Near that a dusty paint box, some odd hooks, A half-burnt match, an ivory block, three books Where conic sections, spherics, logarithms, 95 To great Laplace, from Saunderson and Sims, Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray Of figures — disentangle them who may — Baron de Tott’s memoirs beside them lie, And some odd volumes of old chemistry. 100 Near those a most inexplicable thing, 90

89. quaff] Written above drink canc. in Nbk 15. 90. We’ll] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; Will GT. 91. out heads or tails,] 1964; out, heads or tails, Nbk 15, MT; out, — heads or tails? 1824, out, heads or tails? GT. 92. box,] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; box — GT. odd hooks,] MT; old hooks, 1824; old hooks Nbk 15, GT; old books, 1839. 93. A] An 1824. block,] box, MT. three] Written above some canc. in Nbk 15. 94. conic sections,] Nbk 15, 1824; conic Sections, MT; Conic-sections, GT. OED, under ‘conic’ 2, illustrates the description of a conic section as ‘a figure formed by the section of a right circular cone by a plane’ with a quotation from 1706 in which Conick Sections are referred to as ‘the three Sections or Divisions of a Cone, call’d Ellipsis, Hyperbola and Parabola’. spherics] ‘The mathematical study or science of the sphere; spherical geometry and trigonometry’ (OED). logarithms,] 1824; logarithms Nbk 15, MT, GT. 95. Laplace,] 1824; Laplace Nbk 15; La Place MT; La Place, GT. Pierre Simon Laplace (1749–1827), astronomer and mathematician of atheistical opinions and republican sympathies. He is referred to in the Note to Q Mab vi 45–6 but S. refers to ‘studying Laplace, Système du Monde’, that is, his Exposition du Système du Monde (1796), later, in a letter to Hogg of 26 November 1813 (L i 380). He is described as ‘[t]he illustrious Laplace’ in A Refutation of Deism (1814) (Prose Works 115). Saunderson] Nicholas Saunderson (1683–1739), the blind Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in the University of Cambridge, author of The Elements of Algebra, 2 vols (1740) which ran into many editions up to the nineteenth century. Sims,] 1824; Sims Nbk 15, MT, GT. A reference to Robert Simson (1687–1768), Glaswegian mathematician with a particular interest in Greek geometry, author of The Elements of Euclid (1756), a textbook which was published in an eighteenth edition in 1818. 98. Memoirs of Baron de Tott containing the state of the Turkish Empire and the Crimea, During the Late War with Russia with Numerous Anecdotes, Facts and Observations on the Manners and Customs of the Turks and Tartars, trans., 2 vols (1785). Originally published in French in 1784 as Mémoires sur les Turcs et les Tartares, it is referred to in Don Juan vi [1823] 245. François, Baron de Tott (1733–93) was in the French Embassy to Constantinople with his father between 1755 and 1763 and a consul in Crimea in 1767. According to Hazlitt, this work had been proposed for translation by Thomas Holcroft (Hazlitt Works iii 107), who had introduced Godwin to Maria Gisborne in 1793. Maria Gisborne had spent part of her childhood in Constantinople (see headnote). de] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; De GT. lie,] MT, 1824; lie Nbk 15, GT. 99. some odd volumes] Altered from an odd volume in Nbk 15. chemistry.] 1824; chemistry Nbk 15; chemistry — MT; Chemistry — GT. 100. those] Nbk 15, MT; them 1824; those, GT. thing,] 1824; tin thing Nbk 15; thing MT, GT.

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With lead in the middle — I’m conjecturing How to make Henry understand — but no, I’ll leave, as Spenser says, with many mo This secret in the pregnant womb of time, 105 Too vast a matter for so weak a rhyme. And here like some weird Archimage sit I, Plotting dark spells and devilish enginery, The self-impelling steam-wheels of the mind 101. lead] least MT, 1824 (least is corrected to lead in G1824). 102. but no,] 1964; but, no Nbk 15; but no — MT; but — no, 1824, GT. 103. with many mo] ‘The sense, of course, is, not “As Spenser and many others say,” but “This and many other secrets”.’ (Locock 1911) Cp. Diggon’s complaint in The Shepheardes Calender, September, ll. 11–14: Ah for loue of that, is to thee moste leefe, Hobbinol, I pray thee gall not my old griefe: Sike question ripeth vp cause of newe woe, For one opened mote vnfolde many moe. The Spenserian ‘moe’ is used in Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I lciii 4. See Davie, Purity 141: ‘The archaism, like others (“I wist” . . . “they swink”) is used partly as Spenser used it in “The Shepheards Calender” or “Mother Hubberd’s Tale”, partly as Byron used it in “Don Juan” [sic], to draw attention to its ungainly self.’ 104. the pregnant womb of time] See Iago in Othello I iii 370–1: ‘There are many events in the womb of time, which will be delivered.’ time,] MT, 1824; time Nbk 15, GT. 105. Davie, Purity 141 cps Sidney, Astrophil and Stella LXIX 1: ‘O joy, too high for my low stile to show’. rhyme.] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; rhyme — GT. 106. here] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; here, GT. sit] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; Sit GT. weird] In the sense of ‘having the power to control the fate or destiny of human beings’ (OED 1). Through its celebrated use in ‘the weïrd Sisters’ (Macbeth I iii 32) to describe the three witches in that play, a connection is established with l. 132. Archimage] Archimago is a wicked enchanter in Faerie Queene I i 36 ll. 7–9: He to his studie goes, and there amiddes His magick bookes and artes of sundrie kindes, He seekes out mighty charmes, to trouble sleepy minds. In the ‘Explanation of the obsolete Words used in this Poem’ prefatory to Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence (1748) ‘Archimage’, a character in that poem, is described as ‘The chief, or greatest of Magicians or Enchanters’. He is denounced by the Knight in ii 280–1: ‘ “I will, (he cry’d) so help me, God! Destroy/That Villain Archimage!” ’. S.’s benign usage may have been prompted by the reference to the Hermit in L&C/RofI as ‘a sort of good stupid Archimago’ in the review of that poem in Quarterly Review xxi (April 1819) 467. I,] 1824; I Nbk 15, MT, GT. 107–12. ‘Shelley jokingly describes his poetry in terms of one of Henry Reveley’s steam-engines, just a devilish device for stirring up angry reviews’ (GM). 107. devilish enginery,] 1824; devilish enginery. Nbk 15; self-impelling [imagery canc.], enginery, MT; devilish enginery GT. Satan’s artillery is described as ‘devilish enginery’ in Paradise Lost vi 553 (see OED 2b). 108–12. See Keach, Shelley’s Style (1984) 113: ‘ “The self-impelling steam-wheels of the mind”, which produce salty antidotes to the grave reviewers’ “self-content”, may sound like deliberate self-parody to a reader who recalls some of the images of imaginative freedom in Prometheus Unbound (“The vaporous exultation, not to be confined”, IV 321).’

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Which pump up oaths from clergymen, and grind 110 The gentle spirit of our meek reviews Into a powdery foam of salt abuse, Ruffling the ocean of their self-content — I sit, and smile or sigh as is my bent, But not for them — Libeccio rushes round 115 With an inconstant and an idle sound, I heed him more than them — the thunder-smoke Is gathering on the mountains, like a cloak Folded athwart their shoulders broad and bare; The ripe corn under the undulating air 120 Undulates like an ocean — and the vines Are trembling wide in all their trellised lines — The murmur of the awakening sea doth fill The empty pauses of the blast — the hill Looks hoary through the white electric rain — 125 And from the glens beyond, in sullen strain The interrupted thunder howls; above One chasm of heaven smiles, like the eye of Love

109. clergymen,] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; clergymen — GT. In his defence of S. against the Quarterly Review attack in the Examiner 615 (10 October 1819) 652, Hunt alluded to the possibility that its author was a clergyman: ‘Suppose the opponents of the Quarterly Review were to listen to all the scandals that have been reported of writers in it, and to proclaim this man by name as a pimp, another as a scamp, and another as a place or pulpit hunting slave made out of a school-boy tyrant?’ Reiman suggests this ‘reference to a clergyman once a schoolboy tyrant might be a veiled allusion to Henry Hart Milman’ (SC vi 933). But, though S. later misattributed the review to Milman (L ii 299), until 10 August 1820 he believed Southey to be its author (L ii 203–4). It was in fact written by John Taylor Coleridge. 111. powdery foam of salt abuse] See S.’s letter to Peacock of 12 July 1820: ‘I am told that the magazines, etc., blaspheme me at a great rate. I wonder why I write verses, for nobody reads them. It is a kind of disorder, for which the regular practitioners prescribe what is called a torrent of abuse; but I fear that can hardly be considered as a specific.’ (L ii 213) ‘Specific’ is used here in the medical sense of a remedy ‘especially efficacious for acting upon a particular ailment’ (OED 3a). 112. ocean] dull wave Nbk 15 (written alongside waters canc. which is written above Ocean canc.). 113. sigh] Written beneath write canc. in Nbk 15. bent,] 1824; bent Nbk 15, GT; bent — MT. 114–15. Libeccio .  .  . sound] ‘Libeccio’ is the Italian name for the south-west wind. S.’s remark to Peacock in the letter of 12 July 1820, ‘The Libecchio here howls like a chorus of fiends all day’ (L ii 213), may allude to the reference to ‘Libecchio’ amongst other contending winds in Paradise Lost x 706. It had a detrimental effect on him, as noted to Peacock the previous summer: ‘My health, whenever no Libeccio blows, improves.’ (L ii 100) 115. idle] Possibly meaning ‘empty’ as in ‘deserts idle’ in Othello I iii 141. 116. thunder-smoke] See WA 447 and note. 118. bare;] 1824; bare Nbk 15; bare — MT, GT. 119–20. undulating . . . Undulates] Cp. Epipsychidion l. 434. 122. murmur] Written above howl canc. in Nbk 15. 127. the eye of Love] MT; the eye of Love, Nbk 15; the eye of love GT, 1824. eye] age 1824 (age is corrected to eye in G1824). See James Macpherson, Temora: An Epic Poem (1763) Book Fourth: ‘But tall above the rest is the hero of streamy Atha: he bends his eye of love on Sul—malla, from his stately steps. She turns, with pride, her face away, and careless bends the bow.’ (The Poems of Ossian and related works, ed. Howard Gaskill (1996) 259)

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O’er the unquiet world — while such things are, How could one worth your friendship heed the war 130 Of worms? the shriek of the world’s carrion jays, Their censure, or their wonder, or their praise? You are not here . . . the quaint witch Memory sees In vacant chairs your absent images, And points where once you sat, and now should be 135 But are not — I demand if ever we Shall meet as then we met — and she replies, Veiling in awe her second-sighted eyes; ‘I know the past alone — but summon home My sister Hope, — she speaks of all to come.’ 140 But I, an old diviner, who know well Every false verse of that sweet oracle, Turned to the sad enchantress once again, And sought a respite from my gentle pain, In citing every passage o’er and o’er 145 Of our communion — how on the sea-shore We watched the ocean and the sky together Under the roof of blue Italian weather; 128. O’er] 1964; Oer Nbk 15; On BSM (a doubtful reading of Nbk 15), MT, GT, 1824. 129–30. the war/Of worms] See OL 29. 129. heed] hear MT. the] this Nbk 15. 132–45. As Rognoni notes, this passage is anticipated by S.’s letter to Maria Gisborne of 13 or 14 October 1819: ‘The regret we feel at our absence from you persuades me that it is a state which cannot last, & which so long as it must last, will be interrupted by some intervals, one of which is destined to be your all coming to see us here . . . Our memory — if you will accept so humble a metaphor — is forever scratching at the door of your absence . . .  . Let us believe in a kind of optimism in which we are our own gods . . .  . it is best that this one attempt should have been made, otherwise perhaps one other thing which is best might not have occurred, & it is best that we should think all this for the best even though it be not, because Hope, as Coleridge says is a solemn duty which we owe alike to ourselves & to the world — a worship to the spirit of good within, which requires before it sends that inspiration forth, which impresses its likeness upon all that it creates, devoted & disinterested homage.’ (L ii 123–5) Kenneth Neill Cameron, ‘The Political Symbolism of Prometheus Unbound’, PMLA lviii (1943) comments that the key to the identity of Ione and Panthea in PU (his view is that the first represents Memory, the second her sister Hope) is to be found in LMG 132–9. 132. here . . . ] Nbk 15; here! MT, GT, 1824. quaint] Written above weak canc. and after wild canc. in Nbk 15. Several archaic meanings are implied including ‘ingenious’ and ‘cunning’ (see OED 1). Memory] Nbk 15, 1824; memory MT, GT. 133. chairs] Nbk 15, 1839; chairs, MT, 1824, GT. 136. met —] Nbk 15; met, — MT, GT; met; — 1824. 137. second-sighted] Prophetic. 140. know] knew (Mathilde Blind’s — questionable — reading of Nbk 15 in Westminster Review xxxviii (1870) 81). 141. oracle,] 1824; oracle — MT, GT; oracle Nbk 15. 142. the sad enchantress] I.e. ‘the quaint witch Memory’ in l. 132. again,] 1824; again Nbk 15, MT, GT. 144. citing] Nbk 15 (written above acting canc.); acting MT, 1824, GT. 147. Forman 1876–7 cps. Epipsychidion l. 542.

470

shelley: selected poems

How I ran home through last year’s thunderstorm, And felt the transverse lightning linger warm 150 Upon my cheek — and how we often made Feasts for each other, where good will outweighed The frugal luxury of our country cheer, As well it might, were it less firm and clear Than ours must ever be; — and how we spun 155 A shroud of talk to hide us from the sun Of this familiar life, which seems to be But is not, — or is but quaint mockery Of all we would believe; or sadly blame The jarring and inexplicable frame 160 Of this wrong world; — and then anatomize The purposes and thoughts of men whose eyes Were closed in distant years — or widely guess The issue of the earth’s great business,

149. transverse] That cuts across the whole sky. 151. Feasts] Treats 1824. 152. Cp. Jonson, ‘To Penshurst’ ll. 82–3: ‘What (great, I will not say, but) sudden cheer/Didst thou then make them!’ 153. well it] it well 1824. might,] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; might GT. 154–66. and how we spun . . . but tremble not] Ann Thompson, ‘Shelley’s “Letter to Maria Gisborne”: tact and clutter’ (Essays on Shelley, ed. Miriam Allott (1982) 154–5 cps Lear to Cordelia in King Lear V iii 8–19: Come let’s away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage; When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too — Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out — And take upon’s the mystery of things As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out, In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones, That ebb and flow by th’ moon. 154–5. we spun/ A shroud of talk] Cp. the silkworm’s spinning of ‘a soft cell’ in ll. 6–10. 154. ours] Nbk 15 (written above it canc.), 1824; our’s MT, GT. 155. A shroud of talk] ‘Grammatical subject of the infinitives to hide, blame (l. 158), anatomize (l. 160), and guess (l. 162). The original construction is resumed in l. 166.’ (GM) 157. quaint] Written above sad canc. in Nbk 15. 158. or] and MT. sadly] Written beneath sweetly canc. and gently canc. in Nbk 15. 159–60. jarring . . . world] See Cowper, The Task iii 675–6: ‘Oh blest seclusion from a jarring world/ Which he thus occupied, enjoys!’ 159. jarring] Perhaps meaning ‘quarrelling’ as well as ‘discordant’ (see OED 3 and 4). 160. world; —] Nbk 15; world: — MT, 1824; world; GT. 163. business,] MT, 1824; business Nbk 15, GT.

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When we shall be as we no longer are — 165 Like babbling gossips safe, who hear the war Of winds, and sigh, but tremble not — or how You listened to some interrupted flow Of visionary rhyme, in joy and pain Struck from the inmost fountains of my brain, 170 With little skill perhaps — or how we sought Those deepest wells of passion and of thought Wrought by wise poets in the waste of years, Staining their sacred waters with our tears, Quenching a thirst ever to be renewed! 175 Or how I, wisest lady! then indued The language of a land which now is free, And winged with thoughts of truth and majesty Flits round the tyrant’s sceptre like a cloud, And bursts the peopled prisons, and cries aloud, 180 ‘My name is Legion!’ — that majestic tongue Which Calderon over the desert flung Of ages and of nations; and which found An echo in our hearts, and with the sound Startled Oblivion — thou wert then to me 185 As is a nurse, when inarticulately

164–5. When . . . safe] ‘when we shall be as safe in death as we were before we were born’ (GM). 164. be] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; be, GT. 166–70. or how . . . perhaps] The poet’s craft is compared to Vulcan’s (see l. 23) and Henry’s feats of engineering. 166. sigh,] MT, 1824; sigh — Nbk 15; sigh GT. not —] Nbk 15, MT; not; 1824; not, — GT. 168. visionary rhyme,] Nbk 15; visionary rhyme, — MT; visionary rhyme; — 1824; visionary rhyme — GT. Perhaps a reference to PU which S. had read aloud to the Gisbornes in the autumn of 1819. The phrase is also used in WA 8. 169. brain,] MT, 1824; brain Nbk 15, GT. 170. perhaps —] Nbk 15; perhaps: MT; perhaps; — 1824; perhaps: — GT. 171. deepest] Written above sacred canc. in Nbk 15. and] Nbk 15; or MT, 1824, GT. ‘Not “or” — S. made no such division’ (GM). 173. their] the 1824. tears,] Nbk 15; tears; MT, 1824, GT. 175–6. S. learned Spanish with Maria Gisborne (‘wisest lady!’) in the summer and autumn of 1819 (‘then’) before the military rebellion in Cadiz of January 1820 that led to the granting of a constitution in March, making Spain by the time LMG was composed in late June or early July 1820 (‘now’) free. 175. indued] ‘Clothed myself in’ (GM): cp. Lat. induere (‘to put on, as a garment’). Although Concordance supplies the gloss ‘learned’, the sense seems to be the same as the usage in R&H 728 (see note to that line, Longman ii 290). 177. winged] mingled MT. 178. Locock 1911 cps. OL 198. cloud,] MT, 1824; cloud Nbk 15, GT. 179. aloud,] MT, 1824; aloud Nbk 15, GT. 180. ‘My name is Legion!’ —] 1824; My name is Legion! Nbk 15; ‘My name is Legion!’ MT; ‘My name is legion’ — GT. A quotation from Mark v 9. ‘Legion’ means ‘innumerable’. 183. hearts,] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; hearts; GT. 185. inarticulately] Nbk 15, 1824; inarticulately, MT, GT.

472

shelley: selected poems

A child would talk as its grown parents do. If living winds the rapid clouds pursue, If hawks chase doves through the etherial way, Huntsmen the innocent deer, and beasts their prey, 190 Why should not we rouse with the spirit’s blast Out of the forest of the pathless past These recollected pleasures? You are now In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore 195 Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more. Yet in its depth what treasures! You will see That which was Godwin, — greater none than he Though fallen — and fallen on evil times — to stand Among the spirits of our age and land,

186. do.] MT, 1824; do, — Nbk 15; do — GT. 187–90. If living winds . . . These recollected pleasures?] See Morton 140: ‘Shelley rather comically asserts the rights of the chase associated with feudal power, by ironically presenting the freedom to explore one’s own past as the license of an aristocrat to sport in his territory. The “pleasures” have already been “recollected”, but they also need to be roused with violence.’ 188. etherial] aetherial Nbk 15; aerial 1824. In GT etherial is written beneath aerial, the underline suggesting there was an ambiguity in ‘Fair copy’ about S.’s final choice. way,] MT, 1824; way Nbk 15, GT. 189. prey,] MT, 1824; prey Nbk 15, GT. 190. we] Nbk 15, 1824; we, MT, GT. rouse] The verb is used in the context of hunting in Jonson, ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’, ‘In spring oft roused for thy master’s sport’ (23) and Milton, L’Allegro ll. 53–4, ‘Oft list’ning how the hounds and horn/Cheerly rouse the slumb’ring morn’. 193–5. whose ebb and flow .  .  . howls on for more.] Cp. Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years (Longman v, no. 416). 193. London,] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; London GT. 197–201. * * * * * * * 1824, 1839; Your old friend Godwin, greater none than he;/Though fallen on evil times, yet will he stand,/Among the spirits of our age and land,/Before the dread tribunal of To-come/ The foremost, whilst rebuke stands pale and dumb. 1840. These lines are supplied in G1824. See S.’s letter to the Gisbornes of 26 May 1820: ‘Your impressions about Godwin (I speak especially to Madonna mia, who had known him before) will especially interest me — You know, that although I believe he is the only sincere enemy I have in the world, that added years only add to my admiration of his intellectual powers, & even the moral resources of his character. — ’ (L ii 202–3) S. had introduced himself to Godwin in a letter of January 1812 (L i 219–21) and first met him in October of that year. 197. Godwin, —] Nbk 15; G — n, — MT; Godwin — GT. 198. Though fallen — and fallen on evil times] Godwin’s position is compared to Milton’s during the Restoration to which Paradise Lost vii 24–8 alludes: More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days, On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues; In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, And solitude The line echoes the treatment of Wordsworth in Verses written on receiving a Celandine in a letter from England (Longman i 512–5, no. 117) l. 30.

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200 Before the dread tribunal of to come The foremost — while Rebuke cowers pale and dumb. You will see Coleridge — he who sits obscure In the exceeding lustre, and the pure Intense irradiation of a mind, 205 Which, with its own internal lightning blind, Flags wearily through darkness and despair — A cloud-encircled meteor of the air, A hooded eagle among blinking owls. — You will see Hunt — one of those happy souls 210 Who are the salt of the earth, and without whom

200. tribunal] Tribunal Nbk 15. 201. cowers] Written above stands canc. in Nbk 15. 202–8. Cp. this description of Coleridge with PB3 378–95 (Longman iii 121–2) and that of Byron in J&M 50–2 and note to l. 51. Of the two passages, Keach, Shelley’s Style (1984) 94, comments: ‘Byron is the eagle who, instead of flying towards the sun in a process of aspiring self-renewal, preys upon himself and is blinded by the superiority of his own talents; Coleridge is the eagle paradoxically hooded, encircled, into obscurity by the “intense irradiation” and “internal lightning” of his own mental powers. Both, Shelley suggests, are caught up in their own versions of the central dilemma of Alastor, imprisoned within the self and driven to search despairingly for completion through self-reflection and self-projection.’ L. 208 may be compared with Don Juan Dedication ii 6 where Coleridge is described as ‘like a hawk encumber’d with his hood’; although not published with Cantos I and II in 1819, Byron read S. the Dedication, as well as Canto I, immediately after fair-copying both in Venice in September 1818 (L ii 42 and Byron, CPW v 665). In addition, there is a possible allusion to the wry portrayal of Coleridge’s penchant for obscurity in Peacock’s Melincourt ch xxxii: ‘They had scarcely left the shore when they were involved in a fog of unprecedented density, so that they could not see one another; but they heard the dash of Mr. Mystic’s oars, and were consoled by his assurances that he could not miss his way in a state of the atmosphere so very consentaneous to his peculiar mode of vision; for that, though, in navigating his little skiff on the Ocean of Deceitful Form, he had very often wandered wide and far from the Island of Pure Intelligence, yet this had always happened when he went with his eyes open, in broad daylight; but that he had soon found the means of obviating this little inconvenience, by always keeping his eyes close shut whenever the sun had the impertinence to shine upon him.’ (Peacock Works ii 332) Coleridge was the only one of the London writers mentioned in LMG whom S. had not met; he had stayed with the Gisbornes in Italy in 1805–6 (see headnote). 202. Coleridge] C — 1824; Coleridge 1839, 1840. 205–6. Locock 1911 cps PU I 419–20. 205. Which,] 1824; Which Nbk 15, MT, GT. lightning] lustre 1824. 206. darkness] terror Nbk 15. 207. air,] 1824; air Nbk 15; air — MT, GT. 209–12. You will see Hunt — . . . what others seem] S. commented to the Gisbornes in his letter of 26 May 1820: ‘To see Hunt, is to like him — and there is one other recommendation which he has to you, he is my friend —. ’ (L ii 203) Hunt had been the subject of endorsement in S.’s Dedication to The Cenci, published in London in March 1820. S. had first introduced himself to Hunt in a letter of 2 March 1811, shortly before he was expelled from Oxford, and first met him two months later (see Nicholas Roe, Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt (2005), 137–43). 209. Hunt] H — t 1824; Hunt 1839, 1840. souls] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; Souls GT. 210. Who] Nbk 15 (altered from Which); Which MT, 1824, GT. the salt of the earth,] 1824; the salt of the earth — Nbk 15; the salt of earth, MT, GT. The source of the phrase is Matthew v 13.

474

shelley: selected poems

This world would smell like what it is — a tomb; Who is, what others seem — his room no doubt Is still adorned with many a cast from Shout, With graceful flowers tastefully placed about; 215 And coronals of bay from ribbons hung, And brighter wreaths in neat disorder flung, The gifts of the most learn’d among some dozens Of female friends, sisters-in-law, and cousins. And there is he with his eternal puns, 220 Which beat the dullest brain for smiles, like duns Thundering for money at a poet’s door; Alas! it is no use to say, ‘I’m poor!’ Or oft in graver mood, when he will look Things wiser than were ever read in book, 225 Except in Shakespeare’s wisest tenderness. You will see Hogg — and I cannot express His virtues, though I know that they are great, 211. tomb;] 1824; tomb — Nbk 15; tomb. MT; tomb, GT. 212. is,] MT, 1824; is Nbk 15, GT. Seem —] Nbk 15; seem; MT; seem; — 1824, GT. 213. with] Nbk 15; by MT, 1824, GT. Shout,] MT, 1824; Shout Nbk 15, GT. A London sculptor’s shop mentioned in Hunt’s Indicator xxxv (7 June 1820) 277: ‘Shout in Holburn seems to deal chiefly in modern things; but he has a room up stairs, full of casts from the antique, large and small, that amounts to an exhibition.’ Major Works cps the description of Hunt’s Hampstead cottage in Keats’s ‘Sleep and Poetry’, as in, for example, ll. 355–9: Round about were hung The glorious features of the bards who sung In other ages — cold and sacred busts Smiled at each other. 214–16. Locock 1911 notes that these lines ‘seem to reflect Hunt’s literary style as well as the appearance of his room.’ 216. neat disorder] Webb (1995) cps ‘sweet disorder’ in Robert Herrick, ‘Delight in Disorder’ l. 1. flung,] 1824; flung Nbk 15; flung; MT; flung. GT. 218. sisters-in-law] A reference to Elizabeth (‘Bessy’) Kent, Marianne Hunt’s sister. 219–22. Trelawny told W. M. Rossetti in 1873 that ‘Leigh Hunt’s incessant punning — the puns themselves being far from good — was a great infliction’ (The Diary of W. M. Rossetti, ed. Odette Bornand (1977) 255). 220. duns] debt-collectors. 221. door;] MT, 1824; door Nbk 15 (written beneath gate canc.); door. GT. 223. mood,] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; mood GT. 224. read] said MT, 1824. 225. tenderness.] 1824; tenderness Nbk 15; tenderness. — MT; tenderness — GT. 226–32. You will see Hogg — . . . richest of the deep.] S. commented to the Gisbornes in his letter of 28 May 1820: ‘To know Hogg, (if anyone can know him) is to know something very unlike & inexpressibly superior {to} the great mass of men. — ’ (L ii 203). Hughes 45 notes Mary’s letter to Hogg of 28 February 1823: ‘Our divine Shelley has left me, my dear Jefferson, your fellow collegiate, one who always loved you — the best — but to you I need not praise him.’ (Mary L i 316) The first encounter between S. and Hogg took place at University College, Oxford, at the start of Michaelmas term, 1810 (see Hogg i ch. 3). 226. Hogg] H — 1824, 1839, 1840. 227. virtues,] 1824; virtues Nbk 15; virtues, — MT; virtues —, GT.

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Because he locks, then barricades the gate Within which they inhabit; — of his wit 230 And wisdom, you’ll cry out when you are bit. He is a pearl within an oyster shell, One of the richest of the deep. And there Is English Peacock with his mountain fair, Turned into a Flamingo, that shy bird 235 That gleams i’ the Indian air — have you not heard 229. wit] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; wit, GT. 230. And wisdom,] MT, 1824; And wisdom — Nbk 15; And wisdom GT. bit.] MT, 1824; bit; GT. This line is incomplete in Nbk 15. 231–2. The first of these is the only rhymeless line in the poem. In Nbk 15 the second of these lines is begun on p. 108 and continued on p. 115. 231. Cp. Mary’s reserve about Hogg in her letter to Leigh Hunt of 6 April 1819: ‘You say that you think that he has a good heart — and so do I — but who can be sure of it — he wraps himself up in a triple veil — and places or appears to place a high wall between himself & his fellows — This want of confidence & frankness must in its natural course be repaid by a kind of mistrust’ (Mary L i 91). 232. deep.] Nbk 15, 1824; deep; — MT, GT. 233. English] Written beneath Indian canc. in Nbk 15. In a note to ‘The Lion Hunt’ in Sketches from Hindoostan (1821) 39, Medwin states that the ‘Brahman’s sacred bird’ is a peacock. Peacock] P — 1824, 1839, 1840. Rognoni notes the fondness for word-play on Peacock’s name evident in S.’s letter of 8 November 1820: ‘I hear from Mr. Gisborne that you are surrounded with statements and accounts — a chaos of which you are the God; a sepulchre which encloses in a dormant state the chrysalis of the Pavonian Psyche. May you start into life some day, and give us another “Melincourt”. Your “Melincourt” is exceedingly admired, and I think much more so than any of your other writings. In this respect the world judges rightly.’ (L ii 244) These sentences echo S.’s description of his situation in Henry’s study and his desired relationship to posterity in ll. 8–105. S. was first introduced to Peacock by their then publisher Thomas Hookham, Junior, in ‘October or early November 1812’ (Joukovsky, Peacock L i p. lv). mountain fair] ‘Fair’ is used in the sense of ‘one of the fair sex, a woman’ (OED B. n.2 2), ‘mountain’ adjectivally (cp. ‘Snowdonian’ in l. 239). The reference is to Jane Gryffydh, whom Peacock had married on 22 March 1820 in Cardiganshire, having proposed to her in November 1819 but neither seen nor written to her since April 1811. Peacock had met her in 1810 and referred to her then as ‘The Caernavonshire nymph’, though in fact her father, John Gryffydh, was rector of Festiniog and Maentwrog, Merionethshire (Peacock L i 52, 170). News of his marriage had reached the Shelleys by 21 April (Claire Jnl 143) and S. congratulated Peacock on 2 May 1820 (L ii 192). He referred to Jane Gryffydh as ‘of the mountains’ in his letter to Peacock of 12 July 1820 (L ii 212). 234. Flamingo,] Nbk 15; Flamingo; — MT; Flamingo, — 1824; Flamingo — GT. In Act VI of Sir William Jones’s translation of Sacontalá; or, The Fatal Ring by Cálidás (1799) there is a reference to ‘amorous Flamingos’ (Works (1799) vi 289). S. had ordered Jones’s works on 24 December 1812. 235–7. have you not heard . . . no more of him?] Gently scolding him for his incommunication, as he had done in a letter to Hogg of 20 April (‘Peacock is metamorphosed by his Indian preferment into a very laconic correspondent’, L ii 185), S.’s letter to Peacock of 12 July 1820 alludes to the threat posed to male friendship by marriage: ‘I remember you said that when Auber married you were afraid you would see or hear but little of him’. (L ii 212) Peter Auber was a friend of Peacock’s from childhood who had helped to secure him a post in the East India Company (Peacock L i pp. xlvii — xlviii). A source of the equation of marriage to death is Marionetta in Nightmare Abbey (1818) ch. ix: ‘ “I shall go from hence tomorrow, perhaps to-day; and before we meet again, one of us will be married, and we might as well be dead, you know, Scythrop.” ’ (Peacock Works iii 83) S. remembered Emilia Viviani in these terms to Hogg in his letter of 22 October 1821: ‘I knew a very interesting Italian lady last winter, but she is now married; which, to quote our friend Peacock, is you know, the same as being dead. — ’ (L ii 360). 235–6. Indian . . . Hindoo] Allusions to Peacock’s employment at the East India Company which had begun in January 1819.

476

shelley: selected poems

When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo, His best friends hear no more of him? — but you Will see him, and will like him too, I hope, With the milk-white Snowdonian antelope 240 Matched with this cameleopard. — His fine wit Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it. A strain too learnèd for a shallow age, Too wise for selfish bigots; — let his page Which charms the chosen spirits of the time, 245 Fold itself up for the serener clime Of years to come, and find its recompense In that just expectation. — Wit and sense,

237. him? — but] Forman 1876–7; him, — but MT; him? but Nbk 15, 1824; him — But GT. 238. hope,] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; hope GT. 239–40. With the milk-white . . . this cameleopard. —] The allusion to the joining together of wild animals invites comparison with Virgil, Eclogues viii 26–8: Mopso Nysa datur: quid non speremus amantes? iungentur iam grypes equis, aevoque sequenti cum canibus timidi venient ad pocula dammae. (‘To Mopsus is Nysa given! For what may we lovers not look? Griffins now shall mate with mares, and, in the age to come, the timid deer shall come with hounds to drink.’) Cp. also Satyrane’s yoking of beasts in Faerie Queene I vi 26: And for to make his powre approued more, Wyld beastes in yron yokes he would compell; The spotted Panther, and the tusked Bore, The Pardale swift, and the Tigre cruell; The Antelope, and Wolfe both fierce and fell; And them constraine in equall teme to draw. Such ioy he had, their stubborne harts to quell, And sturdie courage tame with dreadfull aw, That his beheast they feared, as a tyrans law. ‘Cameleopard’ was a not uncommon word for giraffe in the early c. 19 (see Don Juan II vi 2), but GM comments that S. ‘(who probably pronounced it “camel-leopard”) means the sort of “pard” [i.e. panther or leopard] that drew the chariot of Bacchus, slyly implying that the marriage is of milk and wine. Peacock cultivated the pagan gods, and was fond of his bottle.’ 239. antelope] Nbk 15; Antelope MT, 1824; Antelope, GT. 240. this] his 1839, 1840. cameleopard. —] Nbk 15; cameleopard — MT; cameleopard; 1824; Cameleopard — GT. His] 1964; his Nbk 15, MT, 1824, GT. 242–7. These lines echo S.’s idea in PVR that ‘our most celebrated writers . . . are the priests of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present’ (Julian vii 20). Webb (1995) compares them to ll. 8–14. 244. time] age 1824. 245. the] a 1824 (a t in the margin suggests a is corrected to the in G1824), 1839, 1840. 247–50. Wit and sense . . . Horace Smith] Horatio (‘Horace’) Smith (1779–1849), wealthy banker and writer well known for the parodies he wrote with his brother James, Rejected Addresses (1812). S. had first met him at Hunt’s house in Hampstead in December 1816 and he assisted S. in his financial affairs from the summer of 1817 (L i 561). S. had sent him a gift of alabaster vases in May 1820 (L ii 202) and

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Virtue and human knowledge, all that might Make this dull world a business of delight, 250 Are all combined in Horace Smith — and these, With some exceptions which I need not tease Your patience by descanting on, — are all You and I know in London. I recall My thoughts, and bid you look upon the night. 255 As water does a sponge, so the moonlight Fills the void, hollow, universal air — What see you? — unpavilioned heaven is fair Whether the moon, into her chamber gone, Leaves midnight to the golden stars, or wan 260 Climbs with diminished beams the azure steep, Or whether clouds sail o’er the inverse deep, Piloted by the many-wandering blast, And the rare stars rush through them dim and fast: —

he was mentioned in the letter to the Gisbornes of 30 June 1820 as mediator in the arrangements to help Godwin. Smith ‘maintained the views of his dissenting upbringing, disliking Episcopalianism in theory and practice, but was socially and intellectually open-minded, and had a particular dislike of religious intolerance and unthinking obeisance to rank and wealth.’ (Oxford DNB) Maria Gisborne described him as ‘evidently a very amiable man, and remarkably unprejudiced for a man of the world’ (Gisborne Jnl 40). For further information about Smith, see the headnote to Adonais. 247. expectation. —] Forman 1876–7; expectation, — Nbk 15; reputation. — MT; expectation. 1824; expectation; — GT. sense,] MT, 1824; sense Nbk 15, GT. 248. knowledge,] Nbk 15, 1824; knowledge; MT, GT. 249. delight,] 1824; delight Nbk 15, MT, GT. 250. Horace Smith — and] H. S. — And 1824, 1839; Horace Smith. — And 1840. these,] 1824; these Nbk 15, MT, GT. 253. London.] 1824; London — Nbk 15, GT; London; — MT. 254. night.] MT, 1824; night Nbk 15; night! GT. 255–6. Cp. ‘spongy air’ in Comus l. 154. 257–71. Of this passage Leigh Hunt commented in Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries (1828) 213: ‘The way in which Mr. Shelley’s eye darted “from heaven to earth,” and the sort of call at which his imagination was ever ready to descend, is well exemplified . . . The unhappy mass of prostitution which exists in England, contrasted with something which seems to despise it, and which, in more opinions than his, is a main cause of it, was always one of the subjects that at a moment’s notice would overshadow the liveliest of his moods.’ 257. unpavilioned] In Nbk 15 written above the pavilioned canc. The context of this word in PU IV 184 suggests that it is here used to mean ‘cloudless’. Cp. OL 65 and note. heaven] MT, 1824; Heaven Nbk 15, GT. fair] Nbk 15, MT; fair, 1824, GT. 258. moon,] MT, 1824; moon Nbk 15, GT. 261. the inverse deep] The sky (an inverted image of the sea). 263. fast: —] MT; fast —. Nbk 15; fast. 1824; fast; GT.

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All this is beautiful in every land. — 265 But what see you beside? — a shabby stand Of hackney-coaches — a brick house or wall Fencing some lordly court, white with the scrawl Of our unhappy politics; or worse — A wretched woman reeling by, whose curse 270 Mixed with the watchman’s, partner of her trade, You must accept in place of serenade — I see a chaos of green leaves and fruit

266–8. wall . . . unhappy politics] A reference to graffiti mentioned in William Cobbett’s letter to Henry Hunt, first published in the aftermath of the Spa Fields riots in Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register xxxi (14 December 1816) 749, then reprinted in Hunt’s Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Written by Himself, in his Majesty’s Jail at Ilchester, 3 vols (1820) iii 381: ‘We have all seen, for years past, written on the walls, in and near London, these words, “SPENCE’s PLAN;” and I never knew what it meant, until, a little while ago I received a pamphlet from Mr. evans, Newcastle Street, Strand, detailing the Plan very fully.’ Cobbett summarizes the ‘plan’ of Thomas Spence (1750–1814), radical writer and bookseller, thus: ‘About sixteen years ago, a Mr. SPENCE, a schoolmaster in Yorkshire, conceived what he called a PLAN for making the nation happy by taking all the lands into the hands of a just government, and appropriating all the produce or profit to the support of the people, so that there would be no one in want, and all would live in a sort of Christian Brotherhood.’ Cobbett records his presence at the trial of Spence for the publication of his plan ‘accompanied with some political remarks’ in 1800 (Political Register, 634). Amongst Spence’s political interventions of the 1790s had been ‘chalking walls with graffiti’ (Malcolm Chase, ‘Spence’ in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, ed. Iain McCalman (1999) 716). After his death in 1814, the Spencean Philanthropists, amongst them Thomas Evans (mentioned by Cobbett in the prior passage), continued his cause with involvement both in the Spa Fields riots, the subject of Cobbett’s article, and the Cato Street Conspiracy of February 1820. As Chase notes, both Southey in an article on Parliamentary Reform in Quarterly Review xvi (October 1816) which ‘examined the grounds upon which some weak men, some mistaken or insane ones, and other very wicked ones are endeavouring to excite rebellion’ (271), and Malthus, in his fifth edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1817), had singled out Evans’s Spencean proposals for attack. 266–7. Wall/Fencing some lordly court] See [Robert Southey], Letters from England: By Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, trans. from the Spanish, 3 vols (1807) i 123, 125: ‘The streets are perfectly parallel and uniformly extended brick walls, about forty feet high . . . After walking a considerable time in these streets, I enquired for the palaces of the nobility, and was told that their houses were such as I had seen, with a few exceptions, which were shut up from public view by high blank walls’. 266. hackney-coaches] A hackney-coach was ‘a four-wheeled coach, drawn by two horses, and seated for six persons, kept for hire’ (OED). house] MT, 1824; house, Nbk 15, GT. 267. lordly] Nbk 15; lonely MT, 1824, GT (apparently a consequence of John Gisborne’s misreading of S.’s ‘Fair copy’). court,] MT, 1824; court — GT; courts Nbk 15. 268. politics;] Nbk 15; politics, (BSM reading of Nbk 15); politics; — MT, 1824; politics, — GT. Worse —] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; worse; — GT. 269. A wretched woman reeling by] The image is of a prostitute who is drunk. 270. the watchman’s, partner of her trade] I.e. the watchman (policeman) works as a pimp for the prostitute. 271. On the exclusion here of the two lines that follow in eds, see headnote. serenade —] Nbk 15, 1824; serenade; — MT, GT. 272–5. I.e. the garden of Casa Ricci.

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Built round dark caverns, even to the root Of the living stems that feed them — in whose bowers 275 There sleep in their dark dew the folded flowers; Beyond, the surface of the unsickled corn Trembles not in the slumbering air, and borne In circles quaint, and ever-changing dance, Like wingèd stars the fire-flies flash and glance 280 Pale in the open moonshine, but each one Under the dark trees seems a little sun, A meteor tamed, a fixed star gone astray From the silver regions of the Milky Way; — Afar the contadino’s song is heard, 285 Rude, but made sweet by distance — and a bird Which cannot be the nightingale, and yet I know none else that sings so sweet as it At this late hour — and then all is still — Now Italy or London, which you will!

274. that] who 1824 (the authority for the correction of who to which in G1824 is puzzling given that the three MS witnesses, Nbk 15, MT and GT, read that). 276. unsickled] The sole instance of this word cited in OED. 277–83. and borne . . . the Milky Way] On the illumination of fire-flies at this time of year, see S.’s letter to John and Maria Gisborne from Bagni di Lucca on 10 July 1818: ‘Our fire flies are fading away fast, but there is the planet Jupiter who rises majestically over the rift in the forest-covered mountains to the south, & the pale summer lightning which is spread out every night at intervals over the sky. No doubt Providence has contrived these things, that when the fire flies go out the low flying owl may see her way home. — ’ (L ii 20). Hunt comments that S. used to watch fire-flies ‘for hours’, and notes that ‘In England, and I believe [Italy], the supposition is, that [the fire-fly] is a signal of love.’ (‘Letters from Abroad’, Letter IV, The Liberal, 2 vols (1822–23) ii 257, 256) 279. stars] Nbk 15, 1824; stars, MT, GT. 280. moonshine,] Nbk 15 (shine is written above light canc.), MT; moonshine; 1824; moonshine; — GT. 281. sun,] MT, 1824; sun Nbk 15, GT. 282. tamed,] Nbk 15; tamed; MT, 1824; tamed; — GT. 284. Cp. S.’s letter to Hogg of the previous summer (25 July 1819): ‘The vine-dressers are singing all day mi rivedrai, ti revedrò, but by no means in an operatic style.’ (L ii 105) The song referred to here is an air from Rossini’s opera Tancredi (1813). A contadino is an Italian peasant (literally ‘countryman’). heard,] MT, 1824; heard Nbk 15, GT. 285–8. and a bird . . . At this late hour] ‘Ouida’ (Marie Louise de la Ramée), ‘Shelley’ in Views and Opinions (1895) 265: ‘[S.] said, “which cannot be a nightingale,” because he wrote this on the 1st of July, and nightingales rarely sing after June is past. But I have heard nightingales sing in Italy until the middle of July if the weather were cool and if their haunts, leafy and shady, were well protected from the sun; so that this bird which he heard was most likely Philomel. Blackbirds and woodlarks sing late into the dark of evening, but never in the actual night.’ Other possibilities are a reed- or sedge-warbler: ‘both birds may sing at night, and have been mistaken for a nightingale’ (GM). 285. distance —] MT; distance Nbk 15; distance; — 1824, GT. 286. the nightingale,] Nbk 15; the Nightingale, MT; a nightingale, 1824; the nightingale; — GT.

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290 Next winter you must pass with me; I’ll have My house by that time turned into a grave Of dead despondence and low-thoughted care, And all the dreams which our tormentors are. Oh! that Hunt, Hogg, Peacock and Smith were there, 295 With everything belonging to them fair! — We will have books, Spanish, Italian, Greek; And ask one week to make another week As like his father as I’m unlike mine, Which is not his fault, as you may divine. 300 Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine, Yet let’s be merry: we’ll have tea and toast, Custards for supper, and an endless host Of syllabubs and jellies and mince pies, And other such lady-like luxuries — 305 Feasting on which we will philosophize! And we’ll have fires out of the Grand Duke’s wood To thaw the six weeks’ winter in our blood. And then we’ll talk — what shall we talk about?

292. despondence] Nbk 15, 1824; despondence, MT, GT. low-thoughted care] The phrase is used in Milton, Comus l. 6 and Pope, Eloisa to Abelard l. 298. 293. dreams] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; dreams, GT. 294. O! that Hunt Hogg Peacock & Smith were there Nbk 15; Oh that H —— and —— were there, 1824; O that H —— and —— were there, 1839; O that Hunt and —— were there, 1840. 296. We] But we Nbk 15. books, Spanish, Italian, Greek;] MT; books; Spanish Italian Greek Nbk 15; books; Spanish, Italian, Greek, 1824; books, — Spanish, — Italian — Greek; GT. 297–9. * * * * * * */ * * * * * * */* * * * * * * 1824, 1839. These lines are supplied in G1824. 297. another week] Nbk 15, 1840; another week, MT, GT. 298. father] Nbk 15, G1824; father, MT, GT. A wry allusion to S.’s differences with his father. But, in addition, there is perhaps the curious implication that Sir Timothy was not his biological father. 299. Not in Nbk 15 and omitted in 1840. 300. flesh] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; flesh, GT. 301. we’ll] MT, 1824; well Nbk 15; We’ll GT. tea] Tea was associated with sociability in Marlow. See Peacock’s letter to Hogg of 26 September 1817: ‘Perhaps a due mixture of tea Greek & pedestrianism constitute the summum bonum.’ (Peacock L i 116) toast,] 1964; toast Nbk 15; toast; MT, 1824, GT. 303. syllabubs] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; syllabubs, GT. Dishes made of cream and wine. 304. luxuries —] MT; luxuries Nbk 15; luxuries, — 1824; luxuries. GT. 306. Grand Duke’s] A reference to Ferdinando III, Grand Duke of Tuscany 1790–99 and 1814–1824, generally regarded as enlightened though of less ability than his father, Pietro Leopoldo, Grand Duke from 1765–90 who became Emperor Leopold II in 1790, ‘the most enlightened of all the enlightened despots’ in Europe (Harry Hearder, Italy in the Age of the Risorgimento 1790–1870 (1983) 70). S. noted Leopold’s legacy to Peacock in a letter of 10 March  1820: ‘We live here under a nominal tyranny, administered according to the philosophic laws of Leopold, & the mild opinions which are the fashion here. Tuscany is unlike all the other Italian states, in this respect.’ (L ii 177) wood] Nbk 15; wood, MT, GT, 1824. 307. weeks’] 1839; weeks Nbk 15, MT, 1824; week’s GT. 308. talk —] Nbk 15; talk; — MT, 1824, GT.

43  letter to maria gisborne

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Oh! there are themes enough for many a bout 310 Of thought-entangled descant; — as to nerves, With cones and parallelograms and curves I’ve sworn to strangle them if once they dare To bother me — when you are with me there, And they shall never more sip laudanum 315 From Helicon or Himeros*; — well, come, And in despite of God and of the devil, We’ll make our friendly philosophic revel Outlast the leafless time — till buds and flowers Warn the obscure inevitable hours 320 Sweet meeting by sad parting to renew — ‘Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.’ * Ἴμερος from which the river Himera was named, is, with some slight shade of difference, a synonym of Love. (S.’s note). 310. descant] ‘discourse, discussion’ (Concordance). nerves,] 1964; nerves Nbk 15, MT, 1824, GT. 311. curves] Nbk 15, MT; curves, 1824, GT. 312. them] MT, 1824; them — Nbk 15; them, GT. 313. there,] 1964; there Nbk 15, MT; there. 1824, GT. 314–15. And they .  .  . Himeros] ‘Then I  shan’t need to drug myself with composition or emotional distractions.’ (GM) S. alludes here to Hippocrene, the spring beneath the summit of Mount Helicon in Boetia, sacred to the Muses and to the river Himera in the Greek city of that name on Sicily’s northern coast. Rognoni cps S.’s letter from Pisa to John Gisborne in Livorno of 16 June 1821: ‘Pray, when shall we see you? or are the streams of Helicon less salutary than seabathing for the nerves?’ (L ii 300). The nymphs of Himera are referred to in Milton’s Epitaphium Damonis (Damon’s Epitaph) and Helicon mentioned in his An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester l. 56. 314. laudanum] The ‘simple alcoholic tincture of opium’ (OED). See Crook and Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody 30: ‘It was at Eton . . . according to Trelawny, that Shelley first started taking laudanum. This was a life-long habit, though Trelawny insisted that unlike Coleridge or De Quincey Shelley was not a daily addict. He was, however, a compulsive and immoderate user at certain times and probably far more dependent upon it than his biographers have hitherto stated.’ 315. well,] we’ll MT, 1824 (we’ll is corrected to well, in G1824 and was probably a result of Mary misreading ‘M. S. from the Gisbornes’), 1839; Well, GT. come,] MT; come Nbk 15, 1824, GT. 315. S.’s note. Not in Nbk 15. Cp. S.’s letter to Medwin of 16 April 1820, referring to Edward and Jane Williams: ‘I hope, if they come to Italy, I may see the lovely lady & your friend — Though I have never had the ague, I have found these sorts of beings, especially the former, of infinite service in the maladies to which I am subject; and I have no doubt, if it could be supposed that anyone would neglect to employ such a medicine, that the best physicians would prescribe them, although they have been entered in no pharmocopoeia’ (L ii 184–85). 316. despite] spite 1839, 1840. God] MT; * * * 1824, 1839, 1840; God, GT. and] MT, 1824; or GT. The Nbk 15 reading is covered by an ink blot. devil,] MT, 1824; devil Nbk 15; Devil, GT. 317. We’ll] Will 1824 (Will is corrected to we’ll in G1824), 1839, 1840; well Nbk 15. our friendly philosophic revel] ‘[I]n effect, an extended symposium.’ (Webb (1995)) 318–19. S.’s first, canc., version of these lines in Nbk 15 reads: Till the sweet flowers of Spring in herb or tree/Last to the condolence that is here fled from me. 318. time —] Nbk 15; time; MT; time; — 1824, GT. 319. Warn] Warm MT. obscure] Nbk 15, MT; obscure, 1824, GT. 320. Locock 1911 cps PU IV 199. 321. The final line of Milton’s Lycidas. woods] Nbk 15, MT, 1824; woods, GT.

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shelley: selected poems

44  To a Sky-Lark Published as one of the Miscellaneous Poems in 1820. Mary described what she regarded as the encounter that generated S.’s tribute to the sky-lark in her Note on Poems Written in 1820 (1839 iv 50): In the spring we spent a week or two near Leghorn, borrowing the house of some friends, who were absent on a journey to England. — It was on a beautiful summer evening, while wandering among the lanes, whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the sky-lark, which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems. Rather than the ‘week or two’ that Mary recalled, the Shelleys’ stay in Casa Ricci, John and Maria Gisborne’s house in Leghorn (Livorno), extended from 15 June to 4 August 1820. It was from Leghorn that S. posted to Peacock on 12 July (L ii 213–14) what must have been the final two titles for the Miscellaneous Poems section of 1820: one of these was certainly OL (see headnote to no. 322, Longman iii 378–85), the other almost certainly To a Sky-Lark. Newman Ivey White argued in SP xxxvi (1939) that ‘ “Ode to a Skylark” [sic] was inspired on June 22, 1820, and written either then or shortly afterwards’ (528). The available evidence supports his conclusion. The principal co-ordinates for determining a date are the letter to Peacock of 12 July and the notation ‘Walk to the sea’ in Mary Jnl for 22 June. (She does not say that S. accompanied her on this walk or on either of the two others that she records (14 and 30 July) during the stay in Casa Ricci: Mary Jnl i 323–7.) White notes significant details — myrtle shrubs, skylarks, proximity to the sea, a recollection of S. — in an entry in John Gisborne’s journal for 20 October 1827 which describes a walk the Gisbornes took during a return visit to Leghorn. These strongly suggest that in her journal entry and her note in 1839 Mary is remembering a walk over some at least of the same ground. The evening setting that S. evokes in ll. 11–20 and the glow-worm of ll. 46–50 find echoes in her note as well. Claire Clairmont also records evening walks (accompanied by S.) on 25 June, 7, 11, and 13 July (Claire Jnl 151–5). As S. was occupied with his translation of the Homeric Hymn to Mercury in the first half of July (headnote to no. 336, Longman iii 508–10), it appears most likely that he composed To a Sky-Lark in the period from late June through the first few days of the next month. The location of the surviving portions of the draft in Nbk 14, between those for OL (May — June) and for WA (August), offers further corroboration of White’s dating, as Carlene Adamson points out (BSM v p. xxxix). Only one complete page of Nbk 14 carries draft for To a Sky-Lark, p. 97 rev. The fragment of draft is considered in relation to the poem’s development to its final state in Rogers (1967) 206–10. The ten pages following have been torn from the nbk, but words and phrases on some of the remaining stubs indicate that more of the poem, perhaps all of it, was drafted on the missing pages. S. transcribed a fair copy into Harvard Nbk 1, from which the press copy that was posted to Peacock on 12 July was taken, probably by Mary, with only a few minor alterations of substance. In common with several of the shorter poems published with PU in 1820, To a SkyLark features a natural phenomenon which, through an extended analogy with the poet

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-44

44  to a sky-lark

483

and the human situation generally, serves as an occasion to explore the nature of poetic creation and of creativity itself. The immediate precedents for S.’s poem are to be found in Wordsworth’s apostrophes To a Sky-Lark, To the Cuckoo, O Nightingale! and The Green Linnet (1807), and in Coleridge’s The Nightingale (1798): particular resemblances are recorded in the notes. But the literary pedigree of such appropriations of a natural creature to poetic uses reaches back to the ancient Greek lyric. In SP lxv (July 1968) 677–93, Parks C. Hunter, Jnr. noted important parallels between S.’s poem and the anacreontic To the Cicada, one of the most familiar of the ancient songs in the manner of Anacreon (b. c. 570 bce) and frequently translated as one of his ‘odes’. Mary alludes to both insect and song in a letter of August 1819: the cicala a kind of little beetle that makes a noise with its tail .  .  . they live on trees and three or four together are enough to deafen you — it is to the cicala that Anacreon has addressed an ode which they call to a grasshopper in the English translations’. (Mary L i 103) Claire Clairmont’s journal entry for 12 July  1820 (Claire Jnl 155) includes a translation of the ‘ode’ (see note to WA 108). This apostrophises the cicada, hidden from sight high on a tree where it sings and drinks the dew, celebrating its happiness, its power of song, the favour of Apollo and the Muses that it enjoys — concluding that such endowments assimilate its existence to that of a divine being. Literary tradition had recognised, most recently in the prefatory remarks to Thomas Moore’s Odes of Anacreon Translated into English Verse (1800), the simplicity, charm, and elegance of style of Anacreon’s lyrics and the best of those written in his manner — which typically celebrated love, wine, and convivial pleasure. Lines 63–5 of To a Sky-Lark have been taken as S.’s acknowledgement of the anacreontic lyric, of which his own poem is a somewhat chastened and elevated example. In a larger sense it also embodies, if in a minor key, his determined exploration of ancient Greek religion, art, and thought — especially since his arrival in Italy the previous year. The pure joyful inventiveness of the sky-lark, exuberantly at ease in its natural element, manifests qualities that he had come to associate preeminently with the culture of the Greeks; while those gifts of artfulness, freedom, and daring, which set an unattainable ideal for the human poet, were to be given ampler development in his translation of the Homeric Hymn to Mercury in early July 1820 and in WA in August. The appropriateness of the stanza — in which the fifth line seems to have burst the confines of the previous four — to the combination of long and short bursts in the lark’s song has been maintained; e.g. ‘Nothing can be better chosen than the measure of the Stanza, which rapid in the first four lines, ends in a long stream of harmony, a never ending sinuosity of sweetness’ (Medwin (1913) 232); so has its suitability to the bird’s flight: ‘The four short lines match the quick wing-beats of the lark’s hectic climb, and the long final Alexandrine represents its easier descent’ (King-Hele (1971) 228). Text from 1820. Capitalisation has been adopted from S.’s fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1, which is only lightly punctuated. 1820’s punctuation seems excessive in places; it has been modified with reference to S.’s fair copy. Published in 1820, MYRS v 95–100 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

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shelley: selected poems

To a Sky-Lark

5

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

¶ 44. Title. Altered from ‘To the Sky-Lark’ in S.’s fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1. The alteration locates the address in a specific experience; it also renders the title identical to that of Wordsworth’s poem on the bird in Poems, In Two Volumes (1807). 1. Hail to thee] A salutation recalling classical hymns addressed to a divine being, as in S.’s translation of the Homeric hymn To Minerva (Longman ii, no. 160) 19: ‘Child of the Aegis-bearer, hail to thee!’ S. has Socrates greet the rhapsode Ion with ‘Hail to thee’ at the beginning of his translation of Plato’s Ion (Julian vii 233): see note to l. 103. blithe] Cp. Wordsworth, To the Cuckoo (1807) 1: ‘O blithe New-comer!’ Parks C. Hunter Jnr (SP lxv (1968) 685) notes the similarity between this line and the translation by Charles Abraham Elton (1778–1853) of the Gk anacreontic To the Cicada in Specimens of the Classical Poets (1814) 148–9: HAIL, Cicada! hail to thee Nestling in the topmost tree: Blithe as a king . . . (1–3) and between unbodied in l. 15 and the closing lines of Elton’s translation, ‘Thy aerial texture vies/With th’unbodied Deities’. 2. Cp. Wordsworth, To the Cuckoo 14–16: Even yet thou art to me No Bird; but an invisible Thing, A voice, a mystery. And see ll. 31–2. 4–5. S. appears to echo his own poem in a letter to Keats of 27 July  1820: ‘I have lately read your Endymion again  & ever with a new sense of the treasures of poetry it contains, though treasures poured forth with indistinct profusion’ (L ii 221). 4. Cp. the Sensitive-Plant in SP i 74: ‘It loves — even like Love — its deep heart is full.’ 5. unpremeditated] Milton’s Paradise Lost ix 20–4 had attached to the word the sense of authentic inspiration as spontaneously given: If answerable style I can obtain Of my celestial patroness, who deigns Her nightly visitation unimplored, And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires Easy my unpremeditated verse. The usage had become conventional: cp. the bard in James Thomson’s Castle of Indolence (1748: I lxviii) who ‘On virtue still, and nature’s pleasing themes,/Poured forth his unpremeditated strain’, and the minstrel in Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805: Introduction 18) who ‘No longer . . . pour’d to lord and lady gay,/The unpremeditated lay’. S. seems also to be recalling the morning worship of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost v 146–50: for neither various style Nor holy rapture wanted they to praise

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Higher still and higher From the earth thou springest Like a cloud of fire; The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. In the golden lightning Of the sunken Sun, O’er which clouds are brightning, Thou dost float and run;

Their maker, in fit strains pronounced or sung Unmeditated, such prompt eloquence Flowed from their lips, in prose or numerous verse. S. develops the idea of a poetic process rooted in unwilled and unconscious inspiration in DP (Reiman (2002) para. 39). Cp. also Hymn to Mercury (Longman iii, no. 336) 69–70: ‘A strain of unpremeditated wit/Joyous and wild and wanton’; and 590: ‘The power of unpremeditated song’. Webb 112 comments: ‘The “Skylark” gives perhaps the fullest treatment to the idea of spontaneous creation implied in the word’. 6–10. In Harvard Nbk 1 this was transcribed as the fifth stanza; S. signalled on the MS that it should be moved here. 6–8. Following George L. Craik (see note to l. 15), Rossetti 1870 repunctuated the lines: ‘From the earth thou springest:/Like a cloud of fire’, in order that the analogy between bird and cloud in l. 3 should qualify wingest rather than springest. Craik had altered the punctuation on the argument that it was absurd to represent the bird-as-cloud ‘not as soaring in the deep blue of the sky, but as springing from the earth — which is what nobody ever saw a cloud do’. Thomas S. Baynes (Edinburgh Review cclxxii (April  1871) 458) countered that the appropriateness of the comparison depended on what Craik had failed to notice — that already in the first stanza the sky-lark had been located high in its rising flight: ‘ “Like a cloud of fire” applies not to the appearance of the bird at all . . . but to the continuous motion upward, for the obvious reason that “fire ascending seeks the sun”.’ Forman 1876–7 emphatically concurred with Baynes; in his 1878 edition Rossetti accepted 1820’s semicolon at the end of l. 8. Considered absolutely, either position for the stop would give acceptable sense (see the following note) but there is no textual authority for emending 1820’s punctuation here. S.’s fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1 shows no end-line punctuation in the stanza. 8. cloud of fire] apparently one of the clouds illuminated by the setting sun in ll. 11–13 or as in PU III ii 7–9, but GM also notes an additional resemblance to ‘the cloud of fire that springs from a volcano and rains down sparks’. Cp. PU II i 10–12: like joy which riseth up As from the earth, clothing with golden clouds The desert of our life . . . Also PU I 157–8, and see previous note. 10. S. is recalling the words and rhythm of a Spenserian Alexandrine such as ‘Who flying still did ward, and warding fly away’ (VI vi 28) or ‘But flitting still doe flie, and still their places vary’ (VII vii 21).

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shelley: selected poems

15

Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

20

The pale purple even Melts around thy flight; Like a star of Heaven In the broad daylight Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight, Keen as are the arrows Of that silver sphere,

15. unbodied joy] See note to l. 1. The phrase became the subject of a critical dispute following the emendation embodied joy proposed by George L. Craik in his commentary on the poem in A Compendious History of English Literature, 2 vols (1861) ii 498–500. Craik’s emendation was admitted as ‘felicitous’ by Richard Garnett (Relics 97) and adopted by Rossetti 1870, but vigorously challenged (‘This is just the smart but superficial kind of criticism that readily convinces prosaic minds, and is at once accepted by careless and unimaginative readers’) by Thomas S. Baynes in the Edinburgh Review cclxxii 456 (see note to ll. 6–8), by Swinburne in Essays and Studies (1875; 1911 rpt) 229, and by Forman 1876–7. In the face of this opposition, Rossetti reverted to unbodied in his edition of 1878. He did not then know that the previous year Harvard Nbk 1, containing S.’s fair copy of the poem, had been deposited at Harvard by Captain Edward Silsbee, who had obtained it in Florence from Claire Clairmont. An inspection of the holograph revealing unbodied as the true reading was reported in The Athenaeum 2635 (27 April 1878) 536, in the course of a tongue-in-cheek account of the textual controversy prior to the MS coming to light. Wilcox, SP xlvi 567 (see headnote) cps. Byron, Manfred I ii 52–5: Oh, that I were The viewless spirit of a lovely sound, A living voice, a breathing harmony, A bodiless enjoyment. race] course of life. 16–25. The chain of figurative language in these lines has been much commented upon (see references in headnote) and requires close attention. The elementary sense is: the evening dissolves into darkness around the soaring lark (16–17), concealing it from view; similarly a star in the night sky becomes invisible in full daylight (18–20); the bird’s piercing song can still be heard, however — just as (in a sound — light analogy) the arrow-like rays of the planet Venus as morning star can no longer be seen but are felt during the daylight that masks it from sight (20–5). Cp. TL 413–17: As veil by veil the silent splendour drops From Lucifer [the morning star], amid the chrysolite Of sunrise ere it strike the mountaintops — And as the presence of that fairest planet Although unseen is felt . . . 20. yet] still. 22. silver sphere] Venus as the morning star: S. wrote to Peacock on 25 July 1818 from Bagni di Lucca of ‘a certain silver and aerial radiance, and soft yet piercing splendour, which belongs, I suppose, to the latter planet [Venus] by virtue of its at once divine and female nature’ (L ii 25). Cp. L&C: ‘that planet

44  to a sky-lark

25

Whose intense lamp narrows In the white dawn clear, Until we hardly see — we feel that it is there.

30

All the earth and air With thy voice is loud, As when Night is bare From one lonely cloud The moon rains out her beams — and Heaven is overflowed.

35

What thou art we know not; What is most like thee? From rainbow clouds there flow not Drops so bright to see As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

487

Like a Poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden

fair . . ./Which cleaves with arrowy beams the dark-red air’ (308–10) and n. In the association of the lark’s song with Venus, commentators have found an allusion to the music supposed in older cosmology to result from the revolving of the heavenly spheres: cp. TL 478–9: ‘The world can hear not the sweet notes that move/The sphere [of Venus] whose light is melody to lovers.’ O’Malley, Shelley and Synesthesia (1964) 75, cps. Milton’s prolusion De sphaerarum concentu: ‘Why, credible it is that the lark itself should fly right up to the clouds at early dawn, and that the nightingale should spend the whole lonely night in song, in order that they may adjust their strains to the harmonic mode of the sky, to which they listen attentively’: The Works of John Milton (Columbia edn, 1931–8) xii 152–5. 31–2. See note to l. 2. 33–4. The lark’s song is compared to the illuminated drops of rain which continue to fall after the sun has appeared and created a rainbow among the clouds. The draft for this beautiful stanza, much reworked, survives in Nbk 11: apparently among the earliest parts of the poem set down by S., its development to final form is considered in Rogers (1967) 209–10. See also King-Hele (1971) 231. 36–40. The lines condense two leading ideas of S.’s poetics: spontaneous inspiration and the power of poetry to enlarge the sympathetic imagination as an instrument for good — for the first, see note to l. 5; the latter is elaborated in the Preface to PU 119–30 and in DP para. 13 (Reiman 2002). Cp. DP: ‘A Poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness, and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why’ (Reiman 2002 para. 12). 38. unbidden] not composed to order or direction. A contrast is implicit with poetry influenced by commercial motive or political patronage, perhaps especially with the productions of the Poet Laureate.

488

shelley: selected poems

40

Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

45

Like a high-born maiden In a palace-tower, Soothing her love-laden Soul in secret hour, With music sweet as love — which overflows her bower:

50

Like a glow-worm golden In a dell of dew, Scattering unbeholden Its aerial hue Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view:

55

Like a rose embowered In its own green leaves, By warm winds deflowered — Till the scent it gives Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-wingèd thieves:

60

Sound of vernal showers On the twinkling grass, Rain-awakened flowers, All that ever was Joyous and clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass: Teach us, Sprite or Bird, What sweet thoughts are thine; I have never heard

41–5. Just such a scene occurs in Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel (III xxiv). The nobly born Margaret of Branksome Hall, hopelessly in love with Lord Cranstoun of the enemy clan that has slain her father, recalls at nightfall a meeting with her lover: On the high turret sitting lone, She waked at times the lute’s soft tone; Touch’d a wild note, and all between Thought of the bower of hawthorns green. Her golden hair stream’d free from band, Her fair cheek rested on her hand, Her blue eyes sought the west afar, For lovers love the western star. (9–16) 45. bower] dwelling, abode. See also 4th line of the quotation in the previous note. 55. those] Harvard Nbk 1; these 1824, 1839. 63. heard] heard, 1820: the comma, which was removed in 1839, is apparently a mistranscription or misprint, as Forman 1876–7 pointed out.

44  to a sky-lark

65

Praise of love or wine That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine:

70

Chorus Hymeneal Or triumphal chaunt Matched with thine, would be all But an empty vaunt, A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

75

What objects are the fountains Of thy happy strain? What fields or waves or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain? What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

80

With thy clear keen joyance Languor cannot be: Shadow of annoyance Never came near thee: Thou lovest; but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety.

85

Waking or asleep, Thou of death must deem Things more true and deep Than we mortals dream, Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

489

We look before and after And pine for what is not:

64–5. Cp. Wordsworth, O Nightingale! thou surely art (1807) 5–6: ‘Thou sing’st as if the God of wine/ Had helped thee to a Valentine’. love or wine] alluding to two of the principal topics of Anacreontic verse: see headnote. 66. Chorus Hymeneal] A wedding-hymn: Hymen is the Gk god of marriage. 67. triumphal chaunt] Verse celebrating the victory of the conqueror or mocking his captives in a triumphal procession; a song appropriate to success or victory in general. See To — (Corpses are cold in the tomb) 19 and n. 72. happy strain] In the fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1 S. originally wrote ‘?[drainless] strains’. 76–7. The joyance/languor contrast recalls Coleridge’s The Nightingale (1798) in which the traditional perception of the nightingale’s song as melancholy is rejected in favour of ‘Nature’s sweet voices, always full of love/And joyance!’ (42–3). 78. annoyance] vexation, trouble. 80. knew] ‘knew’st’, though grammatically correct, would spoil the sound of the line, as commentators have agreed. satiety] ‘Weariness or dislike of (an object of desire) caused by gratification or attainment’ (OED). 86–7. The commonplace reflection has been variously formulated; e.g. in Gray’s Ode on the Pleasure Arising from Vicissitude 23–4: ‘’Tis Man alone that Joy descries/With forward and reverted eyes.’ But S. appears to be recalling the phrasing of Hamlet IV iv 36–9:

490

shelley: selected poems

90

Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

95

Yet if we could scorn Hate and pride and fear; If we were things born Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures Of delightful sound, Better than all treasures That in books are found, 100 Thy skill to poet were, thou Scorner of the ground! Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know, Such harmonious madness Sure he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and godlike reason To fust in us unused. S. slightly misquotes Hamlet’s speech in On Life: ‘man is a being of high aspirations “looking both before and after,” . . . disclaim[ing] alliance with transience and decay, incapable of imagining to himself annihilation, existing but in the future and the past, being, not what he is, but what he has been, and shall be’ (Reiman (2002) 506). 88–90. S. affirms an aesthetic and moral relationship between pleasure and pain in DP: ‘It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the definition involving a number of apparent paradoxes . . . the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of the superior portions of our being. Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good . . . This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody’ (Reiman (2002) para. 34). 96. measures] S. regularly uses the word to mean musical cadence or rhythm, as in Thou art fair, and few are fairer [To Sophia] 16, ‘thy harp’s wild measure’; but here (in view of l. 100) the word no doubt signifies poetic metres, as in J&M 541–2: ‘wild language . . ./Such as in measure were called poetry’. 98–9. Modifying the central opposition of Wordsworth’s The Tables Turned in Lyrical Ballads (1798): Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife, Come, hear the woodland linnet, How sweet his music; on my life There’s more of wisdom in it. (9–12) 100. Cp. Wordsworth, To a Sky-lark (1807): ‘Joyous as Morning,/Thou art laughing and scorning’ (16–17). 103. madness] The furor poeticus or inspired frenzy of the poet was a commonplace of classical literary criticism which has been variously formulated — and not always considered a virtue — and has had a persistent and protean afterlife. The influence of Plato’s Phaedrus, which S. read in August 1818 (Mary

45 to —— [the lord chancellor]

491

From my lips would flow, 105 The world should listen then — as I am listening now.

45  To ——[the Lord Chancellor] This poem is dated to summer 1820 following the conclusion of Paul Dawson and Timothy Webb in BSM xiv, which provides a facsimile and transcription of the draft; see especially pp. xviii–xix. Dawson and Webb show that Nbk 15 is of Italian manufacture and argue that the draft, entitled ‘To the C. —— ’, was probably written after 14 July 1820 because it closely follows the draft of Hymn to Mercury (Longman iii, no. 336) which was completed on that date. That S.’s much-corrected transcription of the poem in Harvard Nbk 1 immediately follows his fair copy of Hymn to Mercury in the same nbk tends to confirm a date of composition after mid-July 1820. Similarities to I had two babes — a sister and a brother (Longman iii, no. 334; see Jnl i 222), has been proposed: of particular relevance is Socrates’ reported account of the third type of madness, that which derives from the Muses: But he who without the divine madness comes to the doors of the Muses, confident that he will be a good poet by art, meets with no success, and the poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of the inspired madman. (Phaedrus 245A) S.’s own translation of Plato’s Ion was probably made early in 1821 (Notopoulos 462–4; L ii 261), but Mary records that he was reading Plato in February 1820 (Mary Jnl i 308–9). Some of Socrates’ words in the dialogue are of obvious relevance: For the authors of those great poems which we admire, do not attain to excellence through the rules of any art, but they utter their beautiful melodies of verse in a state of inspiration, and, as it were, possessed by a spirit not their own. Thus the composers of lyrical poetry create those admired songs of theirs in a state of divine insanity . . . and, during this supernatural possession, are excited to the rhythm and harmony which they communicate to men. (Julian vii 238) S.’s poem seems to owe a specific verbal debt to Wordsworth’s To a Sky-lark 12–13: ‘there is madness about thee, and joy divine/In that song of thine’. Having long maintained the place of the irrational and the imponderable in the creation of poetry, S. here discovers in the pure exuberant gaiety of the sky-lark’s song an essential link between the elusive notion of creative madness and its rhyming partner gladness — as in the lines of the Earth’s song in PU IV which he wrote the previous autumn: The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness! The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness, The vaporous exultation, not to be confined! (319–21) 104. would] should Harvard Nbk 1, evidently altered in 1820 to avoid repetition with should in the following line. 105. In his letter to Peacock of 12 July 1820, which probably enclosed To a Sky-Lark, S. lamented, ‘I wonder why I write verses, for nobody reads them’ (L ii 213).

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-45

492

shelley: selected poems

headnote), composed late June to mid-August 1820, also support a date for the draft within that range. Further revisions were made between then and 10 November 1820 when S. appears to have sent to England a fair copy of To —— [the Lord Chancellor] in Mary’s hand, corrected by himself, but whether for publication is uncertain. The poem is addressed to the Lord Chancellor Eldon who on 27 March 1817 in the Court of Chancery had decided in favour of a petition of John Westbrook, father of S.’s deceased wife Harriet, to deprive S. of the custody of his and Harriet’s two children. Eldon decreed ‘that the Defendant Percy Bysshe Shelley and his Agents be restrained from taking possession of the persons of the Plaintiffs Eliza Ianthe Shelley and Charles Bysshe Shelley the Infants or intermeddling with the said Infants until the further order of this Court’; and that Chancery should authorise ‘a proper plan for the maintenance and education of the said . . . Infants and also . . . enquire with whom and under whose care the said Infants should remain during their minority’ (Medwin (1913) 474–7). The decree followed the judgement that S.’s principles would lead him ‘to recommend, to whose opinions and habits he may take upon himself to form, that conduct . . . as moral and virtuous which the law calls upon me to consider as immoral and vicious’ (quoted in Dowden Life ii 90). ‘He was pre-eminently an affectionate father’, as Peacock records (Peacock Works viii 70), and he never gave up the hope of recovering his children (see letters of 23–4 January 1819 and 17 February 1821: L ii 75, 264–5). ‘No words can express the anguish he felt’, Mary wrote of S. in her Note on Poems of 1819, ‘when his elder children were torn from him. In his first resentment against the Chancellor, on the passing of the decree, he had written a curse, in which there breathes, besides haughty indignation, all the tenderness of a father’s love, which could imagine and fondly dwell upon its loss and the consequences’ (1839 iii 207–8). Mary’s statement is difficult to reconcile with the MS evidence detailed earlier. It is always possible that S. drafted his curse soon after 27 March 1817, as Mary remembered, and that the Nbk 15 draft represents a reworking of it — though on examination it has the appearance of a first effort. Or perhaps an earlier draft was lost and in Nbk 15 S. was rewriting it from memory. Or Mary may have recalled the time of composition inaccurately. Whatever the case, the evidence of Nbk 15 makes very probable a date between mid-July and 10 November 1820 for the draft of ‘To the C. —— ’ that occupies pp. 180–7. John Scott, Earl of Eldon (1751–1838), Lord Chancellor 1801–6 and 1807–27, was one of S.’s chief aversions. According to Peacock, S. used to recall his early ordeals at Eton ‘with feelings of abhorrence, which I have never heard him express in equal degree in relation to any other subject, except when he spoke of Lord Chancellor Eldon’ (Peacock Works viii 52): see further MA 14–21 and n. to l. 15, and I had two babes — a sister and a brother (Longman iii 501–4, no. 334). The vehement animosity towards Eldon became implicated in February 1820 and through the following year with the affair of the non-payment of S.’s annuity for the support of his children by Harriet and was revived in summer 1820 in I had two babes — a sister and a brother: see headnote and note to ll. 11–12. Both that poem and the present one appear to have been influenced by the legal and family circumstances of spring and summer 1820: see L ii 264–5; SC ix 283–9; Mary Jnl i 360–62. The text in S.’s hand in Harvard Nbk 1 is a revision derived immediately from his own draft; consequently, all Mary’s copies, including that from which the present text is taken, must depend, directly or indirectly, on Harvard Nbk 1 — her variants from it being either inadvertencies or misreadings. The transcript from Harvard Nbk 1, which S. corrected, and which serves as copy-text here, may have been sent to Charles Ollier, possibly to be published, on 10 November 1820 (L ii 246). In the letter of that date to Ollier, S. speaks of enclosing some poems to be added to J&M, when that is published, as well as another poem which he wishes to be printed at the end of the second edition of The Cenci, saying that he has ‘a purpose in this arrangement, & have marked the Poem I mean by a cross’. There is a large cross beside To —— (Corpses are cold in the tomb) in Harvard MSS f. 1 Bv, which is visible when the sheet on which the first three stanzas are transcribed is opened

45 to —— [the lord chancellor]

493

out, and which may be the mark identifying the poem that S. meant. As the final three stanzas of To —— [the Lord Chancellor] are transcribed on Harvard MSS f. 1 Br, continuing from f. 1 Ar and f. 1 Av, the present poem must at least have been sent enclosed in the same letter as To —— (Corpses are cold in the tomb). For a suggestion that the Harvard MSS transcription of the two poems may have been sent instead to Peacock, see MYRS v 218. Only substantive variants from the copy-text are recorded in the notes. Mary added, in her note quoted earlier, that this poem and The billows on the beach are leaping around it (Longman i 578–81, no. 139) ‘were not written to exhibit the pangs of distress to the public’ but were rather ‘spontaneous outbursts’ of one compelled to express his feelings in art. The texts printed by Mary in 1839 and 1840 are from her transcript in Bodleian MS. Shelley Adds. d. 9, which in turn is closely related to that in the Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library NCC MS 63. A partial transcript by John Gisborne is in Bodleian dep. d. 475, f. 38v, and a further transcript in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library (OYD MS 740). Forman 1876–7 iii 394 says that he collated his text of the poem with one in Mary’s hand formerly owned by Leigh Hunt. But her only transcript to have authority is the one amended by S. himself. The number of transcripts that she made for presenting to friends after her return to England in 1823 testifies to the importance she attached to acquainting them with the strength of S.’s feelings for his children by Harriet as well as with S.’s and her sense of the injustice they had suffered in being judged unfit to raise the children. Text from Harvard MSS ff. 1Ar — 1Br. Dashes have been supplied in ll. 40, 48; dashes substituted for full stops in ll. 24, 32; commas supplied in ll. 29, 38. Published in 1839 iii 208–9 (lines 17–36, 49–52, 57–60); 1840 252 (complete including deleted stanza: see note to ll. 40–41); Massey 231–7 (transcript of draft); BSM xiv 188–95 (facsimile and transcription of draft); MYRS v 202–4 (facsimile of transcript by Mary corrected by S.).

To —— [the Lord Chancellor] Thy country’s curse is on thee, darkest Crest Of that foul, knotted, many-headed worm Which rends our mother’s bosom! — Priestly Pest! Masked Resurrection of a buried form! 5

Thy country’s curse is on thee — Justice sold, Truth trampled, Nature’s landmarks overthrown, And heaps of fraud-accumulated gold

¶ 46. Title. ‘Lord Chancellor’ is canc. in Harvard Nbk 1 and what appears to be ‘LC’ written above the line; in the Contents at the end of the nbk the poem is listed as ‘To Lxxd Exxxn’. This is the title adopted in Harvard MSS, then canc. and replaced with the present title, perhaps because S. intended the poem for publication and wished to avoid a charge of libel. 2. worm] Hydra Snake draft canc. 4. buried form] Identified by Mary S. in a note in 1840 as ‘The Star Chamber’, which before 1640 could impose sentences outside the courts of law; but Carl Woodring, noting S.’s ‘Priestly Pest’, sees a reference to a ‘threatened resurrection specifically of the ecclesiastical High Commission of Elizabeth’s reign’ (Politics in English Romantic Poetry (1970) 253). 6. Youth blasted, Age dishonoured, Faith draft canc. Nature’s landmarks] Apparently the same as Nature’s high bounds of l. 52. Both seem to be used figuratively for those places and persons best-qualified by Nature to guide the course of a child’s development. 7. fraud-accumulated gold] At his death in 1838 Lord Eldon left a fortune of over half a million pounds.

494

shelley: selected poems Plead, loud as thunder, at destruction’s throne.

10

15

20

And whilst that sure, slow Fate which ever stands Watching the beck of Mutability Delays to execute her high commands And, though a nation weeps, spares thine and thee — O let a father’s curse be on thy soul And let a daughter’s hope be on thy tomb; Be both, on thy grey head, a leaden cowl To weigh thee down to thine approaching doom. I curse thee! By a parent’s outraged love, — By hopes long cherished and too lately lost, — By gentle feelings thou couldst never prove, By griefs which thy stern nature never crossed; By those infantine smiles of happy light Which were a fire within a stranger’s hearth Quenched even when kindled, in untimely night Hiding the promise of a lovely birth —

9–11. Recalling Lycidas 130–1: ‘But that two-handed engine at the door,/Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.’ Between stanzas 3 and 4, draft has: Thy countrys curse is on thee . . . Freedom store Thy mitre & the bloody cross away That decent dust yet hide thy path of gore Through the delusions of this later day 9. Fate . . . ever] Angel . . . aye Harvard MSS canc. 14. a daughter’s] Eliza Ianthe S. was nearly four years old. S. had not known Charles, born after his separation from Harriet. 17. The Harvard Nbk 1 punctuation (‘I curse thee — by . . .’) and that of Harvard MSS ‘I curse thee! By . . . ’ (the exclamation mark and the upper-case B appear to have been S.’s revision of Mary’s transcription) both indicate that the series of adverbial clauses that continue to l. 52 are to be understood as qualifying I curse thee! 18. too lately] untimely Harvard Nbk 1 canc.; draft. 19. prove] experience. 21–4. First canc. then marked ‘Insert this!’ in Harvard MSS. 22. were] I.e. ‘were as’. a stranger’s hearth] Since the separation from Harriet, care of S.’s children had been deputed first to the Rev. John Kendall in Warwick, then in summer 1818 to Dr and Mrs Thomas Hume. None of these was known to S.

45 to —— [the lord chancellor] 25

30

35

40

495

By those unpractised accents of young speech Which he who is a father thought to frame To gentlest lore, such as the wisest teach — Thou strike the lyre of mind! — oh grief and shame! By all the happy see in children’s growth, That undeveloped flower of budding years — Sweetness and sadness interwoven both, Source of the sweetest hopes, the saddest fears — By all the days under a hireling’s care Of dull constraint and bitter heaviness — Oh wretched ye, if any ever were — Sadder than orphans — why not fatherless? By the false cant which on their innocent lips Must hang like poison on an opening bloom, By the dark creeds which cover with eclipse Their pathway from the cradle to the tomb —

25–8. By those pure accents, which at my command Should have been framed to love & ore divine — Now like a lute fretted by some rude hand, Uttering harsh discords — they must echo thine. (Harvard Nbk 1 canc.) After line 28, draft has: by thy smooth slaves who will be thy successors And by thy fellow [] who would be thee [A senate of impostors & oppressors] Whose words are serpents tangled cunningly 35. if any ever] Harvard MSS, draft; if ever any other transcripts. Perhaps an unnoticed slip. 36. why not fatherless?] yet not fatherless draft, Harvard Nbk 1 and other transcripts; changed by S. in Harvard MSS. The change adds another twist to the irony: ‘since they are to lose their father, why not execute him?’ 37–40. By thy dark creed of thee & of thy crew With which thou dost infect the infant mind A tender flower fed upon poison dew That scatters stench, not fragrance, on the wind (draft canc.) 40–1. Between these lines Harvard MSS has an additional stanza — incomplete in the draft but completed in Harvard Nbk 1 — which is struck through by S. and marked ‘dele’ (= delete): By thy most impious Hell, and all its terror, By all the grief, the madness, & the guilt Which [for Of] thine impostures, which must be their error That sand on which thy crumbling Power is built

496

shelley: selected poems By thy complicity with lust and hate: Thy thirst for tears — thy hunger after gold — The ready frauds which ever on thee wait — The servile arts in which thou hast grown old. —

45

50

55

60

By thy most killing sneer, and by thy smile — By all the snares and nets of thy black den; And — (for thou canst outweep the crocodile) — By thy false tears — those millstones braining men — By all the hate which checks a father’s love, By all the scorn which kills a father’s care, By those most impious hands which dared remove Nature’s high bounds — by thee — and by despair — Yes — the despair which bids a father groan And cry — ‘My children are no longer mine — ‘The blood within their veins may be mine own ‘But, Tyrant, their polluted souls are thine’; — I curse thee, though I hate thee not. — O, slave! If thou couldst quench that earth-consuming Hell Of which thou art a daemon, on thy grave This curse should be a blessing — Fare thee well!

46  To ——[Lines to a Critic] This lyric is drafted on pp. 342 rev. and 343 rev. of Nbk 15, where it is entitled ‘A Hate-Song’. Mary made a fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1 under the title To ——. The rough state of the draft as well as a few substantive differences between it and the fair copy would indicate either that she transcribed from an intermediate fair copy made by S. or that he revised his draft while guiding her transcription from Nbk 15. In the draft, for example, the winter of l. 3 is cancelled and ‘frozen’ substituted for it, and the final word of draft l. 13 is ‘move’ not prove. The fair copy was 41. complicity with lust] S. implies that if he had taken Mary Godwin as his mistress while keeping Harriet as his wife the law would not have penalised him. 42. thirst for tears] I.e. cruel judgements. 46. And by the jackalls of thy deadly den draft. 47–8. Eldon was notorious for weeping in court (see MA 16–21). millstones] A combination of Matthew xviii 6: ‘whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck’, and Troilus and Cressida I ii 143–5: ‘Pandarus. But there was such laughing! Queen Hecuba laughed, that her eyes ran o’er. Cressida. With millstones.’ 51. When Christians with their impious hands remove draft. 52. Nature’s high bounds] See note to l. 6. 56. souls are] Harvard MSS, 1840; soul is: all other transcripts and draft. 58–9. Changed to the present reading from: ‘If thou couldst quench that ever-blazing Hell/Within thee, ere thou crawlest to thy grave’ (Harvard Nbk 1).

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-46

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later torn from Harvard Nbk 1 together with the fair copy of the irregular sonnet To — — [Lines to a Reviewer] and that of Song: To the Men of England, the latter occupying each of the other sides of the consecutive leaves on which the two shorter poems were copied. The two leaves in question are now in Box 1 where they are numbered ff. 75r — 76v. Both Lines to a Reviewer and the present poem were published by Leigh Hunt in 1823, so it is likely that the fair copies were torn from Harvard Nbk 1 in 1822 or 1823 to serve as press copy for Hunt. Lines to a Critic is the title under which this lyric appeared in the third number (April 1823) of The Liberal. Verse and Prose from the South (187–8), which was subsequently bound as the first number of The Liberal vol. ii. It is accompanied by the following editorial note, evidently by Hunt: We have given the stupid malignity of the Investigator a better answer than it is worth already. The writers must lay it to the account of our infirmity, and to a lurking something of orthodoxy in us. But in these “Lines to a Critic”, the Reverend Calumniator, or Calumniators, will see what sort of an answer Mr. Shelley would have given them: for the beautiful effusion is his. Let the reader, when he has finished them, say which is the better Christian, — the “religious” reviver of bitter and repeated calumnies upon one who differs with him in opinion, or the “profane” philanthropist who can answer in such a spirit? (187) Hunt’s remarks are aimed at The Investigator; or, Quarterly Magazine, edited by the Congregational ministers William Bengo’ Collyer and Thomas Raffles and by Raffles’ brother-in-law, the judge and writer on ecclesiastical law James Baldwin Brown. Hunt’s ‘better answer’ had already been delivered in the Advertisement to the second volume of The Liberal (v–vi) where he defended the journal from the numerous charges of irreligion and blasphemy levelled against it, throwing the accusations back upon those ‘divines’ who condemn all who find their notions of divinity too restricted. Already, in a review of Don Juan, The Investigator (vi (October 1821) 353–60) had set its face against the impiety of Byron and Shelley: ‘companions and fellow-workers in iniquity, (if to debauch the mind and deprave the heart, — if to destroy the surest safeguards of virtue here, — the only hopes of happiness hereafter, be iniquitous,) and fellow-candidates for the just recompense of such a prostitution of the noblest gift of heaven, in a future state of rewards and punishments, in which they are too enlightened to believe; though, with the devils, they shall believe, and tremble too’ (353). The profanity of Byron’s The Vision of Judgment is denounced in the next issue — xi (January 1823) 76–108 — in a review of the first number of The Liberal. The same issue delivers a censorious judgement on Shelley’s character and conduct by way of obituary notice (103–4). But Hunt will have had particularly in mind the furious vilification of Q Mab — published in 1821 by the radical bookseller William Clark in a pirated edition — in The Investigator x (October 1822), in an article entitled ‘Licentious Productions in High Life’, which also attacks several of Byron’s works as well as those of the diplomat and poet Sir Charles Hanbury Williams (1708–59). Passage after passage of Q Mab is paraded as the execrable and horrid blasphemy of an ‘impious wretch’, and S.’s sudden death by drowning is offered as a stroke of retributive justice authored by the Deity: in the twinkling of an eye, the bark had disappeared, and the atheist had sunk to the bottom of a fathomless abyss, either to rot into annihilation there, or but to deposit the lifeless body for whose gratification he had lived, that his disencumbered spirit might rise to the judgement of its God. That judgement we presume not to pronounce; but this we may, and this we will undertake to say, that he stood not in his presence and before his throne, to utter the blasphemies he promulgated upon earth. (367)

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S.’s life is then rehearsed as a series of vicious episodes: abandoning his wife to prostitution and suicide, seducing the daughter of a friend, living in an incestuous relationship with another of his daughters, for which actions he was righteously deprived of the custody of his children. Rejoicing that such a race of impiety and sin has now at last been run, the reviewer advises Byron and Hunt to take warning from the dire example of S.’s life and death (368). So Lines to a Critic first appears in print as a benevolent rejoinder from beyond the grave to the partisan vituperation that greeted the appearance of The Liberal, which S. had helped to plan and with which he had been closely associated. The circumstances of the poem’s publication also range it among the contending polemical constructions put upon S.’s death, which began with the earliest obituary notices: Karsten Engelberg, The Making of the Shelley Myth (1988) 1–21. The draft title of A Hate-Song offers a clue to S.’s method and object in the poem. Rossetti 1870 published four doggerel lines, to which he gave the same title (no. 130), which were supposed to have been improvised (according to an anecdote received from Robert Browning) by S. as follows: ‘Hunt and Shelley were talking one day (probably in or about 1817) concerning Love-Songs; and Shelley said he didn’t see why Hate-Songs also should not be written, and that he could do them’ (ii 602). This playful exchange between poets who regularly extemporised verses illustrates S.’s faculty for perceiving the ironic possibilities in a radical revision of traditional literary modes. Lines to a Critic adopts the language and sentiments of a love-lyric, though on the topic of hate, which issue in the eminently Christian position of detesting the sin but not the sinner. Its simultaneously ironic and benign character was achieved only after the exclusion from the draft of some sharp political and anti-religious sentiment: see notes to ll. 5–8, 10, 12. For his part, Hunt, writing as ‘Harry Brown’ in the Examiner no. 608 (22 August 1819) 537, develops a whimsical version of the love/hate lyric: A Hate Song. Dialogue between the Poet and a Lady. Mary dated the poem December 1817 in both 1824 and 1839, and eds have accepted her date. MS evidence argues for a later one. In Nbk 15 the poem is drafted in proximity to other writings datable to 1820–21; while the position of the fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1 — in which S. or Mary generally transcribed his poems soon after they were composed — suggests that it too was probably written in the spring or summer of the former year. It follows S.’s fair copy of To a Sky-Lark, which he wrote towards the end of June 1820 and probably sent to England for inclusion in the PU volume on 12 July (L ii 213) and precedes his translation of the Homeric Hymn to Mercury (Longman iii, no. 336), which he completed on 14 July (Mary Jnl i 326). Both this poem and To —— [Lines to a Reviewer] appear to be addressed to the anonymous reviewer of L&C/RofI in the Quarterly Review for April 1819, which S. read on or shortly after 15 October 1819 (L ii 126–8). Although Southey is not named in either poem, S. then believed that he had written the review and continued to do so until Southey denied his authorship in a letter to him the following month. See headnote to To —— [Lines to a Reviewer] and, for a fuller account of S.’s relations with Southey, the headnotes to Adonais and A Satire upon Satire (Longman iii 269–76, no. 290). His longstanding sense of having been injured by Southey’s slander and the necessity of responding to it without animosity could have prompted S. to write his poem before receiving Southey’s denial, in the period just before or after the letter to Southey of 26 June, for example; but the wider span Spring to August 1820 seems best to accommodate the various strands of evidence. Text from Box 1 f. 76v. Though carefully written, this transcript is not punctuated with the care of a MS sent to press. The punctuation has therefore been slightly modified after consulting the draft, the Liberal printing, 1824 and 1839. The punctuation of the Box 1 fair copy differs as follows: l. 4: me — l. 8: me. — l. 10: mate — — l. 14: be — Published in The Liberal no. iii (1823), vol. ii 187–8; BSM xiv 248–9 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

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To —— [Lines to a Critic] Honey from silkworms who can gather, Or silk from the yellow bee? The grass may grow in winter weather As soon as hate in me. 5

10

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Hate men who cant, and men who pray, And men who rail, like thee; An equal passion to repay They are not coy — like me. Or seek some slave of power and gold To be thy dear heart’s mate; Thy love will move that bigot cold Sooner than me, thy hate. A passion like the one I prove Cannot divided be; I hate thy want of truth and love — How should I then hate thee?

47  The Witch of Atlas Date and circumstances of composition. This poem’s remarkably intense period of composition — ‘three days’ — is recorded in l. 36 of its dedicatory stanzas to Mary. Its date may be identified precisely as 14–16 August 1820 from Mary’s journal (Mary Jnl i 329), where she records ‘W. W. A.’, likely an abbreviation for ‘write’ or ‘wrote’ ‘Witch of Atlas’, on the first two of these days and ‘Do — Finished’ on the last. S. had returned to Bagni di San Giuliano from a solitary two-day walk to Monte San Pellegrino, a peak in the Apennines in the territory of Modena, on the evening of Sunday, 13 August. Two days previously, during a period of ‘warm and delightful’ weather which made ‘[t]he Country . . . delicious’, he, Mary, and Claire had made the brief journey to Lucca where they spent the night, the latter pair remaining there the next day to look at sites relating to the historical basis of the novel Mary had begun writing, Valperga (1823), while S. made his weekend excursion (Mary ¶ 46. 5–8. In the draft in Nbk 15 S. first wrote then canc. ‘Hate Sidmouth, Cobbett Castlereagh’ (342 rev.). 8. coy] Cp. To — [Lines to a Reviewer] 9–11. 10. dear heart’s mate] dear heart’s-mate Liberal. The Liberal reading alters the sense of the fair copy, perhaps to take account of l. 15 in which the addressee is denied those qualities necessary for a dear heart. In the draft S.’s first attempt at the line, ‘Proselyte of Hell’s gate’, is canc. 12. In Nbk 15 (342 rev.) two rejected lines are drafted, perhaps an attempt to begin a stanza to follow stanza three: ‘[And] sooner thy love shall be repaid/By slaves of [Heaven as far].’ 13. prove] feel, experience.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-47

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Jnl i 328–9, Claire Jnl 169–70). As GM notes, WA has the flavour of ‘a holiday-poem’. The restorative effects of the recent move to Bagni di San Giuliano on S.’s health, and the felicitous Tuscan climate and countryside in the summer months that inform the poem’s energy and spirit, are captured in Mary’s recollection of the atmosphere in which it was written: We spent the summer at the baths of San Giuliano, four miles from Pisa. These baths were of great use to Shelley in soothing his nervous instability. We made several excursions in the neighbourhood. The country around is fertile; and diversified and rendered picturesque by ranges of near hills and more distant mountains. The peasantry are a handsome intelligent race, and there was a gladsome sunny heaven spread over us, that rendered home and every scene we visited cheerful and bright. During some of the hottest days of August, Shelley made a solitary journey on foot to the summit of Monte San Pelegrino — a mountain of some height, on the top of which there is a chapel, the object, during certain days in the year, of many pilgrimages. The excursion delighted him while it lasted, though he exerted himself too much, and the effect was considerable lassitude and weakness on his return. During the expedition he conceived the idea and wrote, in the three days immediately succeeding to his return, the Witch of Atlas. (1839 iv 50–1) WA is founded in several kinds of dialogue between S. and Mary, most overtly in its Dedication to her concerning the audience of his poetry. But as significant to both of them may be the place which prompted S.’s poem. Two summers before, on 2 July 1818, soon after they had made an excursion to the celebrated Apennine sight, the ‘Prato fiorito’ (the flowery meadow), from Bagni di Lucca (L ii 20), Mary told Maria Gisborne that ‘Mr Shelley wishes to go with me to Monte Pelerino — the highest of the Appenines at the top of which there is a shrine — It is distant about 22 miles — Can it be there that the Italian palates were deceived by unwholesome food (to talk of that hideous transaction in their own cool way) — ? and would you think it advisable for us to make this pilgrimage? — we must go on horseback and sleep in one of the houses on the mountain.’ (Mary L i 74) S.’s idea for this expedition to Monte San Pellegrino (literally ‘Mount St Pilgrim’ or ‘Mount St Wayfarer’) may have been originally prompted by an enthusiasm for following the Serchio towards its source, in accordance with earlier journeys to the sources of rivers such as the Thames in 1815, since a stream flowing from near the peak joins the Serchio in the valley below. But after his stay at Este, near Petrarch’s house at Arquà (L ii 43), in September–October 1818, S. may have modelled his walk on that poet’s solitary expedition to the summit of Mont Ventoux ‘to divert his thoughts’, as Mary later put it (MSLL i 21). In addition, the resumption of work on her novel after the move to Bagni di San Giuliano on 5 August 1820 raises the question of whether a new pretext for S.’s excursion was to undertake a research visit on Mary’s behalf. According to a medieval tradition recorded in Valperga, the source of which Mary’s working notebook Bod. [Abinger] Dep. e. 274, p. 95 shows to be Lodovico Muratori, Dissertazioni sopra le Antichità Italiane, 3 vols (1765–6) iii 210, ‘The san Pellegrino of Monte San Pelegrino was a king of Scotland [who] for love of God renouncing his kingdom made pilgrimages to various holy places and died on that mountain’. Annual expeditions to the peak of the mountain took place in the summer: This was the season of pilgrimages to Monte San Pelegrino, a wild and high Apennine in the neighbourhood of Valperga. It is said that a king of Scotland, resigning his crown to his son, and exiling himself from his country, finished his days in penitence and prayer on this mountain. In Italy every unknown pilgrim was a king or prince: but

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this was a strange tradition; and it would seem as if the royal penitent, disdaining the gladsome plains of Italy, sought for the image of his native country on this naked peak among the heaped masses of the Apennines. His memory was there canonized, and many indulgences were the reward of three successive visits to his rocky tomb; every year numberless pilgrims flocked, and still continue to flock thither. Straining up the rugged paths of the mountain, careless of the burning sun, they walk on, shadowed by their broad pilgrim’s hats, repeating their pater-nosters, and thus, by the toil of the body, buy indulgence for the soul’s idleness. (MSW iii 185–6) Even embarking from Bagni di Lucca to ascend the 1529m summit on foot would have meant a strenuous expedition, but starting from Lucca, further south, would have made it virtually impossible. S.’s subsequent exhaustion, remembered by Mary in the passage cited, suggests he had over-exerted himself notwithstanding his singular method of walking recalled by Hogg: ‘it was his delight to strike boldly into the fields, to cross the country daringly on foot, as is usual with sportsmen in shooting; to perform, as it were, a pedestrian steeple-chase.’ (Hogg i 110) GM notes of S. in 1817 that as ‘[a] powerful walker, he would cover the 64 miles from Marlow to London and back in two days, spending one active day in town in between.’ Because it is difficult to believe that even S. could have walked all the way to the peak and back in less than 48 hours, given that ‘these wooded mountains and deep river valleys would be almost impenetrable’ (GM), it is almost certain that he rode part of the way, and whether he ever reached the summit is unknown. While the main body of the poem must have been conceived during his excursion, given the position of the rough draft of the dedicatory stanzas in Nbk 14, Carlene Adamson has suggested that they were possibly written before, not after, the main body of the poem had been drafted (BSM v pp. xl — xli). In support of her hypothesis, Mary’s reaction to his plan to write the poem recalled in the Dedication may have occurred in a conversation during her ‘walk with S.’ which took place the day after his return (Mary Jnl i 329), that is, before he began his draft of WA. Mary later explained the Dedication thus: The surpassing excellence of the Cenci had made me greatly desire that Shelley should increase his popularity, by adopting subjects that would more suit the popular taste, than a poem conceived in the abstract and dreamy spirit of the Witch of Atlas. It was not only that I wished him to acquire popularity as redounding to his fame; but I believed that he would obtain a greater mastery over his own powers, and greater happiness in his mind, if public applause crowned his endeavours. The few stanzas that precede the poem were addressed to me on my representing these ideas to him. (1839 iv 51) MS evidence and circumstances of publication. The surviving leaves of Nbk 14 contain rough draft of a substantial proportion of the poem, including the Dedication and 58 of the 78 stanzas, in whole, or in part, on pp. 94–70, 68–66, 30, and 9–8, all reverso. Carlene Adamson (BSM v p. xli) records the stanzas for which there is no draft as 1–4, 8–9, 12, 18–19, 22–24, 27, 29–30, 32–33, 37, 58 and 76 (there is a complete list of the extant draft keyed to line references in BSM xxiii 258). Draft of at least some of the missing stanzas is likely to have been on pages subsequently removed from the nbk. Adamson’s suggestion that the dedicatory stanzas may have been entered in Nbk 14 before the beginning of the poem is qualified by the fact that the progress of the rough draft through the nbk does not correspond to the

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order of the stanzas in S.’s intermediate fair copy of the dedication and main body of the poem in Nbk 16 ff. 15r — 16r and 17r — 32v. This copy, clearly based on Nbk 14, contains corrections in S.’s hand, some in darker ink, therefore done later, some lacunae (see notes to l. 96 and ll. 133–6), and some pencilled figures on f. 32v, including a line-count for the main body of the poem. Given its position in Nbk 16 soon after the intermediate fair copy of Ode to Naples (Longman iii 625–49, no. 343), this intermediate fair copy of WA was probably made in, or soon after, early September 1820 (see headnote to no. 343) and by early December at the latest. (Forman mistakenly refers to Nbk 16, which he never saw, as ‘a perfect MS.’ of WA in Forman 1876–7 iii 242). Both of the fair copies of the poem known to have been made by Mary are lost. It is possible that they were done in December 1820–January 1821. Mary records transcribing WA on 12 December (Mary Jnl i 342) and the further copying for S. on 19 December that was completed on 6 January 1821 (Mary Jnl i 343, i 348), a period during which he could not read nor write because of ophthalmia, may also have been of WA. A fair copy was sent to Ollier by S. on 20 January 1821, with the comment that it was ‘a fanciful poem, which, if its merit be measured by the labour which it cost, is worth nothing’ (L ii 257). A month later, on 22 February, he instructed Ollier explicitly, and for obvious reasons, not to publish it with the pamphlet containing J&M and the other melancholy poems referred to in his letter of 10 November 1820 (see headnote to no. 356, Ye hasten to the [grave]! What seek ye there, Longman iii 725–7) but invited him to ‘put my name to the “Witch of Atlas”, as usual.’ (L ii 269) Since Ollier did not act, a year later, on 25 January 1822, S. wrote to Hunt referring to WA as amongst ‘a parcel of little Poems’ which he sought Hunt’s assistance in trying to place (L ii 381). When Mary began to assemble 1824 for publication, she asked Hunt in a letter of 18 September 1823 to return her copy of WA: ‘You have I think my copies of the Essay on Devils — Translation of Cyprian — Witch of Atlas’, adding, with apparent reference to Nbk 16, ‘The Witch of Atlas I have a copy of corrected by S. — and those vacancies filled up which are in my copy.’ (Mary L i 384) From this letter, and another of 12 January 1823, informing Jane Williams that she expected WA to appear in the ‘next’ (Mary L i 307), i.e. the second, number of The Liberal (in fact published on 1 January but not seen by her until ‘a short time’ before 10 May (Mary L i 338)), it appears that she had given Hunt a transcript of the poem at Albaro in late 1822. This would have been as part of her plan to ‘publish my Shelley’s Mss. in the Liberal. First — being out of England & Ollier behaving so ill it is almost impossible to do it in any other way. — I think also that they will do good to the work & that would best please him — Then when I am rich enough I will make an edition of all he has written — & his works thus appearing at intervals will keep him alive in the minds of his admirers.’ (Mary L i 306–7) WA’s irreligious, light-hearted, and ‘southern’ feel would have made it eminently suitable for that periodical. The transcript Mary gave to Hunt, identified as MT, is mentioned in Forman 1876–7 iii 242 as ‘among the Leigh Hunt MSS. placed at my disposal by Mr. Townshend Mayer’ after Hunt’s death. Forman records its ‘variations from the received text’ in Forman 1876–7, but it should be noted that many of the variants in MT correspond to those in Nbk 16 and those which do not are explicable as mistranscriptions of the kind Mary made in her transcription of LMG. As E. B. Murray suggests (BSM iv, Pt II, 336), most of its differences from 1824 appear to result from MT being based on an early version of the intermediate fair copy in Nbk 16, i.e. before all the corrections to it had been made by S. The variants recorded in the notes to ll. 519, 609 and 628 point to MT having begun as a safe-keeping copy made in December 1820–early January 1821. Because MT was not returned to her, the basis of 1824 is likely to have been, as Murray suggests (BSM iv, Pt I, p. xxx), her first fair copy that S. had sent to Ollier in January 1821, probably amongst the MSS she acknowledges having retrieved from Ollier in a letter of 19 Novem-

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ber 1823 (Mary L i 402). The poem was published without the Dedication in 1824, with its first three stanzas in 1839 and with all six in 1840. Given the publication of PB3 in 1840 (see headnote to no. 239, Longman iii 70–81), there was now no justification for not publishing the Dedication’s last three stanzas, with their reference to Wordsworth’s Peter Bell. Based on his consultation of Nbk 16, Garnett published in Relics 94 corrections to readings in 1839 and 1840 of ll. 109, 210, 424, 596 and 599. Taylor 73 notes that 1834 appears to have been the source of three readings in 1839 not in 1824, those in ll. 210 and 599 corrected by Garnett, and another in l. 549. The only other reading in 1839 not in 1824, in l. 333, occurs in 1829. Sources. S.’s Dedication is polemical. In the Dedication to Robert Southey, prefaced to his best-selling Peter Bell, A Tale in Verse (1819), Wordsworth had commented: ‘The Poem of Peter Bell, as the Prologue will shew, was composed under a belief that the Imagination not only does not require for its exercise the intervention of supernatural agency, but that, though such agency be excluded, the faculty may be called forth as imperiously, and for kindred results of pleasure, by incidents, within the compass of poetic probability, in the humblest departments of daily life.’ (p. iv) In marking out the contrast between his ‘visionary rhyme’ (l. 8) and Wordsworth’s ‘tale in verse’, S. identified WA with Southey’s poetical oeuvre that Wordsworth had praised but distinguished from his own in his Dedication: ‘Since that Prologue was written [i.e. 1798], you have exhibited most splendid effects of judicious daring, in the opposite and usual course. Let this acknowledgement make my peace with the lovers of the supernatural; and I am persuaded it will be admitted, that to you as a Master in that province of the art, the following Tale, whether from contrast or congruity, is a not unappropriate offering.’ (pp.  iv — v) The boat introduced in stanza 31 of WA is an apt symbol of S.’s attempt to drive a wedge between the two ‘Lake’ poets, whose names, Wordsworth noted to Southey, had ‘been often coupled (to use your own words) for evil and for good’ (p.  v). However much the religious and political views of Wordsworth and Southey coalesced in 1819–20, S.’s deployment of the boat in WA is part of a deliberate relish for the supernatural of the kind that is rejected in the Prologue to Wordsworth’s Peter Bell, which Hunt glossed witheringly as ‘about an aerial living Boat which he can ride if he chuses about the upper regions, but declines so doing for the benefit of the lower.’ (Examiner, 592 (2 May 1819) 283) The boat in WA is comparable to the ‘little boat . . ./Without an oar, without a sail,/One only seat it had, one seat’ (ll. 375–7) piloted by a Damsel of ‘maiden modesty’ which plays a prominent part in Book XI of Southey’s epic Thalaba (1801) as it leads the hero to the cave of Domdaniel where, Samson-like, he will destroy the enemy that has killed his father, as well as himself. It is characteristic that in WA S. should thus remind both Wordsworth and Southey of their earlier reputation for literary experiment and their Jacobin leanings to which Francis Jeffrey’s cool reception of the Lake school of poetry in his influential review of Thalaba in Edinburgh Review i (1802) 63–83 had first drawn attention. S.’s Witch is benign, in contrast to the evil Maimuna who weaves a ‘thread so fine’ to entrap Thalaba (Thalaba viii 345), and Khawla who tries to destroy him by making a waxen image of him and burning him on a fire (see note to ll. 321–8). But these sorceresses, grounded in the righteous morality of Southey’s epic poetry, are amongst those aspects of the elder poet’s work from which S., in his letter of 26 June 1820, sought to distance himself as he looked back to their meeting at Keswick in 1811 and ‘the enthusiasm with which I then considered your writings’ (L ii 203). Immediately before and after the short period during which WA was conceived and composed, S. was also, and for the last time, in a correspondence with Southey, only just respectful and verging on the outright intemperate on both sides. Southey’s reply to S., denying he had authored the review of L&C in Quarterly Review, had been received on 10 August (Claire

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Jnl 168). In a letter copied by Claire on 20 August (Claire Jnl 171) but dated and therefore apparently drafted on 17 August, the day after he had finished a draft of WA, S. replied in a way expressive of a significant dimension of WA to which ll. 46–8 of its Dedication draw attention. This is S.’s opposition to aggressive contemporary versions of Christianity promulgated by Southey and Wordsworth, including the Methodism endorsed in Peter Bell, and by others, especially reviewers publicly hostile to his work (‘Another specimen of your Christianity is the judgment you form of the spirit of my verses, from the abuse of the Reviews,’ he told Southey) in contrast to what S. called ‘the graceful religion of the Greeks’ and ‘the express words of Christ.’ (L ii 230–1) WA’s central theme, its profession of the ‘idolatry’ of love (l. 48), makes it, as has been widely noted, continuous with PU and anticipatory of Epipsychidion. The basis of WA is an exploration of Eros, according to Phaedrus in Plato’s Symposium 180b, ‘ “the most ancient and venerable of deities, and most powerful to endow mortals with the possession of happiness and virtue, both whilst they live and after they die.” ’ (S.’s trans., Julian vii 173) Many ideas deriving from Symposium underlie WA, including the Witch’s association with Pausanias’ promotion in 185b–185c of Uranian (Heavenly), as opposed to Pandemian (Common), Love with its ‘ “innumerable benefits both to the state and to individuals” ’ (Julian vii 179). The Hermaphrodite draws on Aristophanes’ view of the original unity of the sexes (see note to ll. 329–36) and, particularly, Agathon’s confessedly poetical eulogy at 197c–197e which in general spirit and in some details (for example, the notion of love as a ‘pilot’) describes Love’s essence: “Nor can I restrain the poetic enthusiasm which takes possession of my discourse, and bids me declare that Love is the divinity who creates peace among men, and calm upon the sea, the windless silence of storms, repose and sleep in sadness. Love divests us of all alienation from each other, and fills our vacant hearts with overflowing sympathy; he gathers us together in such social meetings as we now delight to celebrate, our guardian and our guide in dances, and sacrifices, and feasts. Yes, Love who showers benignity upon the world, and before whose presence all harsh passions flee and perish; the author of all soft affections; the destroyer of all ungentle thoughts; merciful, mild; the object of the admiration of the wise, and the delight of gods; possessed by the fortunate, and desired by the unhappy, therefore unhappy because they possess him not; the father of grace, and delicacy, and gentleness, and delight, and persuasion, and desire; the cherisher of all that is good, the abolisher of all evil; our most excellent pilot, defence, saviour and guardian in labour and in fear, in desire and in reason; the ornament and governor of all things human and divine; the best, the loveliest; in whose footsteps everyone ought to follow, celebrating him excellently in song, and bearing each his part in that divinest harmony which Love sings to all things which live and are, soothing the troubled minds of Gods and men. This, O Phaedrus, is what I have to offer in praise of the Divinity; partly composed, indeed, of thoughtless and playful fancies, and partly of such serious ones, as I could well command.” (Julian vii 191–2) But perhaps most significant, in relation to stanzas 57–78 of WA, is Socrates’ report of Diotima’s identification of love as a daemon mediating between Gods and men in Symposium 202e and 203d: ‘ “He fills up that intermediate space between these two classes of beings, so as to bind together, by his own power, the whole universe of things” ’, and is ‘ “also, during his whole existence, a philosopher, a powerful enchanter, a wizard, and

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a subtle sophist.” ’ (Julian vii 197, 198) S.’s Witch combines such qualities of magic and enchantment associated with the infantine Greek male deity Eros with the grander passions of Aphrodite who, as depicted in the Homeric Hymn To Aphrodite, part of which S. translated as Hymn to Venus (Longman ii 345–7, no. 161), is not capricious and vengeful but invites pathos because of her awareness of the dangers of being subjected to love (see note to WA 233–40). WA’s poetical exposition of a philosophy of love as the basis of virtue in Symposium is modulated by an awareness of its potential to lead to tragic isolation. Sources for the idea of this negatively transformative power of love derive not only from the poetry of Ovid (particularly Met.) and Virgil, but also Greek poetry and romances, a literary vein which S. explored with relish in 1819–20, especially in the weeks immediately prior to the composition of WA when, as Mary informed Maria Gisborne in a letter of 19 July 1820, she began to learn Greek (Mary L i 155). S. told John Gisborne in a letter of 16 November 1819, ‘I envy you the first reading of Theocritus’ (L ii 156), and Theocritus’ Idylls show love to be a source of extreme pain which induces melancholy, if not self-destruction. Examples of this include Idyll i (‘Thyrsis’ Lament for Daphnis’), in which Daphnis laments that, because he has resisted love, ἐγὼν ὑπ’ ἔρωτος ἐς Ἄϊδος ἕλκομαι ἤδη (‘Love now drags me off to Hades’ (130)), and Idyll xi (‘The Cyclops’ Serenade’) 11, which was translated by Hunt in Foliage (1818), where Polyphemus loves Galatea ὀρθαῖς μανίαχς, άγεῖτο δὲ πάντα πάρεργα (‘in an outright frenzy. For him, nothing else existed’ (11), trans. Antony Verity, Theocritus, Idylls (2002)). Such poems, as well as Longus’ romance Daphnis and Chloe, in which youthful sexual love is addressed explicitly yet with tender sympathy and humour, form an essential dimension of the profoundly pastoral quality of WA where the trappings of culture — kings, palaces, soldiers, lawyers, priests — are mere superficialities to elicit laughter. In WA, the focus is on the recovery and promotion of values associated with Pan and Dionysus as an alternative to Christianity, a viewpoint S. had outlined in a passage in ‘On the Devil and Devils’ (written in late 1819 or in the first half of 1820) cited in the note to l. 105. In this regard, three works on love that S. read in Marlow (see L i 541–2) also inform WA: Lucian’s De Dea Syria (‘On the Syrian Goddess’) which mentions Dionysus’ association with Ethiopia (16), Plutarch’s Eroticus (‘The Dialogue on Love’), and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (‘The Golden Ass’) which provides a model, in the birth of Psyche (‘Many mortals travelled far by land and journeyed over the deep seas, flocking together to see the famous sight of the age’ (iv 29)), for the revisionary nativity in stanzas 5–12 of WA. Apuleius’ novel, in which the narrator Lucius is changed into an ass, may inform the comically transformative powers of witchcraft in WA as well as the picaresque quality of its final stanzas. John Livingston Lowes, ‘The Witch of Atlas and Endymion’, PMLA lv (1940) 203–6, noting that S. told Keats in a letter of 27 July  1820, ‘I have lately read your Endymion again  & ever with a new sense of the treasures of poetry it contains, though treasures poured forth with indistinct profusion’ (L ii 221), suggests echoes of that and other of Keats’s poems in WA, though somewhat indiscriminately. In his corrective reply, David Lee Clark, ‘What was Shelley’s indebtedness to Keats?’, PMLA lvi (1941) 479–94, provides a sober reminder that, whatever thematic and even verbal parallels may be posited between WA and the poems in Keats’s Lamia volume (published in June or July 1820), S. did not read it until the Gisbornes gave him a copy in mid-October 1820, well after WA was drafted and probably fair-copied too. As Marilyn Butler notes (‘Myth and mythmaking in the Shelley Circle’, ELH xlix (1982) 66), WA ‘make[s] the connection’ evident in another product of the Marlow summer, Peacock’s Rhododaphne: or, The Thessalian Spell, A  Poem (1818), ‘between a mythographical goddess, a pagan divinity representing love as the ancients believed in it, and a figure of more

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personal significance to the writer, an eternal symbol of art.’ Canto VII of Peacock’s poem, in particular, offers a recent poetical model for the exposition of an ‘idolatry’ of love: Love first in social bonds combined The scattered tribes of humankind, And bade the wild race cease to roam, And learn the endearing name of home. From Love the sister arts began, That charm, adorn, and soften man. To Love the feast, the dance, belong, The temple-rite, the choral song; All feelings that refine and bless, All kindness, sweetness, gentleness. (Peacock Works vii 77) The parallel between the witch and Una in Faerie Queene I is one of a vast number of Spenserian allusions in WA detailed in Carlos Baker, ‘Spenser and The Witch of Atlas’, PMLA lvi (1941) 472–9. The exemplary female love and sorcery, benign and otherwise, of Christabel is palpable in WA, along with numerous echoes from other of Coleridge’s poems astutely identified by G. Wilson Knight in ‘The Naked Seraph: An Essay on Shelley’ in The Starlit Dome: Studies in the Poetry of Vision (1941) 224–34. Medwin calls WA ‘a second Midsummer Night’s Dream’, observing, too, the Witch’s affinities with the Queen Mab of Romeo and Juliet (Medwin (1913) 251–2), to which her Ariel-like qualities may also be added. As with its philosophy of love, the basis of its commentary on the physical environment, history, and culture of Egypt is also Greek. The annotations (reproduced in SC vi 618–33) in S.’s copy of Herodotus’ Histories (fifth-century bc), a work that he read avidly in July 1818 (L ii 26), testify to his particular interest in the treatment of Egypt in the second book. The poem’s delight in strangeness appears to be encouraged by Herodotus’ observation that, ‘As the Egyptians have a climate peculiar to themselves, and their river is different in its nature from all other rivers, so have they made all their customs and laws of a kind contrary for the most part to those of all other men.’ (Histories ii 35) For WA’s Egyptian dimension S., in addition, drew on the first book of Diodorus Siculus’s first-century ad The Library of History, also a source of Ozymandias (see headnote), in which it is noted that ‘the first genesis of living things fittingly attaches to [Egypt.]’ (I x 4) Pliny’s Hist. Nat., which S. had sought to translate at Eton (Medwin (1913) 37), is the source of many references to places, peoples, and animals associated with Egypt and Ethiopia, and to plants, including the Nautilus which shares characteristics with the boat (see note to ll. 313–20). As first noted in Kathrine Koller, ‘A Source for Portions of The Witch of Atlas’, MLN lii (1937) 157–61, two Greek novels, Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon (2nd century ad), and Heliodorus, An Ethiopian Story (3rd or 4th century ad) inform the North African aspect of the poem. S. appears to have read them, along with Daphnis and Chloe, between 27 June and 13 July (Mary Jnl i 324–6), writing to Peacock on 12 July 1820, ‘I have been reading with much pleasure the Greek romances. The best of them is the pastoral of Longus: but they are all very entertaining, and would be delightful if they were less rhetorical and ornate.’ (L ii 213) As widely noted, most early Greek novels perform variations on a set of themes, including the love of a young man and woman for one another, their separation, then subjection to various ordeals, some involving adventures in Egypt or Ethiopia, before reunion. Within such expressions of the confident Hellenistic culture of the Roman empire by Greeks who lived in, or knew, Egypt, its geography and customs are elaborated in detail providing S. with

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a classical literary model for authenticating and idealizing Egypt and Ethiopia. Frederic S. Colwell, ‘Shelley’s “Witch of Atlas” and the mythic geography of the Nile’, ELH xlv (1978) 69–92, and Debbie Lee, ‘Mapping the Interior: African Cartography and Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas’, European Romantic Review viii (1997) 169–84, note early-nineteenth-century interest in the exploration of the African interior and in a comparative understanding of Herodotus’ geography. Several reviews of African travel narratives by John Barrow in Quarterly Review, likely to have been read by S., testify to such interest (see note to l. 424). But these are of less significance than the perspective of those Greeks in Roman times, such as Heliodorus, who, in An Ethiopian Story ii 27, notes that ‘Greeks find all Egyptian lore and legend irresistibly attractive.’ (trans. J. R. Morgan in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, ed. B. P. Reardon (1989)) Another geographically ambitious and excursionary narrative of this same Hellenistic Roman era that S. read on 1 and 25 August (Mary Jnl i 328, 330), was the epic Argonautica in Gk hexameters by Apollonius Rhodius, a third-century resident of Alexandria. Medea’s love for Jason, for whom she procures magic potions that will give him strength in Book III of that poem, is another model further to Aphrodite’s love for Anchises in the Homeric Hymn To Aphrodite, of a goddess in danger of being afflicted by her passion for mortals. A recent English literary source for Egyptianism was Clara Reeve, whose novel The Old English Baron Claire read on 7 August (Claire Jnl 168). ‘The History of Charoba, Queen of Aegypt’, an adaptation of a story based on Vattier’s Egyptian History, trans. John Davies (1672), is printed with Reeve’s The Progress of Romance, 2 vols (1785). Charoba, only daughter of Totis, king of Egypt, is described as ‘of a mild and gentle disposition, always endeavouring to prevent the shedding of blood. She was also of a great capacity and ingenuity’ (ii 113). Walter Savage Landor’s Gebir; A Poem (1798), prompted by that poet’s reading of Reeve’s ‘History of Charoba’, was a favourite of S.’s at Oxford, as Hogg recorded ruefully: ‘I often found Shelley reading “Gebir.” There was something in that poem which caught his fancy. He would read it aloud, or to himself sometimes, with a tiresome pertinacity.’ (Hogg i 201) Gebir recounts the attempt by an Iberian Prince to invade Egypt; but, instead of destroying him to defend her country as in Reeve’s ‘History’, Landor has Charoba fall in love with Gebir, unknown to her nurse Dalica, who obtains a poisoned mantle from the witch Mythyr by which he dies at their wedding. It is as much its Greek qualities as its Orientalism that must have appealed warmly to S. Landor wrote it, under the influence of Pindar, as a heroic idyll modelled on Theocritus and its pastoral sub-plot involving the love of Tamar and the Nymph are part of an anti-militaristic utopianism in which, as Richard Cronin comments, ‘the epic is subordinate to the pastoral’ (‘Gebir and Jacobin Poetry’, in 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. Cronin (1998) 128). The poem’s opening defers to Silenus, tutor of Bacchus: When old Silenus called the Satyrs home, Satyrs then tender-hooft and ruddy-horn’d, With Bacchus and the Nymphs, he sometimes rose Amidst the tale or pastoral, and shewd The light of purest wisdom; and the God Scatter’d with wholesome fruit the pleasant plains. (Gebir (1798) I 1–6) Further grounds for Gebir’s appeal to S. were that it is explicitly anti-monarchical (see note to WA 633–40). In the poem, Landor notoriously attacked George III and other English monarchs (iii 181–223) and praised Napoleon. Other favourites of the youthful S., including Southey’s Oriental epics, also play their part in WA. In a note to The Curse of Kehama vi 17,

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Southey explains of his quasi-Hindu invention, the glendoveers (‘The loveliest race of all of heavenly birth’), that ‘The wings with which they are attired in the poem are borrowed from the neglected story of Peter Wilkins, a work of great genius. Whoever the author was, his winged people are the most beautiful creatures of imagination that ever were devised’ and includes a quotation describing the ‘graundee’ from ch. xx of the novel in The Novelist’s Magazine xii (1783) 71–2. The influence on S.’s poems, including WA, of the erotics of flight in Robert Paltock’s Peter Wilkins (1750), referred to here by Southey, is noted by Nora Crook in ‘Peter Wilkins: a Romantic Cult Book’, Reviewing Romanticism, ed. Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis (1992) 86–98. As first noted in Dowden Life ii 333–4, WA is marked by S.’s pleasurable reading aloud of the ottava rima comic epic poem Il Ricciardetto (1738) by Niccolò Forteguerri (1674– 1735) between 26 June and 27 July (Mary Jnl i 324–7), which he reported to the Gisbornes on 30 June: ‘We are reading Ricciardetto. I think it admirable, especially the assault of the Giants, and Terran’s conversion of them. I assure you I am very grateful to any one who amuses me.’ (L ii 207) Claire, who read the first twelve Cantos in late April 1819, had given up because she found the work ‘stupid’ (Claire Jnl 108–9). White ii 219–21 notes correspondences including that ‘the Italian maga, translated as sorcerer, witch, or hag, is employed in Ricciardetto in both a good and a bad sense.’ Examples, noted in Jerrold E. Hogle, Shelley’s Process (1988) 379 n. 98, include the chaste Stella of Canto I stanzas xxxv–lviii, and Lirina who journeys to Egypt and ‘exercises her magic there’ in Canto XXII stanzas lxxxiii–cix. In his illuminating ‘Il Ricciardetto and Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas’ (Italian Studies in Southern Africa iii/iv (1990–1) 32–42), Alan Weinberg suggests S. may have found Forteguerri’s poem in the Gisbornes’ library (34), that is, during the stay in the Gisbornes’ house in Livorno that had begun on 15 June. But it is very likely that he was drawn to it by Ugo Foscolo’s review of John Hookham Frere’s mock-heroic Prospectus and Specimen of an Intended National Work, by William and Robert Whistlecraft, 2nd edn (1818) and William Stewart Rose, The Court of Beasts (1819), the latter a translation of Giambattista Casti’s Animali Parlanti (1802), in Quarterly Review xxi (April 1819) 486–556, the same number in which John Taylor Coleridge’s review of L&C appeared. Foscolo’s learned and discerning essay, which appeared under the running head ‘Narrative and Romantic Poems of the Italians’, notices Forteguerri as ‘a writer who in genius and means was far inferior’ to Frere. Yet, although Forteguerri’s ‘diction .  .  . is .  .  . without elegance’ and ‘his jokes are vulgar’, Foscolo argues that ‘[c]ompensation is made for the faults of his style, and his want of urbanity, by the astonishing facility of his vein and the activity of his fancy.’ (503–4) That one model for WA was what Foscolo describes as ‘a mere burlesque’ (505) by a barely-known eighteenth-century Italian prelate reinforces those polemical aspects of WA’s Dedication where S. sets himself deliberately against the contemporary English Poet Laureate’s reputation for epic and Wordsworth’s labouring ‘to fit’ Peter Bell ‘for filling permanently a station, however humble, in the Literature of my Country.’ (p.  iii) According to Foscolo, the ‘heroes of romance are the poorest devils imaginable in the poem of Forteguerri.’ (503) Moreover, in the episode which S. refers to as particularly entertaining in the letter cited earlier, Foscolo notes that Forteguerri comically exploits the fact that ‘the actual existence of giants became a dogma which could not be contradicted without incurring excommunication.’ (511) A specific stimulus for reading and emulating Il Ricciardetto may have been Foscolo’s citation of one of its stanzas alongside Beppo (1818) stanza xxii with the comment that ‘the same ideas are presented with fresh graces’ (504–5). That Forteguerri was suddenly marketable in Britain at the time when S. wrote and sought to place WA

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is evidenced in the anonymous publication by John Murray of a free translation of The Two First Cantos of Richardetto (1820) and a separate translation of Canto I by Sylvester Douglas (Lord) Glenbervie (1821). Genre. S.’s use of ottava rima is continuous with Hymn to Mercury which was completed the previous month (see headnote to no. 336, Longman iii 508–10)). But Forteguerri’s relatively recent deployment of the form was not his only model. As Rognoni notes, it is found in Calderón’s dramas, including La cisma de Inglaterra, ottava rima stanzas of which are transcribed in S.’s letter to Maria Gisborne of 16 November  1819 (L ii 155) (see headnote to The dewy silence of the breathing night (no. 355, Longman iii 724–5)), Spenser’s Virgil’s Gnat (which S. and Mary read on 20 May 1820; Mary Jnl i 318) and Muiopotmos, but above all in the earlier celebrated epics, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516), read with Claire in April 1815 (Mary Jnl i 75–6), and again, though without enjoyment, with Mary in July 1818 (L ii 20, 21, 26), and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581) that S. had read in 1818. Byron’s successful ottava rima experiment in Beppo was prompted by a reading of the first edition of Frere’s Prospectus (1817) (Byron PW iv 482–3), but it is not known whether S. knew Byron’s brilliant translation of the first Canto of Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore (1483) done between October 1819 and February 1820, but not published until 1823 (in The Liberal iv). Byron clearly relished Pulci’s ‘irreligion’ and, in respect of ottava rima, described him in Don Juan IV (1821) stanza vi as ‘sire of the half-serious rhyme’ (on Byron’s translation of Pulci, see Byron PW iv 507–9). Cronin 73 instances the final couplet of WA stanza 73 where ‘diocese’ rhymes with ‘geese’ as an example of a ‘Byronic’ rhyme of the kind with which S. would have been familiar from Beppo and Don Juan Cantos I and II (1819). But S. seems to have sought to work the form in a distinct way from Byron in WA, one that exploits the latitude alluded to by Foscolo when he says that, in contrast to the sesta rima of Casti’s Animali Parlanti, ‘[t]he ottava rima, the stanza of Ariosto, seems less monotonous because its cadences recur at longer intervals; and its length assists the development of poetical imagery.’ (494) Thus, in terms of the following distinction made by Foscolo, WA perhaps draws more on the characteristics of the Italian exponents of ottava rima than on the overtly comical tone of their English imitators: [I]t is the end and object of romantic poetry, that, through its medium, this rude world may appear more interesting than it actually is. The romantic poet seeks to astonish his readers by marvellous adventures, by human characters which range above mortality, by chivalrous exploits, by excessive tenderness and heroism, sometimes exaggerated even into absurdity. Poets of this class profit by any theme which presents itself: they are capable of bestowing animation upon any object, therefore they do not reject the ludicrous scenes which happen to fall in their way; but they never go a step out of it to search for them. Such are the poems on Charlemaine and his Peers by Pulci, Boiardo, Berni, and Ariosto. The ‘Prospectus and Specimen of the National Work by William and Robert Whistlecraft’ has undoubtedly been suggested by these poems, and most particularly by the Morgante Maggiore, of which we shall speak anon; but there is one important difference between them. The English author has filled his poem with sprightly humour, whilst the Italian romantic poets only laugh now and then. (498) Finally, it is worth recording the pronounced echoes of Lucretius throughout WA, probably a result of S.’s recent reading of De Re. Nat. with Mary between 28 June and 8 July 1820 (Mary Jnl i 324–5).

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Criticism. Hazlitt established the terms of critical debate about WA in his review of 1824, preferring it to Alastor: ‘for, though the purport of each is equally perplexing and undefined, (both being a sort of mental voyage through the unexplored regions of space and time), the execution of the one is much less dreary and lamentable than that of the other.’ But he used WA as a means of furthering an argument about a contradiction in S.’s work, citing stanzas 38 and 42 ‘to be the very height of wilful extravagance and mysticism. Indeed it is curious to remark every where the proneness to the marvellous and supernatural, in one who so resolutely set his face against every received mystery, and all traditional faith.’ Referring to l. 48, Hazlitt comments: ‘it is only his antipathy to established creeds and legitimate crowns that ever tears the veil from his ideal idolatries, and renders him clear and explicit. Indignation makes him pointed and intelligible enough, and breathes into his verse a spirit very different from his own boasted spirit of Love.’ (Hazlitt Works xvi 274–5) Hunt’s comments in Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries (1828) 208 answer Hazlitt by appealing both to the poem’s self-reflexive qualities and denying that it is altogether unworldly: ‘The Witch of Atlas . . . is but a personification of the imaginative faculty in its most airy abstractions; and yet the author cannot indulge himself long in that fairy region, without dreaming of mortal strife. If he is not in this world, he must have visions of it. If fiction is his reality by day, reality will be his fiction during his slumbers.’ Mary’s assessment of the poem in 1839 seems to address aspects of both Hazlitt’s and Hunt’s diagnoses in classifying WA as amongst ‘the purely imaginative’ class of S.’s poems in which ‘he gave the reins to his fancy, and luxuriated in every idea as it rose; in all, there is that sense of mystery which formed an essential portion of his perception of life — a clinging to the subtler inner spirit, rather than to the outward form — a curious and metaphysical anatomy of human passion and perception.’ (1839 i p. x) Also in 1839 iv 52–3 she admits attempting to persuade S. that, ‘if his poems were more addressed to the common feelings of men, his proper rank among the writers of the day would be acknowledged . . . But my persuasions were vain, the mind could not be bent from its natural inclination.’ Her view of WA has been influential, but is perhaps more subtle than subsequent critics have allowed: Shelley shrunk instinctively from portraying human passion with its mixture of good and evil, of disappointment and disquiet. Such opened again the wounds of his own heart, and he loved to shelter himself rather in the airiest flights of fancy, forgetting love and hate, and regret and lost hope, in such imaginations as borrowed their hues from sunrise or sunset, from the yellow moonshine or paly twilight, from the aspect of the far ocean or the shadows of the woods; which celebrated the singing of the winds among the pines, the flow of a murmuring stream, and the thousand harmonious sounds that nature creates in her solitudes. These are the materials which form the Witch of Atlas; it is a brilliant congregation of ideas, such as his senses gathered, and his fancy coloured, during his rambles in the sunny land he so much loved. (1839 iv 53) The first major study, Carl Grabo, The Meaning of “The Witch of Atlas” (1935), suggests, interestingly in relation to PU, that the Witch represents ‘Asia in her youth before her union with Prometheus’ (4), but then supplies an exhaustive account of the poem’s mythological allusions, misleadingly ascribing them to S.’s supposed Neoplatonism, a thesis ably refuted in White ii 596–9.

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Text from 1824 27–55 (ll. 49–672); 1839 iv 3–4 (Dedication title, ll. 1–24); 1840 268 (ll. 25–48). In some cases, readings are adopted from Nbk 16, MT or eds. Those from Nbk 16 are recorded only selectively in the notes. Numerical headings for the first three stanzas of the Dedication, omitted in 1839, have been supplied. Published in 1824 27–55 (ll. 49–672); 1839 iv 3–31 (Dedication title, ll. 1–24, 49–672); 1840 268–74 (complete).

To Mary (on her objecting to the following poem, upon the score of its containing no human interest)

1

How, my dear Mary, are you critic-bitten (For vipers kill, though dead,) by some review, That you condemn these verses I have written, Because they tell no story, false or true?

¶ 47. Dedication Title. For the circumstances referred to, see headnote. John Buxton, Byron and Shelley: The History of a Friendship (1968) 129 cps Johnson’s ‘Milton’ where it is observed of Paradise Lost that ‘[t]he want of human interest is always felt.’ (The Lives of the Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols (2006) i 290) 1–4. A source of these lines, which ascribe to the reviewers of S.’s writings an effect on Mary’s judgement, may be Alcibiades’ comment on the effect of Socrates on his companions in Plato, Symposium 217d–218b: ‘ “Besides I am like one bitten by a viper, who they say will not tell his misfortune to any, but those who are bitten in the same manner, since they alone knowing what it is, will pardon him for whatever he dares to do or say under the mitigation of his pain. I then, bitten by something more keen and vehement than the keenest of all things by which any one ever was bitten, wounded in my very heart and soul, or whatever else you chose to call it, by the words of philosophy which pierce more sharply than a viper’s tooth, when they seize on a fresh and not ungenerous spirit, and instigate it to say or do any thing, seeing Phaedrus, and Agathon, and Eryximachus, and Pausanias, and Aristodemus, and Aristophanes, and Socrates himself, and the rest of our companions; for ye are all participators with me in the sacred madness and bacchic enthusiasm of philosophy, am willing that you should hear all.” ’ (Julian vii 213–14) 1. critic-bitten] The adjective is also used in PB3 (Longman iii, no. 239) 461. 2. (For vipers kill, though dead)] Hunt in ‘The Quarterly Review, and Revolt of Islam’, Examiner, 613 (26 September 1819) 620, described the review of L&C as ‘Heavy, and swelling, and soft with venom, it creeps through the middle of [the Quarterly Review] like a skulking toad.’ Of a snake cut in two parts, i.e. one that is ostensibly dead, Lucretius observes in De Re. Nat. iii 662–3: ‘ipsam seque retro partem petere ore priorem,/volneris ardenti ut morsu premat icta dolore’ (‘the fore part turning back and seeking to gnaw itself, that by its bite it may assuage the burning pain of the wound which struck it.’) 4. true?] Nbk 16; true! 1839.

512 5

shelley: selected poems What, though no mice are caught by a young kitten, May it not leap and play as grown cats do, Till its claws come? Prithee, for this one time, Content thee with a visionary rhyme.

2

10

15

What hand would crush the silken-wingèd fly, The youngest of inconstant April’s minions, Because it cannot climb the purest sky, Where the swan sings amid the sun’s dominions? Not thine. Thou knowest ’tis its doom to die, When day shall hide within her twilight pinions, The lucent eyes, and the eternal smile, Serene as thine, which lent it life awhile.

3

To thy fair feet a wingèd Vision came, Whose date should have been longer than a day,

5–7. a young kitten . . . Till its claws come?] Turner 279–80 notes that these lines contain ‘the curious zoological error that kittens are born without claws . . . Shelley was evidently relying on the authority of [Lucretius, De Re. Nat. v 1036–8] (but overlooking the saving word vix)’: at catuli pantherarum scymnique leonum unguibus ac pedibus iam tum morsuque repugnant, vix etiam cum sunt dentes unguesque creati (‘then panthers’ kittens and lions’ cubs already fight with claws and feet and bite, even when teeth and claws are as yet scarcely grown.’) 7. Till its claws come] See Hunt’s comment on the review of L&C in ‘The Quarterly Review, and Revolt of Islam’, Examiner, 613 (26 September 1819) 621: ‘We are not going to nauseate the reader with all the half-sighted and whole-clawed meanness of the article in question.’ In his first letter to Fanny Godwin, of 10 December 1812, S. jokingly referred to himself as ‘one of those formidable & long clawed animals called a Man’ (L i 337). 8. visionary rhyme] S. had used this phrase, seemingly of PU, in LMG 168. 9–16. Cp. the comparison of the close of the poet’s song to ‘a brief insect [that] dies with dying day’ in OL (Longman iii, no. 322) 280. Lucian’s The Fly mentions the fly’s ‘membranous wings’, the fact that she is ‘the creature of a day’ and Homer’s association of her with spring in Iliad ii 469. Baker, ‘Spenser and The Witch of Atlas’, 479 n. 9 cps. Spenser, Muiopotmos ll. 17–22 and 41–5. 12. According to Plato, Phaedo 84e–85b, swans are sacred to Apollo, god of poetry (see notes to Alastor ll. 275–90 and OL 271–83). The image of the swan singing recalls the passage on Byron in Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, ll. 167–205. 13. thine. Thou] Nbk 16; thine! thou 1839. 17–24. ‘These lines must no doubt refer to the Revolt of Islam, dedicated to Mary Shelley. “And that is dead” is not a minutely accurate account of its fate.’ (Rossetti 1870) Lines 17–20 echo the imagery of LMG 11–14.

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20

25

30

513

And o’er thy head did beat its wings for fame, And in thy sight its fading plumes display; The watery bow burned in the evening flame, But the shower fell, the swift sun went his way — And that is dead. — O, let me not believe That any thing of mine is fit to live!

4

Wordsworth informs us he was nineteen years Considering and retouching Peter Bell; Watering his laurels with the killing tears Of slow, dull care, so that their roots to hell Might pierce, and their wide branches blot the spheres Of heaven, with dewy leaves and flowers; this well May be, for Heaven and Earth conspire to foil The over-busy gardener’s blundering toil.

5

35

40

My Witch indeed is not so sweet a creature As Ruth or Lucy, whom his graceful praise Clothes for our grandsons — but she matches Peter, Though he took nineteen years, and she three days In dressing. Light the vest of flowing metre She wears; he, proud as dandy with his stays, Has hung upon his wiry limbs a dress Like King Lear’s ‘looped and windowed raggedness.’

21. watery bow] ‘Bow’ is used in the sense of ‘rainbow’. Cp. Paradise Lost xi 865–6: ‘A dewy cloud, and in the cloud a bow/Conspicuous with three listed colours gay’. 23. let me not believe] I.e. ‘let me never again believe’. 25–32. A reference to the Dedication to Peter Bell (1819), in which Wordsworth declares his poem ‘first saw the light in the summer of 1798. During this long interval, pains have been taken at different times to make the production less unworthy of a favourable reception; or, rather, to fit it for filling permanently a station, however humble, in the Literature of my Country.’ (p. iii) 32. See PB3 696–7 and note. 34. Ruth or Lucy] The protagonists of ‘Ruth’ and ‘Lucy Gray’, poems by Wordsworth first published in Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 2 vols (1800). 37–8. Light the vest . . . stays] Wordsworth’s affectedly studied (but in fact, according to ll. 38–9, inadequate) poetical dressing is contrasted with S.’s lightness of touch. 38. She . . . he] She . . . He Nbk 16. 39. wiry limbs] An allusion to Peter’s gauntness: his ‘keen’ face and ‘bare’ looks are described in Peter Bell l. 311 and l. 318. 40. See King Lear III iv 28–32: Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

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45

If you strip Peter, you will see a fellow Scorched by Hell’s hyperequatorial climate Into a kind of a sulphureous yellow: A lean mark, hardly fit to fling a rhyme at; In shape a Scaramouch, in hue Othello. If you unveil my Witch, no Priest or Primate Can shrive you of that sin, — if sin there be In love, when it becomes idolatry.

The Witch of Atlas 1

50

Before those cruel Twins, whom at one birth Incestuous Change bore to her father Time,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? ‘Looped’ means ‘full of holes’. 41–8. The argumentative shape of this stanza echoes Hunt’s scathing review of Peter Bell in the Examiner, 592 (2 May 1819) 282–3, in which he asks ‘Is Mr. Wordsworth in earnest or is he not, in thinking that his fellow-creatures are to be damned?’ and concludes, ‘We happen to write this article on the First of May; and thanks to greater poets than Mr. Wordsworth, and to the nature whom he so strangely recommends, can enjoy the beautiful season on earth, without thinking the less hopefully of heaven.’ (283) 42. hyperequatorial] The sole instance of this word cited in OED. It means ‘hotter than the Equator’. 44. mark] ‘target’ or ‘butt’ (OED 23). 45. Scaramouch] From the second half of the seventeenth century, the word refers to ‘A stock character in Italian farce, a cowardly and foolish boaster of his own prowess, who is constantly being cudgelled by Harlequin. The character was intended in ridicule of the Spanish don, and was dressed in Spanish costume, usually black; the costume was often adopted in masquerades’ (OED). Othello.] Nbk 16, eds; Othello, 1840. 46. Priest or Primate] Nbk 16; priest nor primate 1840. 49–54. This account loosely echoes the cosmogony outlined by Asia in PU II iv 32–4, beginning with a golden era that precedes, and is differentiated from, a conventional Saturnian golden age, then is followed by a downfall associated with the onset of Time. The twin personifications ‘Error and Truth’ appear to allude ironically to the type of righteous Christianity opposed in the last three stanzas of the Dedication. The poem’s domain, Love, is one in which right and wrong are transcended, rather as is the case with the heroine-nymph of Peacock’s Rhododaphne canto VII: Love alone, like ocean, Filled up with one unshared emotion Her soul’s capacity: but right And wrong she recked not of, nor owned A law beyond her soul’s desire (Peacock Works vii 83) 49–50. whom at one birth . . . bore] Baker, ‘Spenser and The Witch of Atlas’ 472 cps the phrasing with Milton, L’Allegro ll. 14–16: Whom lovely Venus at a birth With two sister Graces more To ivy-crowned Bacchus bore

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Error and Truth, had hunted from the earth All those bright natures which adorned its prime, And left us nothing to believe in, worth The pains of putting into learnèd rhyme, A lady-witch there lived on Atlas’ mountain Within a cavern by a secret fountain.

55. The earliest reference in S.’s verse to Mount Atlas, the highest peak (modern-day Djebel Toukbal, at 4167m) in the range of mountains of that name in Northwest Africa, is in Henry and Louisa (Longman i, no. 7) l. 167. It is mentioned in many works with which S. was familiar such as Pliny, Hist. Nat. v 13, Lucan, Pharsalia i 555, iv 672 and ix 655, and Paradise Lost iv 987 and xi 402. In PU II iv 171 the description of Atlas appears to acknowledge Herodotus, Histories iv 184, but the mountain has Promethean associations since the Greeks made the highest peaks of the range into the shoulders of the Titan brother of Prometheus, whose fate he laments in Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 348–50. Ovid, Met. iv 631–62 describes Atlas being transformed into a mountain by Perseus showing him the Gorgon’s head, and he is also described in Aeneid iv 246–51. E. E. Kellett, ‘Imaginative: “The Witch of Atlas” ’, in Suggestions: Literary Essays (1923) 116–17 was the first to note the mountain’s association with the sorceress invoked by Dido in Aeneid iv 480–91: Oceani finem iuxta solemque cadentem ultimus Aethiopum locus est, ubi maximus Atlas axem umero torquet stellis ardentibus aptum: hinc mihi Massylae gentis monstrata sacerdos, Hesperidum templi custos, epulasque draconi quae dabat et sacros servabat in arbore ramos, spargens umida mella soporiferumque papaver. haec se carminibus promittit solvere mentes quas velit, ast aliis duras immittere curas; sistere aquam fluviis et vertere sidera retro; nocturnosque movet Manis; mugire videbis sub pedibus terram et descendere montibus ornos. (‘Near Ocean’s bound and the setting sun lies Ethiopia, farthest of lands, where mightiest Atlas on his shoulders turns the sphere, inset with gleaming stars. Thence a priestess of Massylian race has been shown me, warden of the fane of the Hesperides, who gave dainties to the dragon and guarded the sacred boughs on the tree, sprinkling dewy honey and slumbrous poppies. With her spells she professes to set free the hearts of whom she wills, but on others to bring cruel love pains; to stay the flow of rivers and turn back the stars; she awakes the ghosts of night; and you will see earth rumbling under your feet and ash trees coming down from mountains.’) 56. by a secret fountain] There are ὔδατ᾽ἀενάοντα (‘ever-flowing springs’) in the cave of the Naiads in Odyssey xiii 109. Cp. also the ‘secret fountain’ at the summit of Mount Meru, from which the Ganges issues in Southey, The Curse of Kehama x 17 and 35.

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60

65

70

Her mother was one of the Atlantides: The all-beholding Sun had ne’er beholden In his wide voyage o’er continents and seas So fair a creature, as she lay enfolden In the warm shadow of her loveliness; — He kissed her with his beams, and made all golden The chamber of grey rock in which she lay — She, in that dream of joy, dissolved away.

3

’Tis said, she first was changed into a vapour, And then into a cloud, such clouds as flit, Like splendour-wingèd moths about a taper, Round the red west when the sun dies in it: And then into a meteor, such as caper On hill-tops when the moon is in a fit; Then into one of those mysterious stars Which hide themselves between the Earth and Mars.

4

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Ten times the Mother of the Months had bent Her bow beside the folding-star, and bidden With that bright sign the billows to indent

57. one of the Atlantides] I.e. a daughter of Atlas who was the father of various constellations including the Pleiades, referred to as ‘Atlantides’, in Virgil, Georgics i 221. 58–80. The description of the Witch’s conception has parallels with Panthea’s account of Asia’s birth (see PU II v 20–32 and note) and with Hermes’ birth in Hymn to Mercury (Longman iii, no 336) ll. 6–7, as well as the birth of Belphoebe and Amoretta to Chrysogene through aura seminalis in Faerie Queene III vi 26–7. Although the Witch’s father is explicitly identified as Apollo in l. 293, S. may also have in mind the lineage of Persinna, Queen of the Ethiopians, communicated to her daughter Chariklea: ‘[O] ur line descends from the Sun and Dionysos among gods’ (Heliodorus, Ethiopian Story iv 8, trans. Morgan). 58–60. The all-beholding Sun had ne’er beholden . . . So fair a creature] Beach Langston, ‘Shelley’s Use of Shakespeare’, HLQ xii (1949) 175 cps Romeo and Juliet I ii 97–8: ‘The all-seeing sun/ Ne’er saw her match since first the world begun.’ 61. Locock 1911 cps PU IV 448. 65. first was] Nbk 16; was first 1824. 70. fit] Cp. To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh] l. 9. Glossed as ‘eclipse’ in Concordance, this is a figurative usage that accords with OED 4a: ‘a sudden state of inaction’. 73. Cp. Hymn to Mercury l. 10. the Mother of the Months] I.e. the moon. The wording is also used in PU IV 207. 74. folding-star] Cp. Epipsychidion l. 374. The evening star (Venus) which rises at folding-time, that is, when sheep are herded into the fold.

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The sea-deserted sand — like children chidden, At her command they ever came and went — Since in that cave a dewy splendour hidden, Took shape and motion: with the living form Of this embodied Power, the cave grew warm.

5

85

A lovely lady garmented in light From her own beauty — deep her eyes, as are Two openings of unfathomable night Seen through a temple’s cloven roof — her hair Dark — the dim brain whirls dizzy with delight, Picturing her form; her soft smiles shone afar, And her low voice was heard like love, and drew All living things towards this wonder new.

76. sand —] Nbk 16; sand: 1824. 77. went —] Nbk 16; went: — 1824. 81–2. A lovely lady garmented in light/From her own beauty] The description of the Witch as clothed in luminous beauty follows closely the vocabulary of the Homeric Hymn To Aphrodite ll. 84–5, when Anchises first sets his eyes on Venus, gazing, Ἀγχίσης δ’ ὁρόων ἐϕράζετο θαύμαινέν τε εἶδός τε μέγεθός τε/καὶ εἵματα σιγαλόεντα. (‘Anchises gazed and took stock of her, wondering at her appearance, her stature, and her shining garments’). There are also parallels with Manfred’s description of the Witch of the Alps in Byron, Manfred II ii 25–32: Beautiful Spirit! in thy calm clear brow, Wherein is glass’d serenity of soul, Which of itself shows immortality, I read that thou wilt pardon to a Son Of Earth, whom the abstruser powers permit At times to commune with them — if that he Avails him of his spells — to call thee thus, And gaze on thee a moment. 82–4. deep her eyes . . . cloven roof] Adamson (BSM v 404) cps the following canc. draft from Within a cavern of man’s inmost spirit (Longman iii, no. 323) in Nbk 14 p. 105 rev.: ‘Its eyes are deep and dark as if the night/Were gathered in them. — ’ See also PU II i 114–17 and note. Colwell, ‘Shelley’s “Witch of Atlas” and the Mythic Geography of the Nile’ 74 cps the remark about the Greeks in S.’s letter to Peacock of 23–24 January 1819 prompted by a visit to Pompeii, ‘Their temples were mostly upaithric [i.e. roofless]; & the flying clouds the stars or the deep sky were seen above.’ (L ii 74–5) See also his letter from Rome of 23 March 1819, about the Pantheon, ‘It is open to the sky, & its wide dome is lighted by the ever changing illumination of the air. The clouds of noon fly over it and at night the keen stars are seen thro the azure darkness hanging immoveably, or driving after the driving moon among the clouds.’ (L ii 87–8) 84. temple’s] Rossetti 1878; Temple’s Nbk 16, MT; tempest’s 1824, 1839, 1840, Rossetti 1870. 85. whirls] I.e. reels with giddiness.

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90

95

And first the spotted cameleopard came, And then the wise and fearless elephant; Then the sly serpent, in the golden flame Of his own volumes intervolved; — all gaunt And sanguine beasts her gentle looks made tame. They drank before her at her sacred fount; And every beast of beating heart grew bold, Such gentleness and power even to behold.

89–104. The Witch’s power over wild animals is similar to that conferred upon Hermes by Apollo in Hymn to Mercury ll. 757–64. ‘S. B. P.’, N&Q 190 (23 Feb. 1946) 77 sees these stanzas as a development of Lucretius, De Re. Nat. v 864ff., in which certain kinds of animal are seen as fleeing wild beasts and seeking peace (‘nam cupide fugere feras pacemque secuta’ (868)). Una also has a comparable power to assuage the savage lion in Faerie Queene I iii 5. As noted in Clark, ‘What was Shelley’s Indebtedness to Keats?’ 486–7, there are also parallels with Southey, The Curse of Kehama xiii 149–82, in which a leopard, elephant, tigress and snake are variously enchanted by Kailyal’s song. 89. the spotted cameleopard] I.e. giraffe. A  specimen of this ‘unusual and bizarre kind of animal’ is presented to King Hydaspes by envoys from Axum in Heliodorus, Ethiopian Story x 27, whereupon the ‘people spontaneously invented a name for the creature derived from the most prominent features of its anatomy: camelopard.’ (trans. Morgan) That this and the only other instance of this word in S.’s verse, LMG 240, were prompted by Heliodorus is suggested in Koller, ‘A Source for Portions of The Witch of Atlas’ 157. However, its Ethiopian associations are also mentioned in Pliny, Hist. Nat. viii 32. 90. the wise and fearless elephant] Pliny, Hist. Nat. viii 1–32, ascribes both intelligence and courage to elephants, mentioning African as well as Indian species. See also Thomson, Summer ll. 721–3: Leans the huge Elephant: wisest of Brutes! Tho’ powerful, not destructive! 91–2. Then the sly serpent .  .  . volumes intervolved] Cp. Paradise Lost iv 348–50 (lines that follow a description of wild animals including ‘the unwieldy elephant’), ‘close the serpent sly/Insinuating, wove with Gordian twine/His braided train,’ and ‘intervolved’ to mean ‘wound within one another’ in v 623. ‘Volumes’ here is a poetical usage meaning the ‘coils of a serpent’ (OED ‘volume’ 11a), as in Pope, The First Book of Statius his Thebais 728: ‘Her twisting Volumes, and her rowling Eyes’. 91. the sly] Written above cunning canc. in Nbk 16 (altered from sunning). 92. gaunt] ‘hungry, greedy, ravenous’ (OED 26). 93. sanguine] bloodthirsty. 96. Such [      ] to behold. Nbk 16.

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The brinded lioness led forth her young, That she might teach them how they should forego Their inborn thirst of death; the pard unstrung 100 His sinews at her feet, and sought to know With looks whose motions spoke without a tongue How he might be as gentle as the doe. The magic circle of her voice and eyes All savage natures did imparadise.

97. brinded] ‘Of a tawny or brownish colour, marked with bars or streaks of a different hue’ (OED). Paradise Lost vii 464–6 refers to a ‘tawny lion’ shaking ‘his brinded mane’. As noted in Carlos Baker, ‘A Note on Shelley and Milton’, MLN lv (1940) 586, there is a parallel with ‘the power of gentleness and chastity over wild beasts’ in Comus ll. 440–3: Hence had the huntress Dian her dread bow Fair silver-shafted queen for ever chaste, Wherewith she tamed the brinded lioness And spotted mountain pard 99–100. the pard unstrung/His sinews] The phrase also expresses pacification in L&C 4402. 103–4. The final two lines of the rough draft of this stanza in Nbk 14 p. 70 rev. read: ‘The eagle like the bloodless swan would be/Rapid and strong and innocent as he’. For a facsimile and full transcription of the MS, see BSM v 144–5. 103. voice] Written above looks canc. in Nbk 16. 104. imparadise] ‘to bring to a state of supreme rapture’. The sense is close to the transport described in Paradise Lost iv 506: ‘Imparadised in one another’s arms’. As noted in A. M. D. Hughes, ‘Shelley’s “Witch of Atlas” ’ MLR vii (1912) 512, the Witch’s powers are comparable to the effect that Aphrodite has on wild animals in the Homeric Hymn To Aphrodite ll. 68–74: Ἴδην δ’ ἵκανεν πολυπίδακα, μητέρα θηρῶν, βῆ δ’ ἰθὺς σταθμοῖο δι’ οὔρεος· οἳ δὲ μετ’ αὐτήν σαίνοντες πολιοί τε λύκοι χαροποί τε λέοντες ἄρκτοι παρδάλιές τε θοαὶ προκάδων ἀκόρητοι ἤϊσαν· ἣ δ’ ὁρόωσα μετὰ ϕρεσὶ τέρπετο θυμόν, καὶ τοῖς ἐν στήθεσσι βάλ’ ἵμερον, οἳ δ’ ἅμα πάντες σύνδυο κοιμήσαντο κατὰ σκιόεντας ἐναύλους. (‘She reached Ida with its many springs, mother of wild creatures, and went straight for the steading across the mountain, while after her went fawning the grey wolves and fierce-eyed lions, bears and swift leopards insatiable for deer. Seeing them, she was glad at heart; in their breasts too she cast longing, and they all lay down in pairs in their shadowy haunts.’) 105–12. There are parallels here with Rhododaphne’s effect as she and Anthemion ‘recline, . . . before/ The cave’ in Rhododaphne vii: Satyrs and Fauns would start around, And through their ferny dingles bound, To see that nymph, all life and grace And radiance, like the huntress-queen (Peacock Works vii 81)

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105 And old Silenus, shaking a green stick Of lilies, and the wood-gods in a crew Came, blithe, as in the olive copses thick Cicadae are, drunk with the noonday dew: 105. old Silenus] As in PU II ii 90, Silenus, tutor to Dionysus (Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History IV iv 3–4) and father of the satyrs, is here associated with nymphs and other of his votaries. Notwithstanding his gross looks, referred to in Eclogues vi 15 (‘inflatum hesterno venas, ut semper, Iaccho’ (‘his veins swollen, as ever, with the wine of yesterday’)), he epitomises the positive values of love and song in that poem of Virgil’s. Moreover, in Alcibiades’ eulogy of Socrates in Plato’s Symposium 215a–215b and 216d he represents the embodiment of a supreme inner wisdom that belies his outward appearance: ‘ “Socrates is exactly like those Silenuses that sit in the sculptors’ shops, and which are carved holding flutes or pipes, but which, when divided into two, are found to contain withinside the images of the gods.” . . . “And observe how like he is to what I said, and what a wonderful power he possesses. Know that there is not one of you who is aware of the real nature of Socrates; but since I have begun, I will make him plain to you. You observe how passionately Socrates affects the intimacy of those who are beautiful, and how ignorant he professes himself to be; appearances in themselves excessively Silenic. This, my friends, is the external form with which, like one of the sculptured Sileni, he has clothed himself; for if you open him, you will find within admirable temperance and wisdom”.’ (S.’s trans, Julian vii 210, 212) Rognoni cps the gaiety of Silenus and his followers referred to in this stanza with ‘On the Devil and Devils’: ‘The Sylvans and Fauns, with their leader the great Pan, were most poetical personages, and were connected in the imagination of the Pagans with all that could enliven and delight. They were supposed to be innocent beings not greatly different in habits from the shepherds and herdsmen of which they were the patron saints. But the Christians contrived to turn the wrecks of the Greek mythology, as well as the little they understood of their philosophy, to purposes of deformity and falsehood.’ (Julian vii 103) 105–6. shaking a green stick/ Of lilies] The ‘green stick’ is a ‘thyrsus’, usually wreathed with ivy. In its decoration with lilies, S. may be recalling the wood-god Sylvanus in Virgil, Eclogues x 24–5: ‘venit et agresti capitis Silvanus honore,/florentis ferulas et grandia lilia quassans’ (‘And Sylvan crowned with rustic coronal/Came shaking in his speed the budding wands/And heavy lilies which he bore’ (S.’s trans, From Virgil’s Tenth Eclogue (Longman ii, no. 167) ll. 24–6)). 106. crew] I.e. ‘company’. Cp. Milton, L’Allegro l. 38: ‘Mirth, admit me of thy crew’ and Adonais 295–6: ‘of that crew/He came the last’. 108. For the classical belief that the diet of cicadas was dew, see Theocritus, Idyll iv 16, Virgil, Eclogues v 77 and Anacreon’s Ode (The Anacreontea 34) which begins: μακαρίζομέν σε, τέττιξ, ὅτε δενδρέων ἐπ’ ἄκρων ὀλίγην δρόσον πεπωκὼς βασιλεὺς ὅπως ἀείδεις. (‘How happy are you sweet Cicala! sitting upon the tops of the trees, and drinking dew & singing. Kings might envy your free life!’ (Claire’s trans. in her journal for 12 July 1820, Claire Jnl 155)). In the allusion to drunkenness, there may be a reference to Socrates’ account, in Plato, Phaedrus 259b–259c, which S. finished reading on 2 May 1820 (Mary Jnl i 316), of the associations, also recorded in Anacreon’s Ode, of the locust, or cicada, with poetry: ‘The story goes that these locusts were once men, before the birth of the Muses, and when the Muses were born and song appeared, some of the men were so overcome with delight that they sang and sang, forgetting food and drink, until at last unconsciously they died. From them the locust tribe afterwards arose, and they have this gift from the Muses, that from the time of their birth they need no sustenance, but sing continually, without food or drink, until they die, when they go to the Muses and report who honours each of them on earth.’

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And Dryope and Faunus followed quick, Teazing the God to sing them something new, Till in this cave they found the lady lone, Sitting upon a seat of emerald stone.

9

And Universal Pan,’tis said, was there, And though none saw him, — through the adamant

109. Dryope] Nbk 16; Driope 1824. The story of Dryope, who is transformed into a lotus-tree, is told in Ovid, Met. ix 329–93, where she is described in ll. 330–1 as ‘notissima forma/Oechalidum’ (‘the most beautiful of all the Oechalian maids.’) Dryope is said to have borne a son to Faunus in Aeneid x 551 and is mentioned in Faerie Queene I vi 15. Faunus] A god of the forests described in Horace, Odes iii 18 l.1, as ‘Nympharum fugientum amator’ (‘lustful pursuer of the fleeing Nymphs’). 110. Cp. PU II ii 91. These lines appear to refer to Virgil, Eclogues vi 18–19, where, of Silenus in relation to the youths Chromis and Mnasyllos, it is said that ‘saepe senex spe carminis ambo/luserat’ (‘oft the aged one had cheated both of a promised song’). 112. a seat of emerald stone] Possibly recalling Ovid, Met. ii 24: ‘in solio Phoebus claris lucente smaragdis’ (‘Phoebus sat on his throne gleaming with brilliant emeralds.’) The emerald of the Witch’s throne here and in l. 120, and of the fountain in l. 267, adds to the poem’s Ethiopian associations: emerald mines near the border with Egypt are described in Heliodorus, Ethiopian Story ii 32. 113. Universal Pan] The phrase is used in an incomplete sentence of ‘On Christianity’ in the context of the ‘prodigies’ that accompanied the death of Christ: ‘The philosopher may attribute the application of these events to the death of a reformer or the events themselves to a visitation of that Universal Pan who’ (Prose Works 246). The source is Paradise Lost iv 266–8: ‘while universal Pan/Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance/Led on the eternal spring.’ Wordsworth, who acknowledges the Miltonic source, uses the phrase in a sonnet, first published in The Friend xviii (21 December 1809), then reprinted amongst ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’ in Poems, 2 vols (1815), that begins: O’er the wide earth, on mountain and on plain, Dwells in the affections and the soul of man A Godhead, like the universal PAN, But more exalted, with a brighter train. Pan is Gk for ‘All’, and in ‘Universal’ S. may be recalling the origins of his name in the gods’ reaction to the infant Pan in the Homeric Hymn To Pan ll. 45–7: πάντες δ’ ἄρα θυμὸν ἔτερϕθεν ἀθάνατοι, περίαλλα δ’ ὁ Βάκχείος Διόνυσος· Πᾶνα δέ μιν καλέεσκον, ὅτι ϕρένα πᾶσιν ἔτερψεν. (‘All the immortals were delighted, especially Bacchic Dionysus; and they took to calling him Pan, because he delighted them all (pantes).’) According to Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History I xviii 2, Pan is ‘held in special honour by the Egyptians’. He is referred to in Peacock, Rhododaphne iii, as ‘The life, the intellectual soul/Of vale, and grove, and stream’ (Peacock Works vii 30), lines slightly misquoted by S. in an unpublished review of that poem written in February 1818 (Prose Works 285). Pan is identified with Christ in Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, Maye l. 54 and in Milton, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity l. 89.

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115 Of the deep mountains, through the trackless air, And through those living spirits, like a want He passed out of his everlasting lair Where the quick heart of the great world doth pant, And felt that wondrous lady all alone, — 120 And she felt him upon her emerald throne.

10

And every nymph of stream and spreading tree, And every shepherdess of Ocean’s flocks, Who drives her white waves over the green sea; And Ocean, with the brine on his grey locks, 125 And quaint Priapus with his company All came, much wondering how the enwombèd rocks Could have brought forth so beautiful a birth; — Her love subdued their wonder and their mirth.

114. though none saw him] Pan’s invisibility here recalls Southey’s Thalaba ix 489–96 where the mysterious ‘night Léïleth-ul-cadr . . . considered as being particularly consecrated to ineffable mysteries’ (note to l. 489), is described: For this was that most holy night When all created things know and adore The Power that made them; insects, beasts, and birds, The water-dwellers, herbs and trees and stones, Yea Earth and Ocean and the infinite Heaven With all its worlds. Man only does not know The universal sabbath, does not join With Nature in her homage. 116. want] I.e. ‘desire, longing’ as in SP i 11 (Concordance). 121–8. Cp. Una’s effect in Faerie Queene I vi 18 ll. 1–4: The wooddy Nymphes, fair Hamadryades Her to behold do thither runne apace, And all the troupe of light-foot Naiades, Flocke all about to see her louely face 122. every shepherdess of Ocean’s flocks] I.e. one of the ‘three thousand long-ankled daughters’ of Oceanus and Tethys referred to in Hesiod, Theogony l. 364. A further pastoralized image of flowing water occurs in the description of the Nile in l. 501. 124. Ocean, with the brine on his grey locks] I.e. Poseidon, the Gk god of the sea. 125. quaint Priapus] Priapus was a cult-figure associated with Dionysus, sexuality, and fertility. He is mentioned in Theocritus, Idylls i 21, and in Virgil’s Eclogues vii 33 and Georgics iv 111. The word ‘quaint’ here appears to mean ‘of odd appearance’. 128. Her love] ‘Possibly this means “Their love for her”.’ (Locock 1911)

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The herdsmen and the mountain maidens came, 130 And the rude kings of pastoral Garamant — Their spirits shook within them, as a flame

130. the rude kings of pastoral Garamant] The word ‘rude’ to describe the Garamantes, a tribe identified with the interior of Libya, is indicative of the classical view that they were backward. See Herodotus, Histories iv 174 (‘the Garamantes dwell in the wild beasts’ country. They shun the sight and fellowship of men, and have no weapons of war, nor know how to defend themselves’), and iv 183–4 (where the tribe is described as twenty days’ journey from Mount Atlas); Pliny, Hist. Nat. v 26 and 36; Lucan, Pharsalia iv 334–5 (‘Cancrique sub axe,/Qua nudi Garamantes arant’ (‘beneath the sign of Cancer, where the naked Garamantes plough the earth’)), ix 369 and 460. As noted in Kellett, Suggestions (1923) 117, in ‘rude kings’ there may be a specific reference to Iarbas, an African lord described in Aeneid iv 198 as ‘Hammone satus, rapta Garamantide Nympha’ (‘son of Hammon by a ravished Garamantian Nymph’). ‘Garamant’ is also mentioned in OT (Longman iii, no. 344) I 171. pastoral] in the sense of ‘from a region used for pasture’. 131–6. The last six lines of this stanza in Nbk 14 p. 66 rev. read: And as dry heath when little touched by flame They, wild as Atys, the lost Corybant Knew not that [     ] they were the same They bore within [    ] so [    ] want Which made to them [with an untold] [     ] As men with [     ] nympholepsy stricken. There is a reworking of some of the above lines at the foot of the facing page (p. 67 rev.): Kindled they were to a consuming want Wild as the [    ] And wild as Atys, the lost Corybant With hopeless [    ] The two passages were first published in V&P 31–2; for MS facsimiles and full transcriptions, see BSM v 136–9. The story of Atys, a Phrygian shepherd with whom the goddess Cybele falls in love, is told in Ovid, Fasti iv 223–44. When he breaks his promise to be faithful to her, she takes revenge by driving him to a madness that leads to self-castration. According to Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History V xlix 3, Corybas, son of Cybele by Iasion, ‘gave the name of Corybantes to all who, in celebrating the rites of his mother, acted like men possessed’. These ‘Corybantic mysteries’ are mentioned in Plato, Symposium 215e (Julian vii 211). The first illustration of ‘Nympholepsy’ in OED dates from 1776, but it was used of the nymph Egeria in Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV cxv 5. From the Gk νυμϕόληπτος it refers to young men enraptured to frenzy by nymphs (who are usually, like S.’s Witch, maidens). The word was part of the discourse of S.’s male circle. He uses it in letters to Peacock of August and October 1818 in L ii 29 and L ii 44 with encouraging reference to a poem on the subject, referred to by Marilyn Butler in ‘Myth and Mythmaking in the Shelley Circle’ 66–7, that Peacock planned but never wrote. 131–2. as a flame/ Stirred by the air under a cavern gaunt] ‘Gaunt’ here seems to mean ‘grim or desolate of aspect’ (OED 3). The image is volcanic. 131. Their spirits] 1824 errata leaf, eds; Their spirit Nbk 16 (altered from Their spirits); These spirits 1824.

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Stirred by the air under a cavern gaunt: Pigmies, and Polyphemes, by many a name, Centaurs and Satyrs, and such shapes as haunt 135 Wet clefts, — and lumps neither alive nor dead, Dog-headed, bosom-eyed and bird-footed.

12

For she was beautiful — her beauty made The bright world dim, and every thing beside Seemed like the fleeting image of a shade: 140 No thought of living spirit could abide — Which to her looks had ever been betrayed — On any object in the world so wide, On any hope within the circling skies, But on her form, and in her inmost eyes.

132. under] Written above within canc. in Nbk 16. 133–6. Fauns, Centaurs Pigmies cranes,  & such wild game/And monophalmic Polyphemes who haunt/The pinehills, flocked Nbk 16 (flocked is written above came canc. and l. 136 is incomplete; BSM reads firehills for pinehills). In ‘Polyphemes’ (i.e. those who are monophthalmic like the giant Polyphemus, the Cyclops, in Odyssey ix) and ‘dog-headed’, there appears to be an allusion to inhabitants of the fantastical regions beyond the Ethiopian interior described in Hist. Nat. vi 195: ‘Then come regions that are purely imaginary: towards the west are the Nigroi, whose king is said to have only one eye, in his forehead; . . . the Dog-milkers, who have dogs’ heads.’ In the same work (vii 21), Pliny says that ‘India and parts of Ethiopia especially teem with marvels.’ Hist. Nat. vii 23–30 enumerates all the species described in these lines: ‘on many of the mountains there is a tribe of human beings with dogs’ heads’; ‘there are some people without necks, having their eyes in their shoulders’; ‘There are also satyrs in the mountains in the east of India’; ‘in the south of India . . . women [have] such small feet that they are called Sparrow-feet’; ‘Pygmies, who do not exceed three spans, i.e. twenty-seven inches, in height’; ‘Duris says that some Indians have union with wild animals and the offspring is of mixed race and half animal’. Most of these sources are given in Koller, ‘A Source for Portions of The Witch of Atlas’, 160–1, who also notes that the reputedly bosom-eyed Blemmyae are referred to in Heliodorus, An Ethiopian Story. In addition, it may be noted that Herodotus mentions ‘the one-eyed Arimaspians’ in Scythia (Histories iv 13) and ‘dog-headed men and the headless that have their eyes in their breasts’ in the eastern part of Libya (iv 191). 134. Centaurs and Satyrs] In Greek art and literature centaurs combine human features with those of a horse, satyrs with those of a horse and/or of a goat. 137–44. Hughes, ‘Shelley’s “Witch of Atlas” ’ 512 cps the description of Aphrodite’s radiant beauty in the Homeric Hymn To Aphrodite ll. 84–5 (see note to ll. 81–2) and 174–5: κάλλος δὲ παρειάων ἀπέλαμπεν/ ἄμβροτον (‘from her cheeks shone a divine beauty’). Cp. the description of Asia in PU II v 54–9. 141. betrayed] ‘discovered’ (Concordance). 144. Locock 1911 cps Spenser, Amoretti xxxv 9–14. inmost] ‘deepest’ (Concordance).

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145 Which when the lady knew, she took her spindle And twined three threads of fleecy mist, and three Long lines of light, such as the dawn may kindle The clouds and waves and mountains with, and she As many star-beams, ere their lamps could dwindle 150 In the belated moon, wound skilfully; And with these threads a subtle veil she wove — A shadow for the splendour of her love.

14

The deep recesses of her odorous dwelling Were stored with magic treasures — sounds of air, 155 Which had the power all spirits of compelling, Folded in cells of crystal silence there; Such as we hear in youth, and think the feeling Will never die — yet ere we are aware, The feeling and the sound are fled and gone, 160 And the regret they leave remains alone.

145–52. Cp. Circe’s web in Odyssey x 222–3: ἱστὸν ἐποιχομένης μέγαν ἄμβροτον, οἷα θεάων/λεπτά τε καὶ χαρίεντα καὶ ἀγλαὰ ἔργα πέλονται. (‘she went to and fro before a great imperishable web, such as is the handiwork of goddesses, finely woven and beautiful, and glorious.’) Although she is no witch, Calypso in Odyssey v is a comparable example of a cave-dwelling, weaving divinity (as noted in Hogle, Shelley’s Process 379 n. 98). In l. 62 she goes to and fro before ἱστὸν ἐποιχομένη χρυσείῃ κερκίδ’ ὕϕαινεν (‘the loom, weaving with a golden shuttle’). Notopoulos 272 cps the description of the afterlife in Plato, Republic x 616b — 616c: ‘But when seven days had elapsed for each group in the meadow, they were required to rise up on the eighth and journey on, and they came in four days to a spot whence they discerned, extended from above throughout the heaven and the earth, a straight light like a pillar, most nearly resembling the rainbow, but brighter and purer. To this they came after going forward a day’s journey, and they saw there at the middle of the light the extremities of its fastenings stretched from heaven; for this light was the girdle of the heavens like the undergirders of triremes, holding together in like manner the entire revolving vault. And from the extremities was stretched the spindle of Necessity, through which all the orbits turned. Its staff and its hook were made of adamant, and the whorl of these and other kinds was commingled.’ Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (1937) 141 n. 29, suggests further echoes in Faerie Queene I iii 4, vi 4 and xii 21–3. 154–208. There are similarities between the contents of the Witch’s cave and that of Maia and Hermes as inspected by Apollo in Hymn to Mercury ll. 322–29. 154–60. sounds of air . . . remains alone] Cp. PU II iv 13–18 and Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey ll. 73–86 and Immortality Ode, esp. ll. 19–57.

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And there lay Visions swift, and sweet, and quaint, Each in its thin sheath like a chrysalis; Some eager to burst forth, some weak and faint With the soft burden of intensest bliss 165 It was its work to bear to many a saint Whose heart adores that shrine which holiest is, Even Love’s — and others white, green, grey and black, And of all shapes — and each was at her beck.

16

And odours in a kind of aviary 170 Of ever-blooming Eden-trees she kept, Clipped in a floating net a love-sick Fairy Had woven from dew-beams while the moon yet slept — As bats at the wired window of a dairy, They beat their vans; and each was an adept, 175 When loosed and missioned, making wings of winds,

161. Visions] Concordance supplies the gloss ‘dreams’ but it seems possible that the word carries an intentional ambiguity and that ‘things actually seen’ are also referred to (see OED 5, illustrated by Winter’s Tale I ii 267–71: Ha’ not you seen, Camillo? (But that’s past doubt: you have, or your eye-glass Is thicker than a cuckold’s horn) or heard? (For to a vision so apparent rumour Cannot be mute) or thought? The idea of a ‘vision’ as a record of what has been, as well as a dream of what may be, a memory as well as a prophecy, resonates with LMG esp. 1–14 and 132. 164. bliss] Nbk 16, 1847, Locock 1911; bliss; 1824; bliss: 1839, 1840. In support of the 1847 reading Locock comments: ‘The sense is clearly continuous, “which” being understood’. 165. was] Nbk 16; is 1824. 166. that] Nbk 16; the 1824. 168. at her beck.] I.e. at her command. 170. ever-blooming Eden-trees] The trees planted in Eden by God in Genesis ii 9. 171. Clipped] Gripped tightly. 172. Had woven from] Wove out of Nbk 16. Murray suggests the Nbk 16 ‘tense is dubious but the reading is metrically preferable’ (BSM iv, Pt II, 333). dew-beams] rays of light reflected from dewdrops (cited in OED). slept —] Nbk 16; slept; 1824. 175. When loosed and missioned, making wings of] Written above As glassy meres tremble in coming canc. in Nbk 16.

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To stir sweet thoughts or sad in destined minds.

17

And liquors clear and sweet, whose healthful might Could medicine the sick soul to happy sleep, And change eternal death into a night 180 Of glorious dreams — or if eyes needs must weep, Could make their tears all wonder and delight, She in her crystal vials did closely keep: If men could drink of those clear vials,’tis said The living were not envied of the dead.

18

185 Her cave was stored with scrolls of strange device, The works of some Saturnian Archimage,

177. liquors clear and sweet] Cp. Homeric Hymn To Mercury l. 248, trans. by S. as ‘the sweet food immortals swallow’ in Hymn to Mercury l. 323. might] ‘invigorating qualities’ (Concordance) but also ‘efficacy’ (OED). 178. Cp. Othello III iii 333–6: Not poppy nor mandragora Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep Which thou owedst yesterday. medicine] Cited with the earlier passage in OED to illustrate the now obsolete sense of ‘to bring to a certain state by medicinal means’. 183. those] these Nbk 16. 184. ‘I take the sense to be “The dead would not envy the living, since death would be a ‘night of glorious dreams’.” ’ (Locock 1911) 185–92. Hesiod’s Theogony associates Saturn with a golden age (see PU II iv 33 and note to ll. 32–8) that is ‘lost’ (l. 189). The winning back from the Gods of ‘that happy age’ for man is Prometheus’ goal. ‘S. B. P.’ in N&Q 190 (23 Feb. 1946) 77 comments that this stanza ‘almost defines the aim of Lucretius, and, since he ascribes all his doctrine to Epicurus, the “Saturnian Archimage” may stand for him.’ 185. device] In the sense of ‘ingenious or witty writing’ (OED 10); it is ‘writings’ that are contained in the ‘other scrolls’ in l. 198. Cp. the room, in Alma’s house, of the first of the sages, who ‘could things to come foresee’ in Faerie Queene II ix 50 ll. 1–5: His chamber was dispainted all with in, With sondry colours, in the which were writ Infinite shapes of thinges dispersed thin; Some such as in the world were neuer yit, Ne can deuized be of mortall wit 186–95. Saturnian Archimage . . . wisdom’s wizard skill] On Spenserian and other poetic precedents for an ‘Archimage’, see the note to LMG 106. As in LMG, wisdom and enlightenment in WA are depicted as continuous with wizardry and magic. ‘Saturnian’ refers to the golden age of Saturn.

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Which taught the expiations at whose price Men from the Gods might win that happy age Too lightly lost, redeeming native vice; 190 And which might quench the earth-consuming rage Of gold and blood — till men should live and move Harmonious as the sacred stars above.

19

And how all things that seem untameable, Not to be checked and not to be confined, 195 Obey the spells of wisdom’s wizard skill; Time, Earth and Fire — the Ocean and the Wind, And all their shapes — and man’s imperial will; And other scrolls whose writings did unbind The inmost lore of Love — let the profane 200 Tremble to ask what secrets they contain.

20

And wondrous works of substances unknown, To which the enchantment of her father’s power Had changed those ragged blocks of savage stone, Were heaped in the recesses of her bower;

191. gold and blood] A frequent juxtaposition in S.’s poetry, e.g. Q Mab iv 195, L&C 1843 and OL 43. 194. Cp. PU IV 321: ‘The vaporous exultation, not to be confined!’ 197. man’s imperial will] I.e. man’s capacity to govern himself. Cp. PU III iv 196–7 and Sonnet: Political Greatness ll. 10–11. 198–9. And other scrolls whose writings did unbind/The inmost lore of Love] Hogle, Shelley’s Process (1988) 379 n. 102, sees parallels here with the knowledge of the golden age ‘and the awareness of love’s role in its “guilelessness” in the speech of the Samian prophet’ in Ovid, Met. xv 96–103. 199. the profane] The uninitiated. Stanza 20. [11 (to be ins. after V. 10) canc.] Nbk 16. This note, in S.’s hand, indicates he contemplated re-positioning this stanza after stanza 10. 201. works] rocks MT. 203–5. of savage stone . . . and phials] Cp. the description of the contents of the cave of the Naiads in Odyssey xiii 105–6: ἐν δὲ κρητῆρές τε καὶ ἀμϕιϕορῆες ἔασιν/λάϊνοι· ἔνθα δ’ ἔπειτα τιθαιβώσσουσι μέλισσαι. (‘In it are mixing bowls and jars of stone, and there too the bees store honey.’) W. B. Yeats, ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’ (1900), rptd in Essays and Introductions (1961), 82–4, suggests that in the description of the Witch’s cave S. had in mind Porphyry’s allegorical interpretation of Homer’s cave in ‘On the Cave of the Nymphs’. There it is said that ‘the stony bowls . . . and the amphorae . . . are, indeed, the symbols of Bacchus’ (Select Works of Porphyry, trans. Thomas Taylor (1823) 179). 203. Had changed] Transformed Nbk 16. ragged] ‘Rough-edged’ (see OED 2c).

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205 Carved lamps and chalices, and phials which shone In their own golden beams — each like a flower, Out of whose depth a fire-fly shakes his light Under a cypress in a starless night.

21

At first she lived alone in this wild home, 210 And her own thoughts were each a minister, Clothing themselves or with the ocean-foam, Or with the wind, or with the speed of fire, To work whatever purposes might come Into her mind; such power her mighty Sire 215 Had girt them with, whether to fly or run, Through all the regions which he shines upon.

22

The Ocean-nymphs and Hamadryades, Oreads and Naiads with long weedy locks, Offered to do her bidding through the seas, 220 Under the earth, and in the hollow rocks, And far beneath the matted roots of trees, And in the gnarled heart of stubborn oaks, So they might live forever in the light Of her sweet presence — each a satellite.

205–6. chalices, . . . each like a flower] William Keach, Shelley’s Style (1984) xiv, comments: ‘Shelley is reversing Shakespeare’s metaphor of “chaliced flowers” from a familiar song in Cymbeline (“Hark, hark, the lark”, II iii 20ff). He would have been reminded by Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden [Canto IV ll. 417–18 and n.; Darwin i 194–5] that the outer whorl of sepals enclosing a flower is called the calyx, a word commonly though mistakenly derived (in Johnson’s Dictionary, for instance) from Latin calix, “cup”, the etymological source of “chalice”.’ 207–8. a fire-fly . . . starless night] On the luminosity of fire-flies see LMG 277–83 and note. 208. a starless] the starless Nbk 16. 210. her own thoughts] her thoughts 1834, 1839, 1840. 211. or] I.e. ‘Either’. 217–32. In Gk mythology nymphs (female spirits of nature in human form) are divine but almost always not immortal. In this stanza, the Oceanids (daughters of Oceanus and Tethys), Hamadryads (tree-nymphs), Oreads (mountain-nymphs) and Naiads (nymphs of springs, lakes, and rivers) offer to serve the Witch in their respective spheres in exchange for immortality. But in the next stanza each is reminded of their mortality by reference to the inevitable decay of the elements they guard. 217. Hamadryades] To be pronounced to rhyme with ‘seas’ in l. 219. To maintain metrical regularity here and in l. 226 (‘Naiades’), S. deployed Latin endings (as in Faerie Queene I vi 18 l. 1 and l. 3, cited in the note to ll. 121–8), as opposed to anglicized ones (as in ‘Oreads’ and ‘Naiads’ in l. 218). 218. weedy] streaming MT. 222. gnarled] knarled Nbk 16. 224. satellite] Used in its Latin sense of ‘attendant or guard’.

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225 ‘This may not be,’ the wizard maid replied; ‘The fountains where the Naiades bedew Their shining hair, at length are drained and dried; The solid oaks forget their strength, and strew Their latest leaf upon the mountains wide; 230 The boundless ocean, like a drop of dew Will be consumed — the stubborn centre must Be scattered, like a cloud of summer dust —

24

‘And ye with them will perish one by one: If I must sigh to think that this shall be,

225. maid] Maid Nbk 16 (altered from Maiden). 226. Naiades] See note to l. 217. 230–2. There are parallels here with The Tempest IV i 148–58, but the idea that all forms of life ‘will be consumed’ (that is, are subject to dissolution) is Lucretian. See De Re. Nat. v 243–6: quapropter maxima mundi cum videam membra ac partis consumpta regigni, scire licet caeli quoque item terraeque fuisse principiale aliquod tempus clademque futuram. (‘Therefore, when I see the grand parts and members of the world being consumed and born again, I may be sure that heaven and earth also once had their time of beginning and will have their destruction.’) 231. centre] mountains Nbk 16. I.e. the abode of the ‘Oreads’ of l. 218. ‘Centre’ means ‘the earth’ (OED 2b) as in Troilus and Cressida I iii 85–6 (‘The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre/Observe degree, priority, and place’) and Paradise Lost i 73–4 (‘As far removed from God and light of heaven/As far from the centre thrice to the utmost pole.’) 232. dust —] Nbk 16; dust. 1824. 233–40. The anguish of the Witch in this stanza has parallels with Aphrodite’s acknowledgement to Anchises of the impossibility of loving a mortal forever in the Homeric Hymn To Aphrodite ll. 241–6: ἀλλ’ εἰ μὲν τοιοῦτος ἐὼν εἶδός τε δέμας τε ζώοις ἡμέτερός τε πόσις κεκλημένος εἴης, οὐκ ἄν ἔπειτά μ’ ἄχος πυκινὰς ϕρένας ἀμϕικαλύπτοι. νῦν δὲ μὲν τάχα γῆρας ὀμοίιον ἀμϕικαλύψει νηλειές, τό τ’ ἔπειτα παρίσταται ἀνθρώποισιν, οὐλόμενον καματηρόν, ὅ τε στυγέουσι θεοί περ

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235 If I must weep when the surviving Sun Shall smile on your decay — Oh, ask not me To love you till your little race is run; I cannot die as ye must — over me Your leaves shall glance — the streams in which ye dwell 240 Shall be my paths henceforth, and so, farewell!’

25

She spoke and wept — the dark and azure well Sparkled beneath the shower of her bright tears, And every little circlet where they fell Flung to the cavern-roof inconstant spheres 245 And intertangled lines of light — a knell Of sobbing voices came upon her ears From those departing Forms, o’er the serene Of the white streams and of the forest green.

(‘If you could go on living as you are now in appearance and build, and be known as my husband, sorrow would not then enfold my subtle mind. But as it is, you will soon be enfolded by hostile, merciless old age, which attends men in the time to come, accursed, wearisome, abhorred by the gods’). Rognoni cps Ugo Foscolo, Dei Sepolcri, a poem S. is likely to have known. There (ll. 250–3) Zeus weeps at the death of his beloved nymph Electra, daughter of Atlas and Pleione and one of the Pleiades. Cp. the instances of pain experienced by goddesses who love mortals recounted in ll. 577–84. 234–5. must . . . must] ‘ “[M]ust” is used in the sense of “should have to” (if she loves them).’ (Locock 1911) 234. sigh] weep MT. 238–40. over me . . . my paths henceforth] The idea that the nymphs’ remains will be experienced and used by the Witch after their deaths is Lucretian. See De Re. Nat. v 257–60. 239. Your] The BSM (BSM reads The as written over Your in Nbk 16). 241–2. Cp. the outpouring of Medea’s tears as a result of her love for Jason in Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica (a work that S. was reading during the period he wrote WA) iii 804–6: δεῦε δε κόλπους ἄλληκτον δακρύοισι, τὰ δ’ ἔρρεεν ἀσταγὲς αὔτως, αἴν’ ὀλοϕυρομένης τὸν ἑὸν μόρον. (‘And she drenched her bosom with ceaseless tears, which flowed in torrents as she sat, bitterly bewailing her own fate.’) 241. well] I.e. the ‘fountain’ of l. 56. 245. a knell] A doleful song or dirge. 247. those departing Forms] I.e. the nymphs of stanza 22. Nellist, ‘Shelley’s Narratives and The Witch of Atlas’ (Essays on Shelley, ed Miriam Allott (1982)) 183, suggests that S.’s ‘debt here is significantly to the defeat of the Nymphs by the Christchild’ in Milton, ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ ll. 181–8. serene] I. e. ‘calm brightness’. The word is also used in Ode to Naples l. 36.

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All day the wizard lady sate aloof 250 Spelling out scrolls of dread antiquity Under the cavern’s fountain-lighted roof; Or broidering the pictured poesy Of some high tale upon her growing woof, Which the sweet splendour of her smiles could dye 255 In hues outshining heaven — and ever she Added some grace to the wrought poesy.

27

While on her hearth lay blazing many a piece Of sandalwood, rare gums and cinnamon; Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is — 260 Each flame of it is as a precious stone Dissolved in ever moving light, and this Belongs to each and all who gaze upon. The Witch beheld it not, for in her hand She held a woof that dimmed the burning brand.

28

265 This lady never slept, but lay in trance All night within the fountain — as in sleep.

249. sate] Nbk 16, MT; sat 1824. 252–5. The witch’s weaving of a beautiful tapestry has Homeric associations, as in the description of the loom in the cave of the Naiads in Odyssey xiii 107–8: ἐν δ’ ἱστοὶ λίθεοι περιμήκεες, ἔνθα τε νύμϕαι/φάρε’ ὑφαίνουσιν ἁλιπόρϕυρα, θαῦμα ἰδέσθαι· (‘And in the cave are long looms of stone, at which the nymphs weave purple webs, a wonder to behold’). 252. broidering the pictured poesy] A variation on the idea in Mont Blanc l. 44 that ‘the witch Poesy’ inhabits ‘a still cave’. 253. woof] I.e. weft. That is, in the terminology of weaving, ‘the threads that cross from side to side of a web, at right angles to the warp threads with which they are interlaced’ (OED). 257–8. Cp. the description of Calypso’s cave in Odyssey v 59–60: πῦρ μὲν ἐπ’ ἐσχαρόϕιν μέγα καίετο, τηλόσε δ’ ὀδμὴ/κέδρου τ’ εὐκεάτοιο θύου τ’ ἀνὰ νῆσον ὀδώδει (‘A great fire was burning on the hearth, and far over the isle spread the fragrance of split cedar and citronwood, as they burned’). 259. On the enchantment of fire, see Claire’s description of watching the furnace in which the cyclinder for Henry Reveley’s steam-boat was cast on 22 July 1820: ‘I was extremely delighted — The flames enlightened the countenances of the workman & such others as came like myself a spectator.’ (Claire Jnl 158) 261–2. and this/Belongs to each and all who gaze upon] Cp. the wording of S.’s letter-journal to Peacock of 22 July 1816 describing his first sighting of Mont Blanc: ‘All was as much our own as if we had been the creators of such impressions in the minds of others, as now occupied our own. — ’ (L i 497) 264. woof] Here, as distinct from l. 253, a ‘woven fabric’ (OED 3). One of several instances in WA of the same word being used in different senses.

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Its emerald crags glowed in her beauty’s glance: Through the green splendour of the water deep She saw the constellations reel and dance 270 Like fire-flies — and withal did ever keep The tenor of her contemplations calm, With open eyes, closed feet and folded palm.

29

And when the whirlwinds and the clouds descended From the white pinnacles of that cold hill, 275 She passed at dewfall to a space extended, Where in a lawn of flowering asphodel Amid a wood of pines and cedars blended, There yawned an inextinguishable well Of crimson fire, full even to the brim 280 And overflowing all the margin trim.

270–1. withal did ever keep/The tenor of her contemplations calm] I.e. ‘nevertheless maintained the character of her calm contemplations’. 274. that cold hill] I.e. Mount Atlas. that] the MT. 275. dewfall] The time in the evening when dew begins to be formed. The word is used by Coleridge in Fears in Solitude ll. 204–5: ‘But now the gentle dew-fall sends abroad/The fruit-like perfume of the golden furze.’ 276. asphodel] As well as having immortal connotations (see note to LMG 12), this white-flowering plant (mentioned in Hymn to Mercury l. 287 and l. 455, SP i 54, OT II i 63 and Arethusa arose 84) is frequently referred to in pastoral prose (e.g. Longus, Daphnis and Chloe i 10) and verse (e.g. Theocritus, Idylls i 52 and Milton, Comus l. 837). 278–9. an inextinguishable well/Of crimson fire] Koller, ‘A Source for Portions of The Witch of Atlas’ 157–8, notes this phenomenon in Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon II xiv 7: ‘ “there is, for example, a spring in Sicily which has fire mixed with its waters; if you look down you can see the flame shooting up from beneath, and yet if you touch the water it is as cold as snow: the fire is not put out by the water, nor is the water heated by the fire, but a truce reigns in the spring between the two elements.” ’ That fire is a symbol of the intellect is suggested in the following passage from William Drummond, Academical Questions (1805) i [only one vol. published] 172, which is cited in a Note to Peacock’s mythological ode, ‘The Spirit of Fire’, which was published in The Philosophy of Melancholy (1812): ‘Fire, light, and air, were long the symbols of the mental principle among Oriental nations; and the tenuity of those fine essences continued for ages to be thought nearly similar to that of the soul’ (Peacock Works vi 259). In Rhododaphne vii Love is described thus: He kindles in the inmost mind One lonely flame — for once — for one A vestal fire, which, there enshrined, Lives on, till life itself be done. (Peacock Works vii 78)

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Within the which she lay when the fierce war Of wintry winds shook that innocuous liquor In many a mimic moon and bearded star, O’er woods and lawns — the serpent heard it flicker 285 In sleep, and dreaming still, he crept afar — And when the windless snow descended thicker Than autumn leaves, she watched it as it came Melt on the surface of the level flame.

31

She had a Boat which some say Vulcan wrought 290 For Venus, as the chariot of her star; But it was found too feeble to be fraught With all the ardours in that sphere which are, And so she sold it, and Apollo bought And gave it to this daughter: from a car 295 Changed to the fairest and the lightest boat Which ever upon mortal stream did float.

32

And others say, that when but three hours old, The first-born Love out of his cradle leapt

282. that innocuous liquor] Possibly a reference to the poeticized liquid referred to by ‘The Moon’ in PU IV 356–68. 283. bearded star] I.e. a comet (‘bearded’ refers to its tail). 284–5. the serpent . . . he crept afar] Cp. Wake the serpent not — lest he (Longman ii 454–5, no. 193) ll. 3–5. 288. level] liquid MT. 289–90. Vulcan is the Roman name for Hephaestus, the Gk god of fire. He is married to Aphrodite (Venus) and is cuckolded in Odyssey viii 267–366. Venus is the morning and evening star. 292. ardours in that sphere] ‘ardours’ refers to ‘fierce heat’ but ‘sphere’ lends connotations of the ‘celestial ardours’ referred to in Paradise Lost v 249 and of a Dantean register (see Deluge and dearth, ardours and frosts and earthquake (Longman iii 713–4, no. 346) l. 1 and note). 294. car] chariot. 298–9. The first-born Love .  .  . his wings of gold] On love’s seniority in S.’s cosmogony, see PU II iv 32–3 and his trans. of the reference to Aphrodite in the Homeric Hymn To Aphrodite l. 32 (παρὰ πᾶσι βροτοῖσι θεῶν πρέσβειρα τέτυκται) as ‘To men, the eldest of divinities.’ (Hymn to Venus (Longman ii 345–7) l. 34) The belief that Love was a primordial God is expressed in such Gk sources as Hesiod, Theogony ll. 116–22, Parmenides’ Cosmogony cited in Plutarch’s Eroticus (‘The Dialogue of Love’) 756f (‘And first of all the gods [Aphrodite] framed was Love’), and Plato’s Symposium 178a — 178c where Phaedrus’ speech is translated by S. thus: ‘ “Love is a mighty deity, and the object of admiration, both to Gods and men, for many and for various claims; but especially on account of his origin. For

47  the witch of atlas

300

535

And clove dun Chaos with his wings of gold, And like an horticultural adept, Stole a strange seed, and wrapped it up in mould, And sowed it in his mother’s star, and kept Watering it all the summer with sweet dew, And with his wings fanning it as it grew.

33

305 The plant grew strong and green — the snowy flower Fell, and the long and gourd-like fruit began To turn the light and dew by inward power

that he is to be honoured as one of the most ancient of the gods, this may serve as a testimony, that Love has no parents, nor is there any poet or other person who has ever affirmed that there are such. Hesiod says, that first ‘Chaos was produced; then the broad-bosomed Earth, to be a secure foundation for all things; then Love.’ He says, that after Chaos these two were produced, the Earth and Love. Parmenides, speaking of generation, says: — ‘But he created Love before any of the gods.’ Acusileus agrees with Hesiod. Love, therefore, is universally acknowledged to be among the oldest of things.” ’ (Julian vii 171) In his note to Rhododaphne i 14, Peacock notes that ‘Primogenial, or Creative Love, in the Orphic mythology, is the firstborn of Night and Chaos, the most ancient of the gods, and the parent of all things . . .  . That the identity of the Sun and Primogenial Love was recognised also by the Greeks, appears from the community of their epithets in mythological poetry, as in this Orphic line: Πρωτόγονος ϕαέθων περιμήκεος ἠέρος ὑιός. Lactantius observes that Love was called Πρωτόγονος, which signifies both first-produced and first-producing, because nothing was born before him, but all things have proceeded from him. Primogenial Love is represented in antiques mounted on the back of a lion, and being of Egyptian origin, is traced by the modern astronomical interpreters of mythology to the Leo of the Zodiac.’ (Peacock Works vii 91) 300–11. Though it shares some of their delicate features, the Witch’s boat’s horticultural origin is in contrast with both the ‘strange boat . . . of rare device’ which carries the narrator and the Woman in L&C 323–7 and the moon-like boat that transports Laon, Cythna and their winged child to the Temple of the Spirit at the close of L&C 4630–3. Its physical characteristics have affinities with Phaedria’s self-propelled boat in Faerie Queene II vi 2 ll. 7–9: A litle Gondelay, bedecked trim With boughes and arbours wouen cunningly, That like a litle forrest seemed outwardly. 300. an horticultural adept] I.e. one proficient in horticulture. According to OED (B), the Latin ‘adeptus’ was ‘used . . . and assumed by alchemists that professed to have attained the great secret.’ The word ‘adept’ is used in Hellas l. 741; cp. also PU I 738. 302. his mother’s star] I.e. Venus. 305. green] The colour of the Witch’s boat resembles the Ship of Heaven piloted to the Bower of Bliss by the glendoveer in Southey, The Curse of Kehama vii 15–18: Its hue? . . . Go watch the last green light Ere Evening yields the western sky to Night; Or fix upon the Sun thy strenuous sight Till thou hast reach’d its orb of chrysolite.

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To its own substance; woven tracery ran Of light firm texture, ribbed and branching, o’er 310 The solid rind, like a leaf’s veinèd fan — Of which Love scooped this boat — and with soft motion Piloted it round the circumfluous ocean.

34

This boat she moored upon her fount, and lit A living spirit within all its frame, 315 Breathing the soul of swiftness into it. Couched on the fountain like a panther tame, One of the twain at Evan’s feet that sit — Or as on Vesta’s sceptre a swift flame — Or on blind Homer’s heart a wingèd thought — 320 In joyous expectation lay the Boat.

311. boat] Cp. Hermes’ ‘scooping’ out of the tortoise’s body from its shell to make a lyre in Hymn to Mercury l. 49. 312. circumfluous ocean.] This usage of ‘circumfluous’ accords with the Latin sense of ‘flowing around’ (as in Paradise Lost vii 269–70: ‘he the world/Built on circumfluous waters calm’). 313–20. The speed and agility of the boat referred to in subsequent stanzas suggest that it has parallels with the description of the Nautilus in Pliny, Hist. Nat. ix 88: But among outstanding marvels is the creature called the nautilus, and by others the pilot-fish. Lying on its back it comes to the surface of the sea, gradually raising itself up in such a way that by sending out all the water through a tube it so to speak unloads itself of bilge and sails easily. Afterwards it twists back its two foremost arms and spreads out between them a marvellously thin membrane, and with this serving as a sail in the breeze while it uses its other arms underneath it as oars, it steers itself with its tail between them as a rudder. So it proceeds across the deep mimicking the likeness of a fast cutter, if any alarm interrupts its voyage submerging itself by sucking in water. The Nautilus is mentioned in Darwin, The Economy of Vegetation iii 68 (Darwin i 120) and in that poem’s Additional Note XXVII. For further commentary on the Nautilus significance for S., see the note to L&C 3061. 316–17. Evan (‘Euhan’ in Ovid, Met. iv 15) is a name for Bacchus that derives from the Bacchanalian exclamation ‘Evoe!’, referred to in Lucian’s Dionysus and used in PU II iii 9 (see note to ll. 7–10). Panthers sit at the feet of Bacchus in Ovid, Met. iii 669. 316. fountain] In l. 56 the word ‘fountain’ appears to mean ‘spring’ but here (and in l. 241 and l. 313) the sense is also of a pool of water; i.e. the spring has issued from the earth and now collects in a natural basin (see OED 1a). 318. Vesta was Roman goddess of the hearth. Livy XXVI xxvii 14 cites an episode early in the history of Rome when ‘Vesta’s temple had been the object of attack, and the eternal fires, and, hidden away in its holy place, the fateful pledge of Roman rule.’ The ‘pledge’ is a reference to the Palladium, the sacred image of Athena, said to have been brought from Troy: hence ‘the sceptre’ referred to in this line. 319. wingèd thought] Hughes, ‘Shelley’s “Witch of Atlas” ’, 511 n. 2 cps the Homeric Hymn To Mercury ll. 43–6 (see S.’s Hymn to Mercury ll. 51–3).

47  the witch of atlas

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35

Then by strange art she kneaded fire and snow Together, tempering the repugnant mass With liquid love — all things together grow Through which the harmony of love can pass; 325 And a fair Shape out of her hands did flow — A living Image, which did far surpass In beauty that bright shape of vital stone Which drew the heart out of Pygmalion.

36

A sexless thing it was, and in its growth 330 It seemed to have developed no defect

321–8. There are literary precedents for moulding people out of snow, but these are usually figures associated with evil, e.g. the ‘accursed Hag’ who makes ‘Another [i.e. the ‘False’] Florimell’ out of ‘purest snow in massie mould congeald’ in Faerie Queene III viii 5ff. (mentioned by S. in a letter to the Gisbornes of 13 or 14 October 1819, L ii 125) and Laila’s father in Southey, Thalaba x 183–9: And every morn He visits me, and takes the snow, and moulds Women and men, like thee; and breathes into them Motion, and life, and sense, . . . but to the touch They are chilling cold, and ever when night closes They melt away again, and leave me here Alone and sad. 321. fire and snow] Baker, ‘Spenser and The Witch of Atlas’ 477 cps Spenser, Colin Clovts come home againe ll. 835–50. The Witch’s geographical location may also be at issue: To the Nile (Longman ii 349–50, no. 163) ll. 3–5 refers to the extremes of cold and heat associated with Atlas’s geographical location and height. 322. repugnant] This usage draws attention to the word’s Latin root in pugnare (to fight). The antagonism of fire and snow towards one another is to be overcome by a third element, ‘love’, in l. 323. This idea, and the generally medicinal qualities associated with the Witch’s presence, parallel the definition of love in Eryximachus’ speech in Symposium 186c — 186e: ‘The science of medicine, in a word, is a knowledge of the love affairs of the body . . . the most skilful physician . . . ought to make those things which are most inimical, friendly, and excite them to mutual love . . .  . Our progenitor, Aesculapius . . . through the skill which he possessed to inspire love and concord in these contending principles, established the science of medicine’ (Julian vii 180). Rognoni cps the account of poetry’s transformative power in DP: ‘it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things.’ (Reiman (2002) para. 41) 326–8. The story of Pygmalion who sculpts an ivory statue of a perfect woman with whom he falls in love is told in Ovid, Met. x 243–97. 329–36. S.’s narrative follows the classical genealogy of ‘Hermaphroditus’ (as the being is addressed in l. 388). According to Ovid, he is son of Hermes and Aphrodite, and, as Bush states (‘Notes on

538

shelley: selected poems

Of either sex, yet all the grace of both — In gentleness and strength its limbs were decked; The bosom swelled lightly with its full youth, The countenance was such as might select 335 Some artist that his skill should never die, Imaging forth such perfect purity.

Shelley’, 301), nursed by the naiads in Ida’s caves and great-grandson of Atlas (Met. iv 288–9 and 368). S.’s early perfectibilarianism (the belief, following Political Justice, in the perfectibility of human nature) included a view that distinctions between the sexes would end in time. In a letter to Elizabeth Hitchener of 26 November  1811, he comments of the winged glendoveer in Southey’s The Curse of Kehama that ‘I almost wish that Southey had not made the glendoveer a male — these detestable distinctions will surely be abolished in a future state of being’ (L i 195). Darwin, The Temple of Nature; or, The Origin of Society: A Poem (1803) Additional Notes X (42), states that it was Egyptian magi or philosophers who originated the idea that ‘Mankind was originally of both sexes united, and was afterwards divided into males and females: an opinion in later times held by Plato, and I believe by Aristotle, and which must have arisen from profound inquiries into the original state of animal existence.’ That the Hermaphrodite is a symbol of the perfected human being appears to draw on Aristophanes’ discourse in Plato’s Symposium 189d — 189e which begins by challenging the word’s derogatory use to mean an effeminate man or a virile woman, as in S.’s letter to Hogg of 3 December 1812 describing Hitchener as ‘an artful, superficial, ugly, hermaphroditical beast of a woman’ (L i 336). Aristophanes’ account of the origins of humankind begins thus in S.’s translation: ‘ “First, then, human beings were formerly not divided into two sexes, male and female; there was also a third, common to both the others, the name of which remains, though the sex itself has disappeared. The androgynous sex, both in appearance and in name, was common both to male and female; its name alone remains, which labours under a reproach.” ’ (Julian vii 183) Later in this speech (192d–193a), he discusses the lover’s desire ‘ “intimately to mix and melt and to be melted together with his beloved, so that one should be made out of two. The cause of this desire is, that according to our original nature, we were once entire. The desire and the pursuit of integrity and union is that which we all love.’ (Julian vii 186) Ovid’s account of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in Met. iv 285– 388, especially ll. 373–9, is a poetical version of such union. That Hermaphrodite represents an image of perfect union in marriage is strikingly apparent in the description of Amoret and Scudamour in the first (1590) edn of Faerie Queene III xii 45–46. Jean Overton Fuller, Shelley: A Biography (1968) 270, notes that S. had seen the statue of a Hermaphrodite during a visit to the Palazzo Borghese, Rome, on 29 March 1819, recorded by Claire (Claire Jnl 104). Fuller asserts that, ‘It was plainly the sculpture which was there [i.e. in WA] Shelley’s model.’ She further comments, with reference to l. 362, that ‘I saw this sculpture . . . and it is plainly asleep. That is why Shelley, even in his creative imagination, dared not in the poem wake it.’ Joseph Forsyth, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy, in the years 1802 and 1803, 2nd edn (1816) 216, describes it, along with other statues, as ‘each supreme in its own saloon’. 333. swelled lightly] swelling lightly MT; lightly swell’d 1829; lightly swelled 1839, 1840. youth] growth MT.

47  the witch of atlas

539

37

From its smooth shoulders hung two rapid wings, Fit to have borne it to the seventh sphere, Tipped with the speed of liquid lightenings — 340 Dyed in the ardours of the atmosphere. She led her creature to the boiling springs Where the light boat was moored, and said — ‘Sit here!’ And pointed to the prow, and took her seat Beside the rudder with opposing feet.

38

345 And down the streams which clove those mountains vast Around their inland islets, and amid The panther-peopled forests, whose shade cast Darkness and odours, and a pleasure hid In melancholy gloom, the pinnace passed; 350 By many a star-surrounded pyramid

337. The image of a charmed, as opposed to a ‘mortal’ (l. 375), boat, piloted by nothing but a winged shape has several precedents including the angel in S.’s ‘most favourite passage’ in Dante (Mary L iii 160), ‘the Spirit coming over the sea in a boat like Mars rising from the vapours of the horizon’ (L ii 112), described by Virgil thus in Dante, Purgatorio ii 31–3: Vedi che sdegna li argomenti umani, sì che remo non vuol, né altro velo che l’ali sue, tra liti sì lontani. (‘Lo how all human means he sets at nought! So that nor oar he needs, nor other sail Except his wings, between such distant shores.’) On the echoes of this passage in L&C XII, see the note to l. 4624 of that poem. Further to the note to L&C 4644, WA broadly recalls the prose outline of Peacock’s Ahrimanes in which a boat bears the lovers ‘to the dwelling of Oromazes . . .  . imaging the course of virtue through the storms of life’ (Peacock Works vii 432) as well as the glendoveer that transports Ladurlad in Southey, The Curse of Kehama x. 338. the seventh sphere] A reference to the sphere of Saturn, described in Dante, Paradiso xxi and xxii. Beatrice tells Dante ‘Noi sem levati al settimo splendore’ (‘Into the seventh splendour are we wafted’) in Paradiso xxi 13. 339. lightenings] Nbk 16, 1839, 1840; lightnings MT, 1824. The metre requires the word to be trisyllabic. 340. Cp. l. 292 and note. atmosphere.] Rossetti 1870; atmosphere — Nbk 16; atmosphere: 1824. 342–4. The suggestion is that the Witch occupies the boat’s only seat. Cp. Alastor ll. 311–13, and Southey, Thalaba xi 375–77 (cited in the headnote). 343. her] Nbk 16; her 1824. 344. with opposing feet] I.e. with her feet opposite the Hermaphrodite’s. 345. the] those MT. 350. star-surrounded pyramid] Cp. Milton, ‘On Shakespeare’ l. 4 (‘star-ypointing pyramid’) and Eagle! why soarest thou above that tomb? (Longman iii 716–7, no. 348) l. 2 and note.

540

shelley: selected poems Of icy crag cleaving the purple sky, And caverns yawning round unfathomably.

39

The silver noon into that winding dell, With slanted gleam athwart the forest-tops, 355 Tempered like golden evening, feebly fell; A green and glowing light, like that which drops From folded lilies in which glow-worms dwell, When earth over her face night’s mantle wraps; Between the severed mountains lay on high 360 Over the stream, a narrow rift of sky.

40

And ever as she went, the Image lay With folded wings and unawakened eyes; And o’er its gentle countenance did play The busy dreams, as thick as summer flies, 365 Chasing the rapid smiles that would not stay, And drinking the warm tears, and the sweet sighs Inhaling, which, with busy murmur vain, They had aroused from that full heart and brain.

41

And ever down the prone vale, like a cloud 370 Upon a stream of wind, the pinnace went: Now lingering on the pools, in which abode The calm and darkness of the deep content In which they paused; now o’er the shallow road

354. forest-tops] The word is used in Byron, Don Juan II ciii 4. 360. rift] I.e. ‘opening’ (see OED rift, n.2 2b). 368. that] the Nbk 16. 369. prone] downwardly sloping. 371. on] in MT.

47  the witch of atlas

541

Of white and dancing waters all besprent 375 With sand and polished pebbles — mortal boat In such a shallow rapid could not float.

42

And down the earthquaking cataracts which shiver Their snow-like waters into golden air, Or under chasms unfathomable ever 380 Sepulchre them, till in their rage they tear A subterranean portal for the river, It fled — the circling sunbows did upbear Its fall down the hoar precipice of spray, Lighting it far upon its lampless way.

43

385 And when the wizard lady would ascend The labyrinths of some many winding vale, Which to the inmost mountain upward tend — She called ‘Hermaphroditus!’ and the pale And heavy hue which slumber could extend 390 Over its lips and eyes, as on the gale A rapid shadow from a slope of grass, Into the darkness of the stream did pass.

44

And it unfurled its heaven-coloured pinions, With stars of fire spotting the stream below;

374. dancing] shallow MT. besprent] I. e. ‘sprinkled with’. Cp. ‘dew-besprent’ in Milton, Comus l. 541. 375. pebbles —] pebbles. . Nbk 16; pebbles: — 1824. 377–84. The imagery in this stanza is volcanic and bears comparison with Coleridge, Kubla Khan ll. 17–24. Rognoni cps. the description of ‘the Cataract of the Velino’ in the Apennines in S.’s letter to Peacock of 20 November 1818: ‘You see the evermoving water stream down. It comes in thick & tawny folds flaking off like solid snow gliding down a mountain. It does not seem hollow within, but without it is unequal like the folding of linen thrown carelessly down. Your eye follows it & it is lost below, not in the black rocks which gird it around but in its own foam & spray, in the cloudlike vapours boiling up from below, which is not like rain nor mist nor spray nor foam, but water in a shape wholly unlike any thing I ever saw before. It is as white as snow, but thick & impenetrable to the eye.’ (L ii 56) 382. sunbows] sunbeams MT. OED defines sunbow as ‘[a]n arch of prismatic colours like a rainbow, formed by refraction of sunlight in spray or vapour’ and cites as the first recorded usages S.’s ‘Letter IV’ from Chamouni in 1817 (Prose Works 222), ‘a spray which formed a mist around it [a cascade], in the midst of which hung a multitude of sunbows’, and Byron, Manfred II ii 24. 390–1. as on the gale . . . slope of grass] Locock 1911 cps Athanase (Longman ii, no. 146) ll. 142–3. 393–400. Knight, ‘The Naked Seraph’ 229, suggests that this stanza recalls ‘Coleridge’s sunny-ice’, i.e. the ‘sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!’ of Kubla Khan l. 36. 393. it] Altered from he in Nbk 16.

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shelley: selected poems

395 And from above into the Sun’s dominions Flinging a glory, like the golden glow In which Spring clothes her emerald-wingèd minions, All interwoven with fine feathery snow And moonlight splendour of intensest rime 400 With which frost paints the pines in winter-time.

45

And then it winnowed the Elysian air Which ever hung about that lady bright, With its etherial vans — and speeding there, Like a star up the torrent of the night, 405 Or a swift eagle in the morning glare Breasting the whirlwind with impetuous flight; The pinnace, oared by those enchanted wings, Clove the fierce streams towards their upper springs.

46

The water flashed like sunlight by the prow 410 Of a noon-wandering meteor flung to Heaven; The still air seemed as if its waves did flow In tempest down the mountains — loosely driven The lady’s radiant hair streamed to and fro: Beneath, the billows having vainly striven 415 Indignant and impetuous, roared to feel The swift and steady motion of the keel.

47

Or, when the weary moon was in the wane, Or in the noon of interlunar night, The lady-witch in visions could not chain

396. glory] I.e. effulgence of light (see OED 6). 397. Locock 1911 cps Athanase Detached Passage (b) l. 14. 398–400. Cp. the snow on tree-branches reflecting moonlight in Coleridge, Frost at Midnight ll. 68–74. 399. rime] I.e. hoar-frost. 401. it] Written above he canc. in Nbk 16. 403. its] Altered from his in Nbk 16. 404. the torrent of the night] The sense is of a night sky’s rushing stream of light (see OED 2b). 406. Breasting] Breathing BSM (reading of Nbk 16), MT. I.e. ‘opposing the breast to’ (OED 1), as in Henry V, III. Prol. 13 ‘Breasting the lofty surge.’ 417–18. Or . . . Or] I.e. ‘Either . . . or’. The lines refer to a night sky unilluminated by the moon. On the ‘inchanted’ associations of ‘a waning moon’, see Coleridge, Kubla Khan ll. 14–15. 418. the noon of interlunar night] ‘The time of night corresponding to midday: midnight’ (OED). ‘Interlunar’ means between a waning and a waxing moon (see PU II iv 91 and note).

47  the witch of atlas 420

543

Her spirit; but sailed forth under the light Of shooting stars, and bade extend amain Its storm-outspeeding wings, th’Hermaphrodite; She to the Austral waters took her way, Beyond the fabulous Thamondocana, —

48

425 Where, like a meadow which no scythe has shaven, Which rain could never bend, or whirl-blast shake, With the Antarctic constellations paven, Canopus and his crew, lay th’Austral lake —

421. amain] ‘with full force’ (OED 1). 422. Its] MT; His Nbk 16, 1824. 423. Austral waters] I.e. oceans south of the Equator. The Latin ‘Auster’ refers to the south generally as well as to the southern wind. 424. fabulous Thamondocana, —] Hutchinson; fabulous Thamondocana Nbk 16; fabulous Thamondocona. 1824. Presumably the final syllable is intended to rhyme with ‘way’ in the preceding line. Today known as Timbuktu, Thamondocana is identified as a town on ‘the south bank of the [Nigir] river’ in Ptolemy, Geography IV ch. vi (Geography of Claudius Ptolemy, trans. E. L. Stevenson (1932) 106). S. ordered the works of Ptolemy, the second-century ad Hellenistic mathematician, astronomer, and geographer who lived in Alexandria, from his bookseller on 24 December 1812 (L i 344). The place is also described by Leo Africanus in his Description of Africa (1526). OED cites a quotation from 1863 as the first instance of the word ‘Timbuctoo’ being used to figure ‘the type of the most distant place imaginable’ but the place had a certain aura of the ‘fabulous’ in the sense in which the word is used here (‘fabled or mythical’ as in the Latin fabulosos) in S.’s day. S. had read Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799) and Journal of a Mission to the Interior of Africa (1815) by Mungo Park in December 1814 and 1816 (Mary Jnl i 51–2, 87 and 93). In Travels 213–16, Park records having obtained only limited information about Tombuctoo. But in a review of The Narrative of Robert Adams, a Sailor, who was wrecked in the Year 1810, on the Western Coast of Africa, was detained three Years in Slavery by the Arabs of the Great Desert, and resided several Months of that Period in the City of Tombuctoo (1816) in Quarterly Review xiv (January 1816) 453–73, under the running-title ‘Tombuctoo’, John Barrow, judging the veracity of Adams’s account, remarks: ‘It leaves, we confess, on our minds, very little doubt that the town in which he dwelt with the negroes was Tombuctoo’ (472). In a subsequent review of James Riley, An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American brig Commerce, wrecked on the Western Coast of Africa, in the month of August, 1815 (1816) in Quarterly Review xvi (January 1817) 287–321, Barrow refers to an account of Tombuctoo by an Arab trader, Sidi Hamet, which ‘agrees too in substance with the description given of this celebrated city by Leo Africanus; and, in all the main points, with the more recent account of Adams.’ (309) ‘Tombuctoo’ is mentioned in Byron, Don Juan I cxxxii 6. 427. paven] haven 1824 (a misprint). I.e. ‘paved’. 428. Canopus and his crew] The star Canopus in the constellation Argo has southern associations in Lucan, Pharsalia viii 181–2: ‘Inde Canopos/Excipit, australi caelo contenta vagari,/Stella, timens Borean’ (‘Next after that comes Canopus, a star that shuns the North and limits its wanderings to the southern sky’). ‘[H]is crew’ is a pun. The name of the constellation to which Canopus belongs is the same as that of the vessel on which Jason and his companions sail to Colchis in search of the golden Fleece in Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica. Austral lake] Probably the lake in the interior of Ethiopia out of which flowed both the Nile and the Niger, referred to as ‘not very distant from the equator’ by John Barrow in his review of Mungo Park, Journal of a Mission to the Interior of Africa in 1805 (1815) in Quarterly Review xiii (April 1815) 145.

544

430

shelley: selected poems There she would build herself a windless haven Out of the clouds whose moving turrets make The bastions of the storm, when through the sky The spirits of the tempest thundered by.

49

A haven beneath whose translucent floor The tremulous stars sparkled unfathomably, 435 And around which, the solid vapours hoar, Based on the level waters, to the sky Lifted their dreadful crags; and like a shore Of wintry mountains, inaccessibly Hemmed in with rifts and precipices grey 440 And hanging crags, many a cove and bay.

50

And whilst the outer lake beneath the lash Of the wind’s scourge, foamed like a wounded thing, And the incessant hail with stony clash Ploughed up the waters, and the flagging wing 445 Of the roused cormorant in the lightning-flash Looked like the wreck of some wind-wandering Fragment of inky thunder-smoke — this haven Was as a gem to copy Heaven engraven, —

51

On which that lady played her many pranks, 450 Circling the image of a shooting star,

429. There]?[Where] Nbk 16 (written above And canc.); Where Locock Ex (reading of Nbk 16);?[There] BSM (reading of Nbk 16); When MT. 435. solid vapours hoar] Glaciers are implied. 438–9. inaccessibly,/Hemmed in] The verb is used transitively, i.e. the ‘solid vapours hoar’ (l. 435) enclosed ‘many a cove and bay’ (l. 440) such as to make them inaccessible. 442. wind’s] Nbk 16; winds’ 1824. thing,] Rossetti 1870; thing Nbk 16; thing; 1824. 446. wreck] fragment MT. 447. thunder-smoke] A noun used by S. exclusively in poems composed in the summer of 1820 and spring of 1821 (see Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa l. 26, OL 274, LMG 116, Additional Stanzas for Adonais O (Longman iv 340) 5), not in OED, nor defined in Concordance, but apparently referring to thunderclouds. 448. ‘i.e., was like a gem engraved with a copy of Heaven.’ Reiman (2002). Engraven, —] Hutchinson; engraven Nbk 16; engraven. 1824. 450. Circling] Written above Chasing canc. in Nbk 16.

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Even as a tiger on Hydaspes’ banks Outspeeds the antelopes which speediest are, In her light boat; and many quips and cranks She played upon the water, till the car 455 Of the late moon, like a sick matron wan, To journey from the misty east began.

52

And then she called out of the hollow turrets Of those high clouds, white, golden and vermilion, The armies of her ministering Spirits — 460 In mighty legions million after million They came, each troop emblazoning its merits On meteor flags; and many a proud pavilion, Of the intertexture of the atmosphere, They pitched upon the plain of the calm mere.

53

465 They framed the imperial tent of their great Queen Of woven exhalations, underlaid With lambent lightning-fire, as may be seen A dome of thin and open ivory inlaid With crimson silk — cressets from the serene 451. Hydaspes’ banks] The Hydaspes is a tributary of the river Indus mentioned in Pliny, Hist. Nat. vi 71, Lucan, Pharsalia iii 236, and Virgil, Georgics iv 211. It is the site of a famous victory of Alexander the Great referred to in Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History XVII xcvi 1, and Plutarch’s Life of Alexander lx 1. 453. quips and cranks] The phrase is used in Milton, L’Allegro ll. 26–7: ‘Jest and youthful Jollity,/Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles’. There the words refer, respectively, to ‘witty sayings’ and ‘jokes which depend upon twisting or changing the form or meaning of a word.’ (Carey, Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, 2nd edn (1997) 138) Here the words are used differently, both carrying the sense of ‘curious or fantastic actions’ (see OED ‘quip’ 2b and ‘crank’ n2 3). 455–6. Locock 1911 cps And like a dying lady, lean and pale [The Waning Moon] (Longman iii 19–20, no. 225). 457–64. Cp. the cloudscape of OL 61–9. 462. meteor flags] Cronin 70 cps Satan’s ‘imperial ensign’ ‘unfurled’ by Azazel ‘which full high advanced/ Shone like a meteor streaming to the wind’ (Paradise Lost i 535–7). 464. the calm mere] the calm [    ] MT (mere is difficult to decipher in Nbk 16). 465–72. The framing of the Witch’s tent by her ministering spirits is comparable with the account of the devils’ construction of Pandaemonium in Paradise Lost i 710–30. 466. woven exhalations] Cp. L&C 2107–10 and note. 467. lambent lightning-fire] The sense is of ‘tongues’ of fire (the Latin ‘lambere’ = to lick), ‘shining with a soft clear light and without fierce heat’ (OED 1). 468. The line has an extra foot. 469–70. cressets from the serene/Hung there] Cp. Paradise Lost i 728–30: ‘blazing cressets fed/With naphtha and asphaltus yielded light/As from a sky.’ 469. cressets] Vessels ‘of iron or the like, made to hold grease or oil, or an iron basket to hold pitched rope, wood, or coal, to be burnt for light; usually mounted on the top of a pole or building, or suspended

546 470

shelley: selected poems Hung there, and on the water for her tread, A tapestry of fleece-like mist was strewn, Dyed in the beams of the ascending moon.

54

And on a throne o’erlaid with starlight, caught Upon those wandering isles of aery dew, 475 Which highest shoals of mountain shipwreck not, She sate, and heard all that had happened new Between the earth and moon since they had brought The last intelligence — and now she grew Pale as that moon lost in the watery night — 480 And now she wept and now she laughed outright.

55

These were tame pleasures. — She would often climb The steepest ladder of the crudded rack Up to some beakèd cape of cloud sublime, And like Arion on the dolphin’s back

from a roof ’ (OED). serene] clear, bright sky, from the Latin serenum. Cp. Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer l. 7. Miriam Allott, The Poems of John Keats (1970) 61 cps Coleridge, Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni (1802) l. 72, and Cary’s trans. of Dante’s Paradiso xix 60–1. 475. mountain] mountains MT. 477. they] The ‘ministering Spirits’ of l. 459. 479. that] the Nbk 16. 482. crudded rack] A curded (that is, congealed) mass of cloud. The word ‘crudded’ is Spenserian. See Spenser, Epithalamion l. 175: ‘Her brest like to a bowle of creame vncrudded’. 483. beakèd cape] Cp. ‘beaked promontory’ Lycidas l. 94 (‘beaked’ meaning ‘pointed’). cape] Written above isle canc. in Nbk 16. 484–5. And like Arion . . . the shoreless air.] The story of the poet Arion being rescued by a dolphin (a fit emblem of his view of the durability of poets) is given in Herodotus, Histories i 23–4: ‘Arion of Methymna . . . was a lyre-player second to none in that age; he was the first man, as far as we know, to compose and name the dithyramb which he afterwards taught at Corinth.’ While he was travelling back to Corinth, having made money from his performances in Italy and Sicily, Herodotus tells of how sailors hatched a plan to throw him overboard and steal his earnings. Arion took ‘his lyre, stood up on the poop and sang the “Shrill Strain,” and at its close threw himself without more ado into the sea, clad in his robes. So the crew sailed away to Corinth; but a dolphin (so the story goes) took Arion on his back and bore him to Taenarus.’ The wording ‘like Arion on the dolphin’s back’ is identical with Twelfth Night I ii 14, but the prodigy is also mentioned in Ovid, Fasti ii 79–118, Achilles Latius, Leucippe and Clitophon vi 13, Spenser, Amoretti xxxviii, Faerie Queene IV xi 23 and Keats, Endymion ii 360.

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485 Ride singing through the shoreless air. Oft time Following the serpent lightning’s winding track, She ran upon the platforms of the wind And laughed to hear the fire-balls roar behind.

56

And sometimes to those streams of upper air 490 Which whirl the earth in its diurnal round She would ascend, and win the spirits there To let her join their chorus. Mortals found That on those days the sky was calm and fair, And mystic snatches of harmonious sound 495 Wandered upon the earth where’er she passed, And happy thoughts of hope, too sweet to last.

57

But her choice sport was, in the hours of sleep, To glide adown old Nilus, where he threads

485–88. Desmond King-Hele, ‘The influence of Erasmus Darwin on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley’, Le romantisme anglo-américain: Mélanges offerts à Louis Bonnerot (1971) 162, notes parallels with Darwin, The Economy of Vegetation i 127–30 (Darwin i 12): ‘Ride, with broad eye and scintillating hair,/The rapid Fire-ball through the midnight air’. 488. fire-balls] I.e. balls of lightning (OED 1a). roar] roll MT. 489–94. Reiman (2002) cps PU IV 186–8. 489–90. Turner 280 suggests the basis for the idea ‘that it is air, not love, that makes the world go round’ is Lucretius, De Re. Nat. v 510–16: principio magnus caeli si vortitur orbis, ex utraque polum parti premere aera nobis dicendum est extraque tenere et claudere utrimque; inde alium supra fluere atque intendere eodem quo volvenda micant aeterni sidera mundi; aut alium subter, contra qui subvehat orbem, ut fluvios versare rotas atque haustra videmus. (‘Firstly, if the great circle of heaven turns round, we must say that air presses on the pole at each end and holds it from without and shuts it in from both directions; then that another air flows above, and moves in the same direction in which roll the shining stars of the everlasting world; or else that another air flows below to lift up the circle in the opposite direction, just as we see rivers turn wheels and buckets.’) 491. win] I.e. ‘persuade’. 497–8. But her choice . . . old Nilus] See Reeve, The Progress of Romance ii 134: ‘Now it happened about three years after the death of Gebirus, that Charoba having embarked on board a small vessel, in which she was wont to take her pleasure upon the Nile by moon-light; went on shore with some of her attendants.’ 498. Nilus] Latin for the river Nile (see Ovid, Met. ii 254). where] Nbk 16, MT; when 1824.

548

500

shelley: selected poems Egypt and Ethiopia, from the steep Of utmost Axumè, until he spreads, Like a calm flock of silver-fleecèd sheep, His waters on the plain: and crested heads Of cities and proud temples gleam amid, And many a vapour-belted pyramid.

58

505 By Moeris and the Mareotid lakes, Strewn with faint blooms like bridal chamber floors, Where naked boys bridling tame water-snakes, Or charioteering ghastly alligators, Had left on the sweet waters mighty wakes 510 Of those huge forms — within the brazen doors

499–500. from the steep/Of utmost Axumè] Axum, a city 2100m above sea level in the mountains of Northern Ethiopia, was an important centre of trade between Africa and Egypt from the first century ad and is mentioned in Ptolemy, Geography IV ch. vii. Koller, ‘A Source for Portions of The Witch of Atlas’ 157, suggests S. had in mind the reference to envoys ‘of the Auxomitai’ in Heliodorus, Ethiopian Story x 27. 500–2. until he spreads his waters, . . . on the plain] The Nile Delta is described in numerous Gk sources including Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History I  xxxiii and xxxiv and Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon IV xi 3–5: ‘The Nile flows down in a single stream from Thebes of Egypt as far as Memphis . . . From that point it breaks up round the land, and three rivers are formed out of one; two streams discharge themselves on either side, while the middle one flows on in the same course as the unbroken river, and forms the Delta in between the two outer branches.’ 501. Cp. ‘wool-white as ocean foam’ in R&H (Longman ii, no. 144) 1092. 502–3. and crested heads . . . temples gleam amid] Cp. Achilles Latius, Leucippe and Clitophon V i 1, which describes ‘the splendid beauty’ of the city of Alexandria. 503. amid,] 1829, 1839, 1840; amid Nbk 16, 1824. 505. Moeris] Maeris 1824. According to Didorus Siculus, The Library of History I li 5, King Maeris excavated this lake, not far from Memphis, ‘which was remarkable for its utility and an undertaking of incredible magnitude’. Herodotus, Histories ii 149, describes it as ‘marvellous’ and as having ‘a circuit of three thousand six hundred furlongs, or sixty schoeni, which is as much as the whole seaboard of Egypt.’ In his edition of Histories (1998) 628, Robin Waterfield notes that the lake ‘was a natural formation, watered by the Nile, and considerably smaller than H says’. Mareotid] I.e. Lake Mareotis to the south of Alexandria, mentioned in Pliny, Hist. Nat. v 62. ‘Mareotic’ (OED) is the usual anglicized form whereas S.’s Latinism echoes ‘Mareotidos’ in Lucan, Pharsalia x 161 and ‘Mareotides’ in Virgil, Georgics ii 91. 506. floors,] Rossetti 1870; floors Nbk 16; floors; 1824. 507–8. Cp. Keats, Endymion iv 245–7: ‘Web-footed alligators, crocodiles,/Bearing upon their scaly backs, in files,/Plump infant laughers’. Hughes, ‘Shelley’s “Witch of Atlas” ’ 512 cps Landor, Gebir (1798) iv 151–2: ‘Crown’d were tame crocodiles, and boys whiterobed/Guided their creaking crests across the stream.’ 507. water-snakes] Cp. Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner l. 273.

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Of the great Labyrinth slept both boy and beast, Tired with the pomp of their Osirian feast.

59

And where within the surface of the river The shadows of the massy temples lie, 515 And never are erased — but tremble ever Like things which every cloud can doom to die, Through lotus-pav’n canals, and wheresoever The works of man pierced that serenest sky With tombs, and towers, and fanes,’twas her delight 520 To wander in the shadow of the night.

60

With motion like the spirit of that wind Whose soft step deepens slumber, her light feet Passed through the peopled haunts of human kind,

511. Labyrinth] A reference to the giant labyrinth near lake Moeris described in Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History I lxvi 3–6 and Herodotus, Histories ii 148: ‘Moreover they resolved to preserve the memory of their names by some joint enterprise; and having so resolved they made a labyrinth, a little way beyond the lake Moeris and near the place called the City of Crocodiles. I have myself seen it, and indeed no words can tell its wonders’. 512. the pomp of their Osirian feast.] In Herodotus, Histories ii 42 and 144, and in Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History I xi 3, the Egyptian God Osiris is identified with the Gk God Dionysus. The sense conveyed is of a Bacchic pageant (see ‘pomp’ OED 2), of the kind whose mythical origins are explained in The Library of History I xxii 6: ‘Now the parts of the body of Osiris which were found were honoured with burial, they say, in the manner described above, but the privates, according to them, were thrown by Typhon into the Nile because no one of his accomplices was willing to take them. Yet Isis thought them as worthy of divine honours as the other parts, for, fashioning a likeness of them, she set it up in the temples, commanded that it be honoured, and made it the object of the highest regard and reverence in the rites and sacrifices accorded to the god. Consequently the Greeks too, inasmuch as they received from Egypt the celebrations of the orgies and the festivals connected with Dionysus, honour this member in both the mysteries and the initiatory rites and sacrifices of this god, giving it the name “phallus.” ’ The first instance of ‘Osirian’ cited in OED is Keats, Endymion iv 257. 513–16. Cp. the almost identical imagery in OL 76–9 and Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa ll. 13–16. 517. lotus-pav’n canals] Herodotus, Histories ii 92, notes that ‘When the river [Nile] is in flood and overflows the plains, many lilies, which the Egyptians call lotus, grow in the water.’ There are many references to man-made Egyptian canals in Histories (e.g. ii 17). The phrasing is Miltonic: cp. ‘coral-paven bed’ in Milton, Comus l. 885. 519. With tombs, and towers, and fanes,] In forms is written above two canc. drafts of the start of this line in Nbk 16, With tower-crested cities and With city-crested towers; With tower-crested cities MT. fanes] fane 1839, 1840. 521–4. Cp. Hymn to Intellectual Beauty ll. 4–7. 521. spirit] Cited in OED 15a to illustrate the meaning of ‘spirit’ as ‘a movement of the air; a wind; a breath’.

550

shelley: selected poems

Scattering sweet visions from her presence sweet, 525 Through fane and palace-court and labyrinth mined With many a dark and subterranean street Under the Nile; through chambers high and deep She passed, observing mortals in their sleep.

61

A pleasure sweet doubtless it was to see 530 Mortals subdued in all the shapes of sleep. Here lay two sister-twins in infancy; There, a lone youth who in his dreams did weep; Within, two lovers linked innocently In their loose locks which over both did creep 535 Like ivy from one stem; — and there lay calm, Old age with snow-bright hair and folded palm.

62

But other troubled forms of sleep she saw, Not to be mirrored in a holy song — Distortions foul of supernatural awe, 540 And pale imaginings of visioned wrong, And all the code of custom’s lawless law Written upon the brows of old and young: ‘This,’ said the wizard maiden, ‘is the strife Which stirs the liquid surface of man’s life.’

63

545 And little did the sight disturb her soul — We, the weak mariners of that wide lake Where’er its shores extend or billows roll, Our course unpiloted and starless make O’er its wild surface to an unknown goal —

526–7. subterranean street/Under the Nile] On the underground excavations of the Egyptians, see Herodotus, Histories ii 125. 534–5. which over both did creep/Like ivy from one stem] The likeness of the lovers’ hair to a single stem of ivy has Ovidian overtones. Cp. the likening of Salmacis’s entwining of Hermaphroditus in Met. iv 365: ‘utve solent hederae longos intexere truncos’ (‘as the ivy oft-times embraces great trunks of trees’). 535. calm,] calm Nbk 16. ‘The comma . . . indicates that “calm” is to be taken adverbially.’ (Locock 1911) 536. folded palm.] I.e. hands clasped together. 542. brows] brow MT. 544. liquid] ‘having no determinate shape’ (in the sense used of material substances, OED I 1a). 546–49. These lines recall Lines Written among the Euganean Hills ll. 1–26. 547. Where’er] Where in Nbk 16. 549. wild] wide MT, 1834, 1839, 1840, 1847.

47  the witch of atlas 550

551

But she in the calm depths her way could take, Where in bright bowers immortal forms abide, Beneath the weltering of the restless tide.

64

And she saw princes couched under the glow Of sunlike gems; and round each temple-court 555 In dormitories ranged, row after row, She saw the priests asleep — all of one sort, For all were educated to be so. — The peasants in their huts, and in the port The sailors she saw cradled on the waves, 560 And the dead lulled within their dreamless graves.

65

And all the forms in which those spirits lay Were to her sight like the diaphanous Veils, in which those sweet ladies oft array Their delicate limbs, who would conceal from us 565 Only their scorn of all concealment: they Move in the light of their own beauty thus. But these and all now lay with sleep upon them, And little thought a Witch was looking on them.

66

She all those human figures breathing there 570 Beheld as living spirits — to her eyes The naked beauty of the soul lay bare, And often through a rude and worn disguise She saw the inner form most bright and fair — And then, she had a charm of strange device, 575 Which, murmured on mute lips with tender tone,

552. weltering] S. seems to have in mind Miltonic usages that convey a sense of rolling or tumbling about as in Milton, Lycidas l. 13 (‘welter to the parching wind’) and Paradise Lost i 78 (‘weltering by his side’). 561–6. Cp. Alastor ll. 175–7 and PU II v 54–5 and notes. Rognoni cps DP: ‘The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn.’ (Reiman (2002) para. 12) 563. those sweet] Written above lovely canc. in Nbk 16. 575. Which,] 1840; Which Nbk 16, 1824.

552

shelley: selected poems Could make that spirit mingle with her own.

67

Alas, Aurora! what wouldst thou have given For such a charm, when Tithon became grey? Or how much, Venus, of thy silver Heaven 580 Wouldst thou have yielded, ere Proserpina Had half (oh! why not all?) the debt forgiven Which dear Adonis had been doomed to pay, To any witch who would have taught you it? The Heliad doth not know its value yet.

577–84. In each of the classical myths alluded to in this stanza, the divine female lovers are tormented by the mortality of those they love. The Witch’s ‘charm’ (l. 578) seems to have the power to overcome this pain. Lines 577–8 refer to the story of Aurora (Latin for the Gk goddess of the dawn, Eos), who loves the mortal Tithonus, told in the Homeric Hymn To Aphrodite 218–38. She asks Zeus to grant him immortality but omits to request his eternal youth and, ultimately repulsed by him, locks him away. The singer in Theocritus, Idyll xv 100–45, tells of the only temporary (hence ‘half (oh! why not all?)’ in l. 581) return of Adonis to Aphrodite from Persephone in the underworld. Aphrodite had fallen in love with him then entrusted him to Persephone who, entranced, refused to give him back so, after Zeus’ arbitration, Adonis spent part of his time with each. 584. Many commentaries (Reiman (2002), Rognoni, Major Works) suggest that by ‘The Heliad’ the Witch herself is referred to, but a more extended reference seems possible. The Heliad were sisters of Phaethon, son of Helios, the sun-god (and therefore, like the Witch, daughters of the sun) and Clymene, who is killed by Zeus after losing control of his father’s chariot. The story of their lament for Phaeton ending with them being transformed into trees which perpetually drip amber is told in Ovid, Met. ii 340–66. It concludes: inde fluunt lacrimae, stillataque sole rigescunt de ramis electra novis, quae lucidus amnis excipit et nuribus mittit gestanda Latinis. (‘Still their tears flow on, and these tears, hardened into amber by the sun, drop down from the newmade trees. The clear river receives them and bears them onward, one day to be worn by the brides of Rome.’) In this line ‘yet’ (meaning ‘still’) seems to echo ‘inde’ in Ovid, Met. ii 364. 585–92. Cp. the story of the young Charikleia, adopted daughter of Charikles, in Heliodorus, Ethiopian Story ii 33: ‘in physical beauty she is so superior to all other women that all eyes, Greek and foreign alike, turn towards her, and wherever she appears in the temples, colonnades, and squares, she is like a statue of ideal beauty that draws all eyes and hearts to itself. Yet, for all her qualities, she is, for me, the source of a pain that will not heal. You see, she has renounced marriage and is resolved to stay a virgin all her life; she has dedicated herself to the sacred service of Artemis’ (trans. Morgan).

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68

585 ’Tis said in after times her spirit free Knew what love was, and felt itself alone — But holy Dian could not chaster be Before she stooped to kiss Endymion, Than now this lady — like a sexless bee 590 Tasting all blossoms, and confined to none — Among those mortal forms, the wizard-maiden Passed with an eye serene and heart unladen.

69

To those she saw most beautiful, she gave Strange panacea in a crystal bowl. 595 They drank in their deep sleep of that sweet wave, And lived thenceforward as if some control Mightier than life, were in them; and the grave Of such, when death oppressed the weary soul, Was as a green and overarching bower 600 Lit by the gems of many a starry flower.

585–6. ’Tis said in after times . . . Knew what love was] See Grabo, The Meaning of ‘The Witch of Atlas’ 48: ‘If indeed the story of the Witch grew from Shelley’s imaginings when he conceived the story of Prometheus, and if herein he is depicting the youth of Asia, goddess of love and beauty in Nature, the love she knew later was for Prometheus, the mind of man, when, in the Promethean day, man and nature were united.’ 587–8. holy Dian .  .  . Endymion] This legend is summarised thus in ‘Edward Baldwin’ [William Godwin], The Pantheon: or Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome (1806) 260–1: ‘Diana is said to have fallen in love . . . though she were the Goddess of Chastity: the object of her flame was Endymion, a shepherd of Caria: she saw him naked on the top of mount Latmos, and thought she had never beheld so beautiful a creature: as she was the most bashful and modest of existing beings, she cast him into a deep sleep, that she might kiss him unseen and undiscovered even by him she loved: every night she visited the beautiful shepherd, whom Jupiter endowed with perpetual youth, and every night she loved him better than the night before’. 589. a sexless bee] An allusion to Virgil, Georgics iv 197–202, in which the female bee is described as procreating unaided by the male. 593–5. To those . . . of that sweet wave] Cp. the account of Isis in Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History I xxv 2–3: ‘As for Isis, the Egyptians say that she was the discoverer of many health-giving drugs and was greatly versed in the science of healing; consequently, now that she has attained immortality, she finds her greatest delight in the healing of mankind and gives aid in their sleep to those who call upon her, plainly manifesting both her very presence and her beneficence towards men who ask her help.’ 594. panacea] Here used in its original Gk sense of a plant reputed to have universal healing powers. 595. wave] I.e. ‘liquid’ (Concordance). 596. thenceforward] Nbk 16; henceforward MT; thenceforth 1824, 1839, 1840. 597. grave] grant MT. 598. oppressed] I.e. ‘crushed’ or ‘put an end to’ (OED 1). A usage that was rare in S.’s day, deriving from the Latin opprimere meaning ‘to crush’ or ‘to overpower’. 599. Was as a] Was a MT, 1834, 1839, 1840.

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For on the night that they were buried, she Restored the embalmer’s ruining, and shook The light out of the funeral lamps, to be A mimic day within that deathy nook; 605 And she unwound the woven imagery Of second childhood’s swaddling bands, and took The coffin, its last cradle, from its niche, And threw it with contempt into a ditch.

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And there the body lay, age after age, 610 Mute, breathing, beating, warm, and undecaying Like one asleep in a green hermitage, With gentle smiles about its eyelids playing, And living in its dreams beyond the rage Of death or life; while they were still arraying 615 In liveries ever new, the rapid, blind And fleeting generations of mankind.

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And she would write strange dreams upon the brain Of those who were less beautiful, and make All harsh and crooked purposes more vain

601. that] when MT. 602–3. shook . . . of] ‘Borrowed the light from’ (OED). 602. the embalmer’s ruining] ‘Ruining’ is an ironical way of glossing the Egyptian practice of preserving dead bodies, described in Herodotus, Histories ii 86–8, and Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History I xci 5–7. embalmer’s] Nbk 16; embalmers 1824; embalmers’ 1829, 1839, 1840. 603. lamps] lamp MT. The reading in Nbk 16 is ambiguous: Locock Ex gives lamp and BSM gives lamps. 604. deathy] deathly Locock Ex, BSM (doubtful readings of Nbk 16), MT, Locock 1911, Reiman (2002). The word ‘deathy’ is frequent in Southey’s verse (see, e.g., Thalaba ii 32: ‘The cheeks were deathy dark’) and appears to have been coined by him. 609–16. Rognoni cps this and the two preceding stanzas with the account in Herodotus, Histories iii 24 of Ethiopian coffins: ‘said to be made of alabaster, as I shall describe: they make the dead body to shrink, either as the Egyptians do or in some other way, then cover it with gypsum and paint it all as far as they may in the likeness of the living man; then they set it within a hollow pillar of alabaster, which they dig in abundance from the ground, and it is easily wrought; the body can be seen in the pillar through the alabaster, no evil stench nor aught unseemly proceeding from it, and showing clearly all its parts, as if it were the dead man himself.’ 609. there the body] then bodies MT (body is altered from bodies in Nbk 16). 612. smiles] Nbk 16, MT; sleep 1824. 614–16. arraying . . . generations of mankind.] The vocabulary anticipates Ye hasten to the [grave]! What seek ye there (Longman iii, no. 356). 618. were less beautiful] were beautiful MT.

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Than in the desert is the serpent’s wake Which the sand covers — all his evil gain The miser in such dreams would rise and shake Into a beggar’s lap; — the lying scribe Would his own lies betray without a bribe.

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625 The priests would write an explanation full, Translating hieroglyphics into Greek, How the god Apis really was a bull, And nothing more; and bid the heralds stick The same against the temple doors, and pull 630 The old cant down; they licensed all to speak Whate’er they thought of hawks, and cats, and geese, By pastoral letters to each diocese.

620. desert] desarts MT. 625–6. These lines suggest an antithesis between the language of credulous forms of worship and Greek, ‘[f]or S . . .  . the language of enlightened thought.’ (Major Works) 627–8. How the god .  .  . And nothing more] A  reference to king Cambyses (530–522 bc), who is described by Herodotus in Histories iii 38 as ‘very mad; else he would never have set himself to deride religion and custom.’ These lines refer to an instance, which no doubt appealed to S., in the account in Histories iii 28–9 of his attitude to the appearance of Apis, or Epaphus, ‘a calf born of a cow that can never conceive again . . .  . When the priests led Apis in, Cambyses — for he was well-nigh mad — drew his dagger and made to stab the calf in the belly, but smote the thigh; then laughing he said to the priests: “Wretched wights, are these your gods, creatures of flesh and blood that can feel weapons of iron? that is a god worthy of the Egyptians. But for you, you shall suffer for making me your laughing-stock.” So saying he bade those, whose business it was, to scourge the priests well, and to kill any other Egyptian whom they found holiday-making. So the Egyptian festival was ended, and the priests were punished, and Apis lay in the temple and died of the blow on the thigh.’ Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History I xxi 10 refers to ‘the sacred bulls, which are given the names Apis and Mnevis, and the worship of them as gods’. 627. Apis] 1839, 1840; Apis, Nbk 16, 1824. bull] Major Works suggests S. ‘may pun on “bull” meaning “expression containing contradiction in terms” (OED).’ 628–32. The language invites parallels not just with Luther specifically, as suggested in Colwell, ‘Shelley’s “Witch of Atlas” and the Mythic Geography of the Nile’ 89, but by zealots of the Reformation more generally. 628. bid] Altered from bade in Nbk 16; bade MT. heralds] Nbk 16; herald 1824. 629. doors] walls MT. 631. hawks, and cats, and geese] The treatment of these animals, each of which was sacred to the Egyptians, is described in detail in Herodotus, Histories ii 67 and 72 and Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History I lxxxiii — lxxxvii. ‘Geese’ may be an irreverent allusion to the Egyptian worship of another sacred animal, the ibis.

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The king would dress an ape up in his crown And robes, and seat him on his glorious seat, 635 And on the right hand of the sunlike throne Would place a gaudy mock-bird to repeat The chatterings of the monkey. — Every one Of the prone courtiers crawled to kiss the feet Of their great Emperor when the morning came, 640 And kissed — alas, how many kiss the same!

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The soldiers dreamed that they were blacksmiths, and Walked out of quarters in somnambulism; Round the red anvils you might see them stand Like Cyclopses in Vulcan’s sooty abysm, 645 Beating their swords to ploughshares; — in a band The jailors sent those of the liberal schism

633–40. Baker, ‘Spenser and The Witch of Atlas’ 478 cps the Ape in Spenser, Prosopopoia or Mother Hubberds Tale ll. 1059–63 and ll. 1082–5: Then freely vp those royall spoyles he tooke, Yet at the Lyons skin he inly quooke; But it dissembled, and vpon his head The Crowne, and on his backe the skin he did, And the false Foxe him helped to array . . .  . So he perswaded them, with homage due Themselues to humble to the Ape prostrate, Who gently to them bowing in his gate, Receyued them with chearefull entertayne. The behaviour of the infant Charoba, later Queen of Egypt, in Landor, Gebir (1798) v 117–26, is likewise disrespectful of the trappings of monarchy. 634. his glorious seat] I.e. royal throne. 636. mock-bird] Mocking-bird. 638. prone] The context gives the adjective Miltonic overtones. Cp. the devils’ attitude towards Satan in Paradise Lost ii 477–8: ‘Towards him they bend/With awful reverence prone’. 642. somnambulism;] Rossetti 1870; somnambulism, 1824; somnambulism Nbk 16. 643–4. The Cyclops forge iron on anvils in Vulcan’s cave under Etna in Virgil, Aeneid viii 451–3 and Georgics iv 173–5. 643. Around the red hot anvils you might see them stand, MT. 645. Beating their swords to ploughshares] See Isaiah ii 4 and Micah iv 3. 646. sent] Written above let canc. in Nbk 16. schism] OED identifies this and the use of the word in PB3 97 as a nonce, meaning ‘a faction, party; a set or class of people’.

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Free through the streets of Memphis, much, I wis, To the annoyance of king Amasis.

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And timid lovers who had been so coy 650 They hardly knew whether they loved or not, Would rise out of their rest, and take sweet joy, To the fulfilment of their inmost thought; And when next day the maiden and the boy Met one another, both, like sinners caught, 655 Blushed at the thing which each believed was done Only in fancy — till the tenth moon shone;

647. Memphis] The capital of ancient Egypt, described in Herodotus, Histories ii 99 and Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History I l 3–7. I wis] certainly (OED notes that by separation of the two elements of iwis and use of capital I the word became used erroneously to mean ‘I wist’ or ‘I know’). An example of a lighthearted poetical precedent is Thomson, Castle of Indolence ii 431–2: ‘ “To prove it were, I wis, /T o prove the beauteous World excels the brute Abyss.” ’ The word is also used in Coleridge, Christabel l. 92 and l. 294. 648. king Amasis] The character and reign of King Amasis are summarised in Herodotus, Histories ii 172–82, and Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History I lx 1–2. The latter refers to his tyrannical tendencies and its consequences: ‘Amasis . . . ruled the masses of the people with great harshness; many he punished unjustly, great numbers he deprived of their possessions, and towards all his conduct was without exception contemptuous and arrogant. Now for a time his victims bore up under this, being unable in any way to protect themselves against those of greater power; but when Actisanes, the king of the Ethiopians, led an army against Amasis, their hatred seized the opportunity and most of the Egyptians revolted.’ 649–56. Turner 280 cps Lucretius, De Re. Nat. iv 1030–6: tum quibus aetatis freta primitus insinuatur semen, ubi ipsa dies membris matura creavit, conveniunt simulacra foris e corpore quoque, nuntia praeclari voltus pulchrique coloris, qui ciet inritans loca turgida semine multo, ut quasi transactis saepe omnibu’ rebu’ profundant fluminis ingentis fluctus vestemque cruentent. (‘Then other boys feed the heated waves of youth with the first insertion of seed created at that very time in their limbs and encounter the images of some outside body which highlight a lovely face with a beautiful complexion. This excites and arouses those parts swelling with abundant seed so that, just as if the act were being performed in reality, they pour out huge waves of a flood and stain their clothes.’ trans. Gerald Bevan) Turner notes that this passage is paraphrased in DMAG: ‘If we consider the facility with which certain phenomena connected with sleep, at the age of puberty, associate themselves with those images which are the objects of our waking desires . . .’ (Notopoulos 411). 652. inmost] utmost MT.

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And then the Witch would let them take no ill: Of many thousand schemes which lovers find, The Witch found one, — and so they took their fill 660 Of happiness in marriage warm and kind. Friends who by practice of some envious skill, Were torn apart, a wide wound, mind from mind! She did unite again with visions clear Of deep affection and of truth sincere.

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665 These were the pranks she played among the cities Of mortal men, and what she did to sprites And Gods, entangling them in her sweet ditties

657–64. This stanza presents love as informing friendship but not sexual desire. Cp. the speech of Protogenes in Plutarch, Eroticus (‘The Dialogue on Love’) 750d—750e: ‘there normally exists in men and women a need for the pleasure derived from each other; but when the impulse that drives us to this goal is so vigorous and powerful that it becomes torrential and almost out of control, it is a mistake to give the name Love to it. Love, in fact, it is that attaches himself to a young and talented soul and through friendship brings it to a state of virtue; but the appetite for women we are speaking of, however well it turns out, has for net gain only an accrual of pleasure in the enjoyment of a ripe physical beauty . . .  . The object of desire is, in fact, pleasure and enjoyment; while Love, if he loses the hope of inspiring friendship, has no wish to remain cultivating a deficient plant which has come to its prime, if the plant cannot yield the proper fruit of character to produce friendship and virtue.’ 658. find,] Rossetti 1870; find Nbk 16, 1824. 666–69. what she did to sprites . . . another time] The implication is that the pranks played by the Witch involve amorous adventures that might be unseemly to recount. Cp. Jonathan Swift, Cadenus and Vanessa (1713) ll. 818–27: But what Success Vanessa met, Is to the World a Secret yet: Whether the Nymph, to please her Swain, Talks in a high Romantick Strain; Or whether he at last descends To like with less Seraphick Ends; Or, to compound the Business, whether They temper Love and Books together; Must never to Mankind be told, Nor shall the conscious Muse unfold.

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To do her will, and show their subtle slights, I will declare another time; for it is 670 A tale more fit for the weird winter nights Than for these garish summer days, when we Scarcely believe much more than we can see.

48  Sonnet: Political Greatness Date. Mary placed this sonnet amongst ‘Poems written in 1821’ in 1839 iv 147. However, Webb (1995), Rognoni, Reiman (2002) and Major Works, suggest it was drafted between July and September 1820 on account of the reference to the events of that summer in the title of the intermediate fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1: Sonnet To the Republic of Benevento. While the poem was very likely drafted and fair-copied in August 1820, it was copied for the press in February 1821, when a distinct set of historical circumstances lent weight to the finally assigned title, Sonnet: Political Greatness, the last of several S. had given it at various stages in its evolution. It was published as the second in a sequence of four sonnets in 1824 223 under the heading Sonnet II. Political Greatness (the rest are identified by number alone). MS evidence. Three MS sources are extant. There are two drafts in ink on facing pages in Nbk 17 pp. 151 rev.—150 rev. (reproduced with transcription in BSM vi 396–99) The first, on p. 151 rev., includes the opening six lines and part of the seventh as well as a draft of the second half of line 12 and the first half of line 13. There is a subsequent draft of the entire sonnet on p. 150 rev. beneath an earlier and unrelated jotting in pencil, The lakes are calm, & the rivers. This complete draft shows S.’s uncertainty about a title. He first wrote The Republican then altered it to The true Republican. The whole was then cancelled and Rex sui (meaning ‘King of himself’) written above. It is difficult to concur with Dawson (90 and n. 1), who reads the latter two titles as ‘The Eng[lish?] Republican’ and ‘Rex [Im?]’ and, in respect of the last, assumes that S. ‘probably intended to write “Rex Imperator”, the title of the British monarch.’ In lighter ink than the body of the poem, all three titles were evidently added after it had been drafted. B. C. Barker-Benfield argues that ‘the close proximity [in Nbk 17] of an abortive address “To the Illustrious assertors of Neapolitan Liberty” ([p. 148 rev.]) supports the sonnet’s accepted context and date [i.e. July — September  1820].’ (Shelley’s Guitar 153) Such a dating for these drafts is supported by Adamson who, however, also notes that the draft of Epipsychidion also on p. 148 rev. ‘clearly written in after the fragment was entered’ establishes a terminus ante quem of February 1821 for the fragmentary address which ‘[b]y extension . . . could safely be applied to the sonnet.’ (BSM vi 26) Reasons are advanced for August 1820 being the date of these drafts. 668. and show their subtle slights] I.e. the Witch exposes the trickery performed by spirits and gods on one another. ‘Slights’ is used in the sense of OED ‘sleight’, n.1 6b ‘A feat of jugglery or legerdemain; a trick or action performed with great dexterity, esp. so quickly as to deceive the eye’, as in Faerie Queene V ix 13 l. 8. 669–72. Cp. Faerie Queene II Proem iii ll. 4–5: ‘Why then should witlesse man so much misweene/That nothing is but that which he hath seene?’ 671. garish summer days] Cp. Milton, Il Penseroso l. 141: ‘Hide me from day’s garish eye’.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-48

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There is an intermediate fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1 entitled Sonnet: To the Republic of Benevento (reproduced in MYRS v 149). Donald Reiman notes that it ‘shows revisions made by [S.] on two separate occasions, some at the time he was copying the sonnet (from a source yet to be identified) and others later, when he wrote smaller with a finer pen point.’ (MYRS v 193) Reiman posits that this fair copy was ‘made between July and September 1820’ (MYRS v p. xxxix), a dating refined by Barker-Benfield who places it in ‘late summer 1820’ (Shelley’s Guitar 153). But Reiman’s supposition that the Harvard Nbk 1 version is copied ‘from a source yet to be identified’ is curious since it seems fair to assume it is based on the Nbk 17 draft. Clearly adopting revisions made in Harvard Nbk 1, the third witness, in Box 2, is a neat copy in S.’s hand that is notably disciplined in its pointing and was clearly intended for the press. The Box 2 version is on the verso of a leaf of flimsy paper (f. 132) on the recto of which, in Mary’s hand, is a fair copy of Ode to Naples (Longman iii 625–48no. 343) ll. 151–76. This leaf was originally part of a home-made booklet of the kind used by S. when transcribing poems to be sent by post for publication in England. Of the Box 2 version, reproduced with transcription in BSM xxii, Pt. II, 318–19, it is worth emphasising Barker-Benfield’s insight that ‘The vertical deletion-stroke in ink down the centre of the whole sonnet was added later, after the sheet had been folded and unfolded.’ (Shelley’s Guitar 153) This affirms that the ‘deletion-stroke’ does not in any sense constitute an authorially sanctioned cancellation of this version of the poem. Rather, it is probably the work of a compositor since the visible folds in the leaf suggest the booklet had been enclosed in S.’s letter to Ollier of 16 February and that this is the sonnet referred to there as accompanying Ode to Naples and Epipsychidion (L ii 262). Alan Weinberg’s comment that ‘[t]he appearance of the sonnet after the ode suggests that S intended the shorter poem on Naples to complement the longer one on the same subject’ (BSM xxii, Pt II, 27) is supported by the title S. first gave to the Box 2 version: Sonnet to Naples. He subsequently cancelled ‘to Naples’ and wrote ‘Political greatness’ beneath. The sonnet’s non-publication in S.’s lifetime may be explained by the failure of Olliers [sic] Literary Miscellany, a magazine in which S. hints that Ode to Naples and this sonnet could be placed in a further letter to Ollier of 22 February (see headnote to Ode to Naples). It is virtually certain that Sonnet: Political Greatness is referred to in this last letter, not Ye hasten to the [grave]! What seek ye there (Longman iii, no. 356) as Jones asserts in L ii 269 n. 2. It seems that, at her request, Box 2 f. 132 had been returned to Mary by Ollier in late 1823 since, though the pointing is different, it forms the basis of 1824. Context. The sonnet requires situating within two sets of circumstances. The first relates to its Harvard Nbk 1 title and concerns the position of Benevento, a small Ecclesiastical State thirty miles or so northeast of Naples, in the summer of 1820 relative to the constitutional government in Naples. The second pertains to its Box 2 title and refers to the crisis in the Italian peninsula as a whole in February 1821. Richard Keppel Craven, who witnessed events in Naples in the summer of 1820, noted that ‘the inhabitants of Pontecorvo and Benevento could not be debarred from all intercourse with those of the surrounding districts: and the fire which had thus been silently kindled was not likely to be extinguished by the inefficient hand of the vicar of pontifical authority.’ (A Tour through the Southern Provinces of the Kingdom of Naples (1821) 448) Soon after the constitutional revolution that began on 1 July (discussed in the headnote to the Ode to Naples), Andrea Valiante, a hero of the uprising in Benevento

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in 1799 (prompted by the Neapolitan revolution of that year), returned to occupy its fortress, and the Papal Delegate fled (Galignani’s Messenger (5 August 1820) 4). However, for strategic reasons, the constitutional government in Naples refused the requests of Benevento and Pontecorvo for annexation. Notwithstanding this, on 28 August, le Constitutionnel described Benevento and Pontecorvo in language that resonates directly with the Harvard Nbk 1 title as ‘complètement organisés en petites républiques’ (3). Given that news of Benevento’s peculiar position in relation to the constitutional government in Naples had been conveyed through newspapers S. is known to have read such as Galignani’s Messenger and le Constitutionnel by mid- to late August, it is likely that the sonnet was drafted and an intermediate fair copy made during that period, possibly at the same time as Ode to Naples was drafted. Furthermore, it may be that when the intermediate fair copy was made, S. intended the sonnet to be published, like Ode to Naples, as a means to raise consciousness among the British public of the situation in southern Italy, which was one of fragile optimism rather than crisis. Had it been submitted for publication with its Harvard Nbk 1 title, its purpose would have been to promote the cause of Valiante and his citizens in their tenuous hold upon republican autonomy and to exhort them to prefer such autonomy to association with the Neapolitan constitutionalist government, which had rejected their advances and was anyway tainted because by definition it was constitutionally premised on monarchical rule. The reprinting of Sonnet: Political Greatness in a journal dedicated to the imprisoned republican Richard Carlile, The Newgate Monthly Magazine; or Calendar of Men, Things, and Opinions 2: 8 (1 April 1826) 343–4, indicates a constituency of early readers who understood it as a republican poem. The neat copy of the sonnet was done under a completely different, less sanguine, more urgent set of circumstances from the viewpoint of those who supported the constitutionalists’ cause. S.’s letter to Peacock of 15 February 1821, the day before the final version of the sonnet was sent to Ollier, conveys the sense of crisis at this time as the Neapolitan and Austrian armies prepared for battle (L ii 261–2). The letter he wrote three days later to Claire, who had been living in Florence since October 1820, ‘repeats very closely what was said in the sonnet’ (GM), and is evidently a reply to a letter from her mentioning the visit by the improvvisatore Tommaso Sgricci recorded in her journal entry for 6 February: ‘Sgricci calls. He says the Neapolitans — those few who were for the Constitution cried Viva la Costernazione [Long live Consternation] instead of Costituzione [Constitution]’ (Claire Jnl 207–8): I hate the cowardly envy which prompts such base stories as Sgricci’s about the Neapolitans: a set of slaves who dare not to imitate the high example of clasping even the shadow of freedom, alledge the ignorance?[&] excesses of a populace, which oppression has made savages in sentiment & understanding. That the populace of the city of Naples are brutal, who denies to be [?] they cannot improvise tragedies as Sgricci can, but is it certain that under no excitement they would be incapable of more enthusiasm for their country? Besides it is not of them we speak, but of the people of the Kingdom of Naples, the cultivators of the soil; whom a sudden & great impulse might awaken into citizens & men, as the French & Spaniards have been awakened, & may render instruments of a system of future social life before which the existing anarchies of Europe will be dissolved & absorbed. — . . . If the Austrians meet with

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shelley: selected poems any serious check — they?[may] as well at once retire, for the good Spirit of the World is out against them. — If they march?[to] Naples at once — let us hide our heads in sorrow, for our hopes of political good are vain. — (Transcription based on MA 406 ff. 2r — 3r, Morgan Library & Museum; it differs in certain respects from that in L ii 266–7)

GM’s claim that the sonnet in its February 1821 incarnation was ‘evidently provoked by Sgricci and directed at non-participating Italians’ is supported by the extract in which Sgricci is rebuked. Read in this light, the sonnet chides the Tuscans generally, not just Sgricci, for their unwillingness to assist the Neapolitan cause. Thus, the sonnet may be read as arguing that the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Naples and the Two Sicilies, viewed as beyond redemption by Tuscan liberals such as Sgricci, have the potential to redeem themselves and to achieve what the last sentence of the extract from S.’s letter to Claire, in an echo of the sonnet’s final title, calls ‘political good’. Moreover, this letter suggests, such a hopeful possibility has precedents in France in 1789 and Spain in 1808 and 1820. Internal divisions amongst the Italian revolutionaries had been widely reported in Britain by early 1821 and are contrasted with the unified Greek cause in the Examiner 694 (22 April 1821) 248: ‘The Neapolitans and Piedmontese have had to cope with disunion and treachery among themselves, as well as invading armies.’ On this subject, Medwin (Medwin (1913) 253) noted that S. ‘used to inveigh against’ Thomas Moore’s ‘cruel and ungenerous’ Lines written on hearing that the Austrians had entered Naples which begins ‘Ay — down to the dust with them, slaves as they are’, published after the defeat of the Neapolitans by the Austrian army in March 1821, which is contemptuous of what it sees as the constitutionalists’ pusillanimity. A biographical context for the sonnet has been suggested by Reiman (SC viii 1062–3 n. 12) who identifies an echo in ll. 10–11 of S.’s pained and private letter of 11 March 1820 to the Gisbornes which survives in a transcript by John Gisborne. In it, S. invites Maria to live with them temporarily as a means of alleviating Mary’s acute dejection since William’s death: Could she suddenly know a person in every way my equal, and hold close and perpetual communion with him, as a distinct being from herself; as a friend instead of a husband, she would obtain empire over herself that she might not make him miserable — In seeking to make another happy, she would find her own happiness — (David M. Stocking and Marion Kingston Stocking, ‘New Shelley Letters in a John Gisborne Notebook’, K-SMB xxxi (1980) 3) Sources. The poem’s assessment of tyranny, slavery and true kingship is indebted to a tradition of republican thought from Plato to Godwin. The last of the sonnet’s draft titles in Nbk 17, ‘Rex sui’, glosses the relationship between virtue and genuine sovereignty in Plato, Republic ix 580b — 580c: ‘the best man and the most righteous [is] the happiest, and . . . he is the one who is the most kingly and a king over himself ’. Such a concept of self-mastery has precedents in the description of man as ‘the King/Over himself ’ (PU III iv 196–7) and OL (Longman iii 378–418, no. 322) stanzas xvi and xvii. It is apparent too in Plato’s Phaedo 68e — 69e, a text S. translated in 1820 (see headnote to OL). That S. was preoccupied in 1820–1 with the perils of outward forms of majesty is evident from his transcription in

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Nbk 17 p. 1 of the following passage from Hippolytus’ speech to Theseus after he has been accused of incest with Phaedra in Euripides’ Hippolytus 1013–5: ἀλλ’ ὡς τυραννεῖν ἡδὺ τοῖσι σώϕροσιν; ἥκιστ’, ἐπεί τοι τὰς ϕρένας διέφθορεν θνητῶν ὅσοισιν ἁνδάνει μοναρχία. (‘But will you say that to be king is a tempting pleasure even to the virtuous? Not at all, since kingly power has corrupted the minds of all those who love it.’) Precedents for the poem’s argument about self-imposed obstacles to genuine liberty are to be found in Etienne de la Boétie’s Discours de la servitude volontaire (c. 1553), an essay that Claire translated, then fair-copied, in March and April 1820 (Claire Jnl 131–7). Milton’s writings, particularly Paradise Regained, which S. read while drafting OL (see headnote to that poem), are a source of the notion that personal liberty is inviolable. The same is true of the chapter ‘Of the Equality of Mankind’ in Political Justice, where Godwin argues: ‘There is no such disparity among the human race, as to enable one man to hold several other men in subjection, except so far as they are willing to be subject . . .  . all men are essentially independent. — ’ (i 144–5) Henrietta, the heroine of Godwin’s Mandeville: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century (1817) expresses these sentiments eloquently: ‘No man can be this slave unless he pleases. If by the caprice of fortune he has fallen as to externals into another’s power, still there is a point that at his own will he can reserve.’ (Godwin Novels vi 155) S. had long admired her speech, noting in ‘On Godwin’s Mandeville’, Examiner, 522 (28 December 1817) that ‘The pleadings of Henrietta to Mandeville, after his recovery from madness, in favour of virtue and benevolent energy, compose, in every respect, the most perfect and beautiful piece of writing of modern times.’ (Prose Works 278) The ‘Argument’ of the fifth stanza of Coleridge’s France: An Ode, a favourite of S.’s, in the revised version published in the Morning Post (14 October 1802) makes a similar point: ‘the Poet expresses his conviction, that those feelings, and that grand ideal, of freedom, which the mind attains by its contemplation of its individual nature, and of the sublime surrounding objects (see Stanza the First), do not belong to men, as a society, nor can possibly be either gratified, or realised, under any form of human government; but belong to the individual man, so far as he is pure, and inflamed with the love and adoration of God in Nature.’ (Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays (2001) i, Pt I, 464) Given its Italian orientation, it is likely that Vittorio Alfieri’s writings critiquing tyranny, particularly in the context of late-eighteenth-century Italy and France, inform S.’s sonnet. In his essay Della Tirannide (1787), Alfieri condemns political servitude of the kind S. identifies with Sgricci: ‘in a tyranny only those few deserve to be slaves who, though possessing the idea of liberty (and consequently the strength or the skill to try at least to regain it for themselves, and at the same time for others), yet prefer to live in servitude’ (trans. Julius A. Molinaro and Beatrice Corrigan (1961) 93). S. would also have been familiar with the way that Staël draws attention to the hope that Italy will one day free itself from enslavement in Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807): D’autres peuples, interrompit Corinne, ont supporté le joug comme nous, et ils ont de moins l’imagination qui fait rêver une autre destinée:   Servi siam sì, ma servi ognor frementi.

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shelley: selected poems Nous sommes esclaves, mais des esclaves toujours frémissants, dit Alfiéri, le plus fier de nos écrivains modernes. Il y a tant d’ame dans nos beaux arts, que peut-être un jour notre caractère égalera notre génie. (Ed. Simone Balayé (1985) 104)

The twelfth line of Alfieri’s Sonetto xviii in Il Misogallo (‘The Francophobe’) (1799) cited here, which translates as ‘We are slaves but ever restless slaves’, is a slogan eminently fitting in respect of the encouragement the Harvard Nbk 1 title of S.’s sonnet gives to Benevento’s quest for autonomy. Finally, Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV, while preoccupied with the modern loss of liberty and independence in the Italian peninsula, also makes a wider point in stanza xciv about the nature of human bondage. Form. The sonnet inverts the Petrarchan structure of octave then sestet and, as is the case with many of S.’s sonnets, its rhyme-scheme is unorthodox: abababcdcdcede. There is a late ‘turn’ in the middle of line 10. In its form, it bears comparison with Ozymandias (see headnote). Text from Box 2 f. 132v. Published in 1824 223; BSM xxii, Pt II, 318–19 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

Sonnet: Political Greatness

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Nor happiness, nor majesty nor fame, Nor peace nor strength, nor skill in arms or arts Shepherd those herds whom Tyranny makes tame: Verse echoes not one beating of their hearts; History is but the shadow of their shame;

¶ 48. T itle. Rex sui Nbk 17 (written above The true Republican canc. which is altered from The Republican); Sonnet To the Republic of Benevento Harvard Nbk 1; Sonnet Political greatness Box 2 (altered from Sonnet to Naples). Possible sources for the final title include Etienne de la Boétie, Discours de la servitude volontaire (c. 1553) ed. Simone Goyard-Fabre (1983) 143, where, identifying three kinds of tyrant who obtain their kingdoms either by force of arms, or by birth, or by popular election, it is said of the last: ‘Celui à qui le peuple a donné l’état devrait être, ce me semble, plus supportable, et le serait, comme je crois, n’était que dès lors qu’il se voit élevé par-dessus les autres, flatté par je ne sais quoi qu’on appelle la grandeur, il délibère de n’en bouger point’; Pope, Essay on Man iv 217–36; and the dialogue between Falkand and Caleb about Alexander the Great in Godwin, Things as They Are; Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) (Godwin Novels iii 98). 2. arms or arts] Cp. Jonson, ‘To Penshurst’ l. 98 and Paradise Regained iv 368. 3. Cp. OL 45. Shepherd] Written above Attend canc. in Nbk 17. tame:] tame. BSM. 4. echoes] Written after stains canc. in Nbk 17. 5. shadow] record Nbk 17.

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Art veils her glass, or from the pageant starts As to oblivion their blind millions fleet Staining that Heaven with obscene imagery Of their own likeness. What are numbers, knit By force or custom? Man, who man would be, Must rule the empire of himself; in it Must be supreme, establishing his throne On vanquished will; quelling the anarchy Of hopes and fears; being himself alone.

7. There are possible echoes here of Petrarch, De Vita Solitaria: ‘We who were wont to show the right road to others, now like blind men led by the blind — a token of impending ruin — are being rushed along dangerous ways, revolving in the orbit of strange examples, not knowing what we desire.’ (trans. Jacob Zeitlin (1924) 177) oblivion] Oblivion Nbk 17, Harvard Nbk 1. fleet] i.e. ‘move swiftly’ (OED 11). 8. that] its Nbk 17. 9–10. What are numbers, knit/By force or custom?] ‘Numbers’ may here carry the sense of ‘metrical periods or feet; lines, verses’ (OED 17a) as well as ‘the multitude’ (OED 8d). This question thus refers back to ‘Verse’ in l. 4 as well as to the herds’ ‘blind millions’ of l. 7. The question implies that art has the power to criticize tyranny and that poets have a responsibility to further liberty (cp. Ozymandias). 9. Of their own likeness] As clouds the pure sea Nbk 17. 10–14. Man . . . alone.] Cp. PU III iv 196–7 and I 492, OL 243–5, TL 211–13, and the section of On Christianity (1817) headed ‘Equality of Mankind’: ‘Too mean spirited and too feeble in resolve to attempt the conquest of their own evil passions, and of the difficulties of the material world, men sought dominion over their fellow men as an easy method to gain that apparent majesty and power which the instinct of their nature requires. Plato wrote the scheme of a republic in which laws should watch over the equal distribution of the external instruments of unequal power: honours, property, and [     ]. Diogenes devised a nobler and more worthy system of opposition to the system of slave and tyrant. He said, it is in the power of each individual to level the inequality which is the topic of the complaint of mankind. Let him be aware of his own worth and the station which he really occupies in the scale of moral beings. Diamonds and gold, palaces and sceptres derive their value from the opinion of mankind. The only sumptuary law which can be imposed on the use and fabrication of these instruments of mischief and deceit, these symbols of successful injustice, is the law of opinion. Every man possesses the power in this respect, to legislate for himself ’ (Prose Works 263–4). Sources of this idea in addition to those mentioned in the headnote include: Plato, Republic iv 431a (‘the soul of a man within him has a better part and a worse part, and the expression self-mastery means the control of the worse by the naturally better part’) and Phaedo 69b (‘courage and self-restraint and justice and, in short, true virtue exist only with wisdom’); Milton, A Second Defence of the English People (1654) in Complete Prose Works (1966) iv, pt I, 684 (‘he who cannot control himself . . . should not be his own master’); and Algernon Sidney, Discourses concerning Government (1763 [1698]), 349 (‘the name of slave can belong to no man, unless to him who is either born in the house of a master, bought, taken, subdued, or willingly gives his ear to be nailed to the post, and subjects himself to the will of another.’)

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49  ‘Ye hasten to the [grave]! What seek ye there’ No draft of this poem is known to exist. It is placed amongst ‘Poems written in 1820’ in 1839 iv 47. Given its theme, it is possible that it was composed in the summer or autumn of 1820 around the time of an anniversary of the death of one S. particularly mourned, i.e. 7 June (William), 24 September (Clara), 9 October (Fanny), or 9 November (Harriet). There is an intermediate fair copy in S.’s hand, entitled ‘Sonnet’, made for safe-keeping in Harvard Nbk 1 p.  151 (reproduced in facsimile in MYRS v 148). Donald Reiman suggests it was amongst those poems S. ‘last copied’ into this nbk (MYRS v, p. xxii). It is possible, though by no means certain, that a fair copy of the sonnet was enclosed in S.’s letter to Ollier of 10 November 1820 and intended for publication with J&M in a collection he described as ‘all my saddest verses raked up into one heap.’ (L ii 246; on the likely contents of this collection, which was never published, see BSM ix pp. liii — lv and headnotes to Stanzas written in dejection — December 1818, near Naples and Misery. — A Fragment (Longman ii 701–5, no. 202)) The neat holograph fair copy in the Morgan Library & Museum, MA 3223 f. 2v, with the title ‘Sonnet’ cancelled, on the recto of which is The Question — (Longman iii 265–8, no. 288), was apparently made from Harvard Nbk 1, probably in the summer of 1821. There is also a neat copy of the first line and the start of the second, mostly cancelled, at the top of MA 3223 f. 3v rev. The Question and Goodnight (also in MA 3223) were first published in The Literary Pocket-Book 1822 in November 1821 (see headnotes to those poems), this poem, under the title ‘Sonnet’, in The Literary Pocket-Book 1823 in 1822. All three appeared over the signature ‘Σ’ (the Greek letter sigma, equivalent of the English ‘S’). As Reiman notes, S. probably posted these fair copies to London in late summer or early autumn 1821, though whether to Hunt, editor of the Literary Pocket-Book, or to Ollier, its publisher, is not clear. However, Ollier, who effectively took over editorship of the final, 1823 Literary Pocket-Book on Hunt’s departure for Italy, must have handled the publication of the sonnet (MYRS viii 303). There are markings in pencil on MA 3223 f. 2v including cancel lines which Reiman interprets as ‘probably by Charles Ollier when he determined not to include all three of PBS’s poems in LPB for 1822.’ (MYRS viii 306) He also conjectures that MA 3223 may not have been copy-text for the Literary Pocket-Book printing, and that more probably ‘Ollier copied it out and sent his transcription to press at that time.’ (MYRS viii 306) The Literary Pocket-Book text is more heavily punctuated than MA 3223, and its printing of ‘living’ for ‘livery’ in line 3 results from a misreading of S.’s hand. For 1824, where it was published as ‘Sonnet I’, Mary used as base-text Harvard Nbk 1, the only version available to her. MA 3223 f. 2v is collated with The Literary Pocket-Book 1823, 1824, 1839 and Forman 1876–7, amongst other witnesses, in MYRS viii 320. The rhyme-scheme (abababccbdcdcc) and the position of the turn at the end of l. 5 are characteristically unconventional. Rognoni 1603, noting parallels with Alastor and The Two Spirits. An Allegory calls the sonnet ‘un carpe diem . . . ma cosí concitato, come se la voce della saggezza mondana da un istante all’altro potesse venir travolta dalla corsa dei suoi stessi, frenetici pensieri’ (‘a carpe diem, but so flustered as if the voice of worldly wisdom could at any moment be swept away in the rush of its very own frantic thoughts’). Text from the Morgan Library & Museum, MA 3223 f. 2v. A comma has been supplied in the first line. Other departures from the MS are recorded in the notes. Published in The Literary Pocket-Book; or, Companion for the Lover of Nature and Art. 1823 (1822) 112; MYRS viii 314–15 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-49

50  ‘rose leaves, when the rose is dead’

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Ye hasten to the [grave]! What seek ye there, Ye restless thoughts and busy purposes Of the idle brain, which the world’s livery wear? O thou quick Heart which pantest to possess All that pale Expectation feigneth fair! Thou vainly curious mind which wouldest guess Whence thou didst come, and whither thou must go, And all, that never yet was known, wouldst know; O whither hasten ye, that thus ye press With such swift feet life’s green and pleasant path Seeking alike from happiness and woe A refuge in the cavern of grey death? O Heart and Mind and Thoughts, what thing do you Hope to inherit in the grave below?

50  ‘Rose leaves, when the rose is dead’ [To —— (‘Music, when soft voices die’)] The sole holograph of this poem is a rough draft in Nbk 17 p. 154 rev. beneath sketches in dark ink of two trees. It comprises two stanzas, each of four lines, with some mostly cancelled lines below; it is untitled. The stanza beginning ‘Rose leaves, when the rose is dead’ is written directly beneath the tree sketches in the top half of the page in light ink, and is struck through with two diagonal lines in pencil. The one beginning ‘Music, when soft voices die’ is directly beneath; revised and completed in darker ink, it is crossed with a single diagonal pencil stroke and there is a dash stroke above and a cross beneath, both in ink. The draft at the foot of the page, also in dark ink, yields one uncancelled line and the first ¶ 49. 1. [grave]!] grave! Literary Pocket-Book; dead! Harvard Nbk 1; grave canc. is written above dead canc. in MA 3223 f. 2v; grave uncanc., is written and smudged above dead [canc.] — in MA 3223 f.3v (the smudging appears to have prompted the fresh start on f.2v). S. may have been uncertain about anticipating the word in the final line. 2. Ye restless] In darkest canc. (MYRS questionable reading of MA 3223 f. 3v). thoughts] Harvard Nbk 1; thoughts, MA 3223 f. 2v. 3. livery] living Literary Pocket-Book. 4. O] O, Literary Pocket-Book. Heart] Written above Sense canc. in MA 3223; heart Harvard Nbk 1, Literary Pocket-Book. 5. pale Expectation] anticipation Harvard Nbk 1; pale expectation Literary Pocket-Book. 7. Cp. John viii 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.’ 8. all, that] that which Harvard Nbk 1; all that Literary Pocket-Book. known,] known Literary Pocket-Book. know;] know, MYRS; know? Literary Pocket-Book. 9. O] O, Literary Pocket-Book. press] press, Literary Pocket-Book. 10. feet] Harvard Nbk 1; feet, MA 3223, Literary Pocket-Book. path] path, Literary Pocket-Book. 11. Seeking] Seeking, Literary Pocket-Book. woe] woe, Literary Pocket-Book. 13. O Heart and Mind and Thoughts,] O heart and mind and thoughts! Harvard Nbk 1; O, heart, and mind, and thoughts, Literary Pocket-Book.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-50

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word of another. Carlene A. Adamson suggests that the much-cancelled verses drafted in pencil reverso on p. 155 rev. and crossed through with two diagonal pencil strokes ‘demonstrate a syntactical similarity’ (BSM vi 43) to the unfinished stanza at the foot of p. 154 rev. In Mary Copybk 2 p. 35 (Massey 92), Mary transcribed the stanzas in the order in which they appear in Nbk 17, omitting to copy the uncancelled material at the foot of the page, and supplied a title, Memory. The poem was first published in 1824 under a different title, To —, apparently a tacit acknowledgement that Mary knew Teresa Viviani (‘Emilia’) to be the addressee. More significantly, the sequence of the two stanzas as they appear in Nbk 17 and Mary Copybk 2 was reversed in 1824. GM speculated that Mary made this transposition because the allusion to the first line of the wedding song (witnessed by Emilia, sister of the bride Hippolyta, amongst others) in The Two Noble Kinsmen I i (see note to ll. 1–4) was too painful, in the context of a poem she now acknowledged to be addressed to ‘Emilia’, if positioned in the opening line of the poem rather than at the start of its second stanza. Mary placed the poem among ‘Poems Written in 1821’ in 1839 iv 109. Rossetti noted publicly that ‘[it] seems feasible to regard these lovely lines as addressed to Emilia Viviani’ (Rossetti 1870 ii 572). The poem could have been written at any time in the first two weeks of December 1820 or between late December and mid-February 1821. Late December or early January is perhaps most likely, by which time S. and Teresa Viviani had almost certainly exchanged writings, not just letters. In his letters to Claire of ?2 and 16 January, S. refers to seeing ‘Emilia’ ‘sometimes’ (L ii 254, 256); however, according to Mary Jnl i 344, 348, visits were regular to the point of being almost daily between 26 December and 8 January. Further editorial interventions and hypotheses in the hundred years or so following the poem’s first publication complicated its textual history. Harry Buxton Forman conjoined the two stanzas ‘[a]t the suggestion of [Richard] Garnett’ in Forman 1876–7 (iv 77 n.). This practice, followed in Locock 1911 ii 249, flouts the clearly marked stanza divisions in Nbk 17. V&P 70, entirely misleadingly, published two lines from the facing page in Nbk 17 (p. 155) as ‘[t]he beginning of a new verse’ of the poem. One, Gentle visions what are you, is faintly written and, like the draft on p. 154, reverso; the other, And I have tamed the wild (Fragments connected with Epipsychidion) (Longman iv 190, no. 391 Appendix) U), in dark ink, is not. These lines are unconnected to one another, nor is there evidence that either belongs with this poem. From the 1960s onwards, the questioning of the authority of the text in 1824 has marked this poem out for particular scrutiny within the Shelley canon. Ever since Irving Massey first addressed the issues in ‘Shelley’s “Music, when soft voices die”: Text and Meaning’, JEGP lix (1960) 430–8, there has been vigorous debate about which of the versions in Nbk 17, Mary Copybk 2 and 1824 has the greatest claim to be authoritative textually. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., ‘Further comment on “Music, when soft voices die” ’, JEGP lx (1961) 296–8 defends robustly the aesthetic coherence as well as textual authority of the order of the two completed stanzas as they appear in Nbk 17. By contrast, and somewhat ingeniously, Chernaik 281–4 reconstructs the process of the poem’s composition in Nbk 17 in such a way as to authorise the sequence of the stanzas as they are presented in 1824. Judith Chernaik also raises the important question of ‘whether the poem is a fragment or a finished lyric’ (284), a matter taken up by Tatsuo Tokoo, ‘On Shelley’s “Music, when soft voices die” ’, Shikai [The Outlook] xxi (1984) 46–58, and by Adamson in BSM vi 41–3 who both argue that the draft at the foot of Nbk 17 p. 154 rev. is the opening of a third stanza. The text in Timothy Webb, ed., Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selected Poems (1977) 162–3 and Webb (1995) 305 is based upon Nbk 17. Reiman (1977) 442–3 (and Reiman (2002) 469) present two versions of the poem, 1824, and Nbk 17 under the Mary Copybk 2 title, ‘Memory’, commenting that ‘[w]e consider the manuscript evidence on the order and significance of the two stanzas . . . to be inconclusive and the issues still open for discussion’ (Reiman (2002) 469 n. 1). Rognoni 762 publishes the 1824 text alone under a title that echoes Mary Copybk 2: ‘Memory: Fragment’. Because there is no evidence that the 1824 text was authorised by S., the editors follow Tokoo

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and Adamson both in taking the sequence of the lines in Nbk 17 to be the order in which S. intended them to be presented and in regarding the poem as unfinished. Both Chernaik and GM see the poem as premised upon S.’s reading of ‘Emilia’’s writings. Two of her sonnets and her poem Il Ritratto di Tirsi (Bodleian MS. Abinger c. 64, ff. 6 and 7r — 8v) are published in Viviani della Robbia 94–7 (Il Ritratto di Tirsi is also published in Shelley and Mary iii 560–1 and Dowden Life ii 378–9; none of these published versions of her poems are entirely faithful to the MSS). They may have informed some of his Italian writings to her (see the headnote to Che Emilia, ch’era più bella [a vedere] (Longman iv 52–3, no. 375)). A sentence deriving from her essay, Il vero Amore (The True Love), reprinted in Medwin (1913) 281–3 (the MS of which is unlocated), forms the epigraph to Epipsychidion (1821). Chernaik offers the following interpretation: It seems reasonable to take Emilia, addressed as ‘Sweet Spirit!’ in the opening line of Epipsychidion, as the ‘Spirit sweet!’ of the line canceled in the short lyric, and to read the lyric as a compliment to Emilia’s poetry, an affirmation that it shall survive as a nest for Love, as music and odors survive in the memory of those whose spirit they have once quickened. (284) GM comments that ‘Emilia’ ‘is the poet (with her essay on “Love”, which “Love itself ” will “slumber on” when she is “gone” (ll. 3–4) — [i.e.] married)’. The poem in its 1824 form has enjoyed renown. Burton R. Pollin, Music for Shelley’s Poetry: An Annotated Bibliography of Musical Settings of Shelley’s Poetry (1974) 160, 165, records 165 musical settings between 1847 and 1969, more than for any other poem by S. Text from Nbk 17 p. 154 rev. An apostrophe has been added in l. 2, commas at the ends of ll. 7 and 9 and a full stop in l. 8. Published in Massey, ‘Shelley’s “Music, when soft voices die”: Text and Meaning’, JEGP lix (1960) 434 (ll. 1–8 only; transcription of MS); Massey 257 (ll. 1–8 only; transcription of MS); Reiman (1977) 442–3 (ll. 1–8 only, entitled ‘Memory’); Webb, ed., Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selected Poems (1977) 162–3 (ll. 1–8 only, entitled ‘Fragment: Rose leaves, when the rose is dead’); Tokoo, ‘On Shelley’s “Music, when soft voices die” ’, Shikai xxi (1984) 55–6 (complete); BSM vi 404–5 (facsimile and transcription of MS); Gerard Benson, Judith Chernaik, Cicely Herbert, ed., Poems on the Underground: Illustrated Edition (1992) 138 (facsimile of MS).

‘Rose leaves, when the rose is dead’ Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, Are heaped for the beloved’s bed — ¶ 50. 1–4. These lines recall the song to Hymen usually attributed to John Fletcher in The Two Noble Kinsmen I i 1–24, which begins ‘Roses, their sharp spines being gone’. The singer’s strewing of flowers may be likened to the roses being heaped in l. 2. Locock 1911 ii 519 cps the concluding lines with Shakespeare’s Sonnet liv ll. 10–14: Sweet roses do not so, Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made: And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth, When that shall fade, my verse distills your truth. 1. The cancelled first attempt at this line in Nbk 17 reads A roseleaf when. That flowers symbolise earthly transience is emphasised in the opening of the penultimate verse paragraph of Peacock’s ‘Palmyra’ in The Genius of the Thames, Palmyra, and Other Poems, 2nd edn (1812) 116: ‘The flower, that drinks the morning-dew,/Far on the evening gale shall fly’. See also l. 7 and note. 2. the beloved’s] Written above a Sultana’s canc. in Nbk 17.

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shelley: selected poems [And] so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, Love itself shall slumber on . . .

5

Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory. — Odours, when [sweet] violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken.

As desire, when hope is cold, 10 As 3–4. As elsewhere (e.g. ll. 1–2 and 8), the argument and diction are comparable with OWW esp. ll. 63–4. 3. A first, cancelled draft of this line in Nbk 17 reads: ‘[Poets canc.] [When canc.] When a Poet [  ] gone/The thoughts. thy thoughts] I.e. ‘ “Your — Emilia’s — thoughts”. Emilia’s “thoughts” will be “her own words” — the essay on Love, quoted at the opening of Epipsychidion’ (GM). Webb (1995) suggests ‘perhaps poetic thoughts (= poems, like the dead thoughts in O.W.W.). This may refer to the poetry of Emilia Viviani’. Whether prose or verse, it is Teresa Viviani’s writings that seem to be referred to. 5–7. die . . . sicken] There may be an echo of Macbeth IV iii 171–3: good men’s lives Expire before the flowers in their caps, Dying or ere they sicken. 5–6. A first, mostly cancelled draft of these lines in Nbk 17 reads: Spirit sweet! from th from [  ]/Melodies even when they die. Mary transcribed and cancelled ‘Spirit sweet — when soft voice’ as l. 5 in Mary Copybk 2. Cp. the address to Teresa Viviani as ‘Sweet Spirit!’ in Epipsychidion 1. Rognoni 1616 cps PU I 804–6. 5. Music] Written above Melodies canc. in Nbk 17. soft] Written above sweet canc. in Nbk 17. 6. Vibrates] Written above Linger canc. in Nbk 17. Cp. Moore’s Ode to Nea XI (‘I found her not — the chamber seem’d’) in Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806) ll. 9–12: There lingers still a trembling breath After the note’s luxurious death, A shade of song, a spirit air Of melodies which had been there! 7. when [sweet] violets sicken] Cp. Henry Wotton’s ‘You meaner beauties’ ll. 6–10, repr. in Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 2nd edn (1767) ii 313: Ye violets that first appeare, By your pure purple mantles known Like the proud virgins of the yeare, As if the Spring were all your own; What are you when the Rose is blown? 8. quicken] stimulate. See Ode to the West Wind l. 64 and note. 9. Written beneath As desire withou canc. in Nbk 17. Tokoo (Shikai 48) reads As desire withers, Chernaik (Chernaik 282) As desire within. cold] Written above dead uncanc. in Nbk 17. 10. As] Written beneath two cancelled attempts to begin this line in Nbk 17: As without hope and As passion.

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51  Epipsychidion Date, MS  Evidence, and Circumstances of Composition. Tatsuo Tokoo’s groundbreaking article, ‘The Composition of Epipsychidion: Some Manuscript Evidence’, K-SJ xlii (1993) 97–103, established that a significant proportion of this poem draws upon passages of verse that had been drafted as early as 1819. The passages concerned are amongst those edited in the Appendix (Fragments connected with Epipsychidion, Longman iv 173–90), and are identified in the commentary to that item and in the following notes. S. appears to have begun to draft Epipsychidion at the end of January 1821 soon after abandoning Fiordispina, some lines of which it takes over (see commentary to no. 378 (Longman iv 62–77) and notes). The period of composition must have been rapid since the press copy of the poem was enclosed in a letter to Charles Ollier of 16 February (L ii 262–3). Given that Jane and Edward Williams, who the Shelleys had only met for the first time in mid-January 1821, are addressed as intimate friends in l. 601, some of the poem — though not all of it, as suggested in White ii 606 n. 15 — was probably composed in the first two weeks of February. Rough drafts of approximately 400 of its 604 lines survive mainly in Nbk 17 but also in Nbk 11, Nbk 15, Box 1 and Nbk 16. The latter nbk also contains three drafts of the Advertisement (see note to Adv. 1–9). MS sources of the drafts of the text are identified in BSM xxiii 259–60. The press copy almost certainly derived from an intermediate fair copy, as E. B. Murray remarks (BSM iv, Pt I, p. xxxi), but neither has survived. Mary copied the draft of ll. 5–12 in Nbk 11 p. 41 and made two copies of the draft of ll. 368–83 in Nbk 15 pp. 196–7 (see Mary Copybk 1 pp. 66–7, 22 and 74–5; BSM ii 134–5, 46–7 and 150–3). Lines 368–83 are further transcribed under the heading ‘The Comet’ in Mary Copybk 2 pp. 31–2 (Massey 82–5). In his diary entry for 27 February  1872, first published in the Athenaeum 2857 (29 July 1882) 145, Rossetti recorded Trelawny’s claim ‘that Epipsychidion was printed in Italy, in a version of Italian poetry written by Shelley himself for Emilia (Viviani) to read’ (The Diary of W. M. Rossetti, 1870–1873, ed. Odette Bornand (1977) 169; for a fuller version of Trelawny’s comments, see the headnote to Dal spiro della tua mente, [è] istinta, Longman iv 195–8, no. 395). No evidence has come to light to support Trelawny’s assertion, but that the opening four lines of the poem are likely to be a translation of lines originally composed in Italian is discussed in the commentary to Fragments N and O in the Appendix. In the 16 February letter to Ollier, which also included Sonnet: Political Greatness and Ode to Naples (Longman iii 635–48, no. 343), S. indicated that he had written out the press copy of Epipsychidion himself and requested Ollier to check the proofs: ‘I have written it so as to give very little trouble, I hope, to the printer, or to the person who revises. I would be much obliged to you if you would take this office on yourself’ (L ii 263). Publication. S. directed Ollier to publish Epipsychidion in a limited print-run and ­anonymously for reasons he explained thus: It is to be published simply for the esoteric few; and I  make its author a secret, to avoid the malignity of those who turn sweet food into poison; transforming all they touch into the corruption of their own natures. My wish with respect to it is, that it should be printed immediately in the simplest form, and merely one hundred copies: those who are capable of judging and feeling rightly with respect to a c­ omposition of so abstruse a nature, certainly do not arrive at that number — among those, at least, who would ever be excited to read an obscure and anonymous ­production; and it would give me no pleasure that the vulgar should read it. If you have any bookselling reason

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-51

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shelley: selected poems against publishing so small a number as a hundred, merely, distribute copies among those to whom you think the poetry would afford any pleasure, and send me, as soon as you can, a copy by the post. (L ii 263)

In a further letter to Ollier, of 22 February, S. repeated his request that the poem was ‘to be printed immediately, and . . . anonymously’ (L ii 269). Epipsychidion (1821) was published as an octavo pamphlet, priced at 2 shillings without a wrapper and with a text that appears to be relatively free of error (although see the notes to ll. 282 and 334). It must have appeared by the middle of May since, as noted in White ii 608 n. 32, it was reported that ‘that frantic fellow S-ll-y has a finger in’ Epipsychidion in the Gossip xii (19 May  1821) 91. It was reviewed in the Gossip xvii (23 June 1821) 129–35 (Unextinguished Hearth 275–6), with further notices appearing in the Gossip xviii (30 June 1821) 140 (as recorded by Nicholas A. Joukovsky, ‘Contemporary Notices of Shelley: Addenda to The Unextinguished Hearth’, K-SJ lvi (2007) 173–95 (187), and xx (14 July 1821) 153–8 (Unextinguished Hearth 276–81). Since Ollier specified in his letter to Mary of 17 November 1823 (reproduced in Sylva Norman, Flight of the Skylark: The Development of Shelley’s Reputation (1954) 46–7) that 160 copies of Epipsychidion were amongst those of S.’s works that he had recently sent to John Hunt at her request (see Mary L i 400), the print-run is likely to have been 250, significantly more than the one hundred that S. had specified. His concern that even the exclusive readership he hoped for would struggle to understand the poem is evident in the Advertisement (ll. 9–14) and also, to some extent, in his letter to John Gisborne of 22 October 1821: The Epipsychidion is a mystery — As to real flesh & blood, you know that I do not deal in those articles, — you might as well go to a ginshop for a leg of mutton, as e­ xpect any thing human or earthly from me. I desired Ollier not to circulate this piece except to the Σύυετοι [those who understand], and even they it seems are ­inclined to approximate me to the circle of a servant girl & her sweetheart. — (L ii 363; Jones glosses Σύυετοι as ‘cognoscenti’) However, as Jones suggests, this passage may be ‘intended to make the poem more of a mystery than it really is’ (L ii 363 n. 5), and perhaps registers S.’s ambivalence towards and self-distancing from it as much as it does his anxiety about finding an audience. A few months later, in a letter of 12 January 1822, S. asked Gisborne ‘to be so good as to obtain a copy of “Epipsychidion”, and to send it me by post, by the return of post’ (L ii 375), suggesting that he had still not seen the volume almost a year after he had mailed it to Ollier. By then the poem had — perhaps several months since — been withdrawn. Ollier’s tact in this matter is evident from his letter to Mary referred to, in which he explained that ‘As it was the wish of Mr. Shelley that the whole of the “Epipsychidion” should be suppressed, I  would not, though it was printed at our expense, suffer the remainder to be disposed of’ (Norman, Flight of the Skylark 46). Ollier had the previous year defended the poem and alluded to its suppression in a letter (‘Letter from London’) to ‘Christopher North’ (John Wilson) under the pseudonym of ‘John Johnes’, published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine xi (February 1822) 236–9 (237–8): Did it ever fall in your way to see a poem with this title, ‘Epipsychidion: Verses addressed to the noble and unfortunate Lady Emilia V —, now imprisoned in the convent of — ?’

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This little pamphlet is a threefold curiosity, on account of the impenetrable mysticism of its greater portion, the delicious beauty of the rest, and the object of the whole, which I take to be an endeavour to set aside the divine prohibition, that a man may not marry his own sister. The poem was published anonymously, but as people began to apply it to a certain individual, and make their own inferences, it was, I believe, suddenly withdrawn from circulation. There is no doubt but it comes from the Holy Pisan Alliance; and some of its insulated passages are worthy of the genius which dwells among the members of that body. Charles E. Robinson sees Ollier here as ‘indirectly defend[ing] Shelley against the charges levelled at The Cenci’ (‘Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Ollier, and William Blackwood: the contexts of early nineteenth-century publishing’, in Shelley Revalued 203) and notes that his intention of protecting S.’s anonymity was undone by a footnote Wilson added to the sentence in this passage ending ‘marry his own sister’, which begins: Our readers will probably suspect, that our correspondent’s intention is to attribute the poem in question to Lord Byron; but we venture to say, that there is nobody capable of wasting such poetry on such a theme, except only the unfortunate Mr Shelly. (‘Letter from London’, 237) As Newman Ivey White remarks (Unextinguished Hearth 284), the notice of the poem in The Paris Monthly Review of British and Continental Literature i (March 1822) 355 is extracted from Ollier’s Blackwood’s article. Biographical Context. In a letter of 18 June 1822, S. told John Gisborne: The ‘Epipsychidion’ I cannot look at; the person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno; and poor Ixion starts from the centaur that was the offspring of his own embrace. If you are anxious, however, to hear what I am and have been, it will tell you something thereof. It is an idealized history of my life and feelings. I think one is always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal. Hogg is very droll and very wicked about this poem, which he says, he likes — he praises it and says: — Tantum de medio sumptis accedit honoris. Now that, I contend, even in Latin, is not to be permitted. (L ii 434; the quotation is from Horace, Ars Poetica l. 243 and may be translated as: ‘such [is] the beauty that may be achieved through commonplace language.’) The allusion to the myth of Ixion suggests that estrangement from the poem on S.’s part, already manifest in the letter of 16 February 1821 to Ollier (‘it is a production of a portion of me already dead’, L ii 262–3), had grown to such an extent that a year and a half later he virtually disowned it. Part of this disenchantment appears to have stemmed from embarrassment at the ‘error’ of his infatuation with the ‘mortal image’ that was its prompt. Teresa Viviani (1801–36), elder of the two daughters of the Governor of Pisa, Niccolò Viviani, was in November 1820 residing at the Convent of St Anna while her father and stepmother made plans for her to marry. It was Francesco Pacchiani, a Professor at the

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University of Pisa, who arranged for the Shelleys, Claire and Medwin to be introduced to her. Pacchiani, with whom they had recently become acquainted (Mary Jnl i 341), was confessor to the family, and had tutored the girls, whom he had known from infancy (Medwin (1913) 277; Viviani della Robbia 50). In Medwin’s fictionalised account of S.’s infatuation, entitled ‘Sydney’, Torriagni (Pacchiani) says of Bianca (Teresa Viviani) that ‘ “She not only knows all our best poets by heart, but is herself a poetess[”]’ (Bentley’s Miscellany ix (1841) 168–79 (174)). Her ‘beauty and accomplishments’, of which Pacchiani had spoken enthusiastically according to Medwin (Medwin (1913) 277), are evident in the accounts by himself, Claire and Mary of their first encounters with her. After her introduction on 29 November, Claire noted in her journal: ‘with Pacchiani to the Convent of St. Anna. The beautiful Teresa Viviani’ (Claire Jnl 189). Mary in her letter to Leigh Hunt of 3 December described her as ‘una fanciulla di diece novi anni — figlia d’un nobile Fiorentino, bellissima — d’un gran’ genio — chi scrive Italiana con un eleganza e delicatezza chi eguala i migliore autori della migliore età d’Italia’ (‘a young girl, nineteen years old — the daughter of a Florentine nobleman, beautiful — of great genius — who writes Italian with an elegance and delicacy to equal the best authors of the best Italian age’) (Mary L i 163 and 165). Medwin’s overblown description of his and S.’s first meeting identifies an ideal quality in her physical appearance that he implies was attractive to S.: Emilia was indeed lovely and interesting. Her profuse black hair, tied in the most simple knot, after the manner of a Greek Muse in the Florence gallery, displayed to its full height her brow, fair as that of the marble of which I speak. She was also of about the same height as the antique. Her features possessed a rare faultlessness, and almost Grecian contour, the nose and forehead making a straight line, — a style of face so rare, that I remember Bartolini’s telling Byron that he had scarcely an instance of such in the numerous casts of busts which his studio contained. Her eyes had the sleepy voluptuousness, if not the colour of Beatrice Cenci’s. They had ­indeed no definite colour, changing with the changing feeling, to dark or light, as the soul animated them. Her cheek was pale, too, as marble, owing to her confinement and want of air, or perhaps ‘to thought’. (Medwin (1913) 278–9) It appears that S. was introduced to Viviani in the company of Mary and Claire on 3 December 1820 (Claire Jnl 191), although Edward Silsbee’s record of his conversations with Claire late in her life suggests that it was one or the other rather than both of them who introduced S. to her (Bieri 762 n. 52). The name ‘Emilia’ seems to have been adopted almost immediately; Claire refers to her as ‘Theresa Emilia Viviani’ in her jnl entry for 30 November, the day after their first meeting (Claire Jnl 190), and she signs herself ‘Teresa Emilia’ in the earliest of the letters to S. (Shelley and Mary iii 554 and Viviani della Robbia 71–2; trans. White ii 467), which is dated 10 December 1820. Enrica Viviani della Robbia in ‘Shelley e il Boccaccio’, Italica xxxvi (1959) 181–97 (185) suggests that the name derives from that of the heroine of Boccaccio’s Il Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia (The Story of Theseus concerning the nuptials of Emily) since just as Arcita and Palemone compete for the affections of Emilia in that poem, so Viviani was wooed by two suitors, Luigi Biondi and Francesco Danieli (Viviani della Robbia 118). Boccaccio’s poem is a source of Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale from which S. translated into Italian some lines about ‘Emelye’ in late 1820 or early 1821 (see Che Emilia, ch’era più bella [a vedere], Longman iv 52–3, no. 375). It is probably Teseida to which S. refers in his letter to Hunt of 27 September 1819 where he remarks that Boccaccio’s ‘more serious theories of love agree especially with mine’ (L ii 122).

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Visits to Viviani are recorded regularly by Mary between early December 1820 and April 1821 (see Mary Jnl i 341–4, 348–56, 358–60 and 364–5) with final meetings taking place in late May and late June (Mary Jnl i 367–8 and 371). Most of Viviani’s surviving letters to S. and Mary date from December  1820—January  1821 and include mention of them lending her Staël’s Corinne and Rousseau’s Julie (see Viviani della Robbia 72 and 116; White ii 468 and 483). Her correspondence with Claire has not survived. It began with a letter from Viviani the day after they first met and lasted until 30 June 1821; Claire visited frequently in December 1820 while staying with Mary and S. (see Claire Jnl 190–4, 196–9, 201–2, 204–11, 215–16, 218–20, 227–33, 237 and 239). The fragmentary drafts of four of S.’s letters to Viviani are published in Rogers 341–2 and 238–41 and L ii 447–9 with transcriptions and translations that are not altogether satisfactory; what is presented in those sources as a fifth letter is identified in this edition as a verse translation of some lines from Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale (see Che Emilia, ch’era più bella [a vedere], referred to earlier). The letters in Nbk 15 pp. 32–3 (BSM xiv 38–9) and Nbk 17 p. 44a (BSM vi 172–3) demonstrate S.’s efforts to exert influence to have Viviani removed from the Convent of St Anna (see L ii 267 and Mary Jnl i 349 n. 5). In this regard Claire told Silsbee that one of S.’s most extravagant schemes was that she, in Marion Kingston Stocking’s words, should persuade Lady Mount Cashell, who had studied medicine at Jena disguised as a man, to go back into male attire, court and marry Emilia Viviani, and get her dowry, so that Emilia could leave the convent and come live with them. (Clairmont Correspondence ii 658; see also i 134–5 n. 9 and ii 510–11 n. 6) One of two further letters in Nbk 17, evidently from early in his friendship with ­Viviani, shows how S. considers their relationship in Dantean terms (see the note to ll. 388–591); the other, on p. 20 (BSM vi 122–3), which is cited in the headnote to Thy gentle face, [?] dear (Longman iv 46–51, no. 373), includes the sentence ‘credo che l’anima che tu ami non possa dislegarsi’ (I believe that the soul that is loved by you cannot untie itself). Medwin comments that Viviani ‘was made for love’ and ‘had the purest and most ­sublime c­ onceptions of the master-passion’ (Medwin (1913) 281). Una Favola, a prose allegory in Italian featuring a personification of Love (see notes to ll. 249 and 299–301) may have been the result of a collaboration between S. and Viviani. Mary A. Quinn argues that the story was probably begun after Epipsychidion had been sent to press in ­February 1821 and that the pair may have worked on it together in March or April (MYRS vi pp. li—lii). It was first published (along with an English translation) in ­Relics 62–73 in a text based on the fair draft in S.’s hand in Box 1 ff. 250r — 53r (BSM xxi 250–63). This MS derived from S.’s rough draft in Nbk 12 which contains corrections identified by Quinn as in Viviani’s hand on ff. *36r rev. and *40v rev. (see MYRS vi 226–7, 208–9, 123–4 and 109–10). S. told Peacock in a letter of 21 March  1821 that Viviani was ‘the only Italian for whom I ever felt any interest’ (L ii 276). That he found her company invigorating is evident from his letter to Claire of ?2 January 1821: ‘She continues to enchant me infinitely; and I  soothe myself with the idea that I  make the discomfort of her captivity lighter to her by demonstration of the interest which she has awakened in me’ (L ii 254). In a subsequent letter, of 16 January, he told Claire that he thought Viviani ‘tender & true — which is always something — how many are only one of these things at a time!’ and sought to reassure her that ‘There is no reason that you should fear any mixture of that which you call love’ (L ii 256). However, in the context of the support he offered after

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Viviani had been intimidated by one of her suitors, he wryly acknowledged himself to be ‘worthy of taking my degree of M.A. in the art of Love’ (L ii 292). Rossetti told Garnett on 9 July 1869 that in a letter to S. then in the hands of the Gisbornes’ former servant Elizabeth Rumble, Viviani had addressed him as ‘sposo adorato’ (beloved husband) (L about S 28–9; Dowden Life ii 373 and n.). According to Silsbee, Claire thought ‘Shelley was a lover of’ Viviani’s (see Bieri 551), and S.’s letter to Byron of 14 September 1821, referring to conversations with him the previous month at Ravenna, hints at this possibility: ‘They have made a great fuss at Pisa about my intimacy with this lady. Pray do not mention anything of what I told you; as the whole truth is not known and Mary might be very much annoyed at it’ (L ii 347). Disenchantment with Viviani came to a head when, on 3 September 1821, just before her marriage to Biondi five days later, she wrote to S. asking for money (Shelley and Mary iii 691–2 and Viviani della Robbia 131–2; trans. White ii 484–5). In March 1822 Mary told Claire that ‘Emilia’ was part of the ‘ill luck’ of the spring of 1821 (Mary L i 226) and gave Maria Gisborne the following cool assessment of her and S.’s infatuation: Emilia married Biondi — we hear that she leads him & his mother (to use a vulgarism) a devil of a life — The conclusion of our friendship a la Italiana puts me in mind of a nursery rhyme which runs thus — As I was going down Cranbourne lane, Cranbourne lane was dirty, And there I met a pretty maid, Who dropt to me a curt’sey; I gave her cakes, I gave her wine, I gave her sugar candy, But oh! the little naughty girl! She asked me for some brandy Now turn Cranbourne lane into Pisan acquaintances, which I  am sure are dirty enough, & brandy into that wherewithall to buy brandy (& that no small sum pero) & you have [the] whole story of Shelley[’s] Italian platonics. (Mary L i 223) Mary published Epipsychidion without comment in her collected editions and the following jnl entry, written on 12 February 1839, soon after the appearance of 1839 i, almost certainly refers to it: ‘There are other verses I should well like to obliterate for ever’ (Mary Jnl ii 561). There are less-than-sympathetic depictions of Viviani in the characters of Clorinda Saviani in her short story ‘The Bride of Modern Italy’ (MSCTS 32–42; published anonymously in London Magazine ix (1824) 357–63) and Clorinda Saville in Lodore (1835) (see the note to Così la Poesia, incarnata diva, Longman iv 199, no. 395 Appendix l. 2). The short story (33) reworks a mordant anecdote recorded in Claire’s jnl entry for 23 July 1821: ‘Emilia says that she prays always to a Saint, and every time she changes her lover, she changes her Saint, adopting the one of her lover’ (Claire Jnl 243). In a moving account of a visit to Viviani with Pacchiani some years after she had separated from her husband, Medwin recalled that he ‘could scarcely recognise a trace of the once beautiful Emilia’ (Medwin (1913) 288–90). There are MSS of Viviani’s letters to the Shelleys along with three poems (two sonnets and Il Ritratto di Tirsi) in the Abinger Collection of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Some of the letters were published in the original Italian along with Il Ritratto di Tirsi in Shelley and

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Mary iii 554–61, 569–77, 637–8 and 691–2. Il Ritratto di Tirsi and translations of some of the letters appeared in Dowden Life ii 373–9. Viviani della Robbia, a biography of Teresa Viviani by Enrica Viviani della Robbia, reviewed favourably by Benedetto Croce in La Critica xxxv (1937) 138–40, includes letters by Viviani that were lent to the author by Sir John Shelley-Rolls, her poems, and her essay Il vero Amore (The True Love) (71–99). This essay, cited in the epigraph to Epipsychidion, was first published by Medwin along with his translation in Medwin ii 67–72; the MS is untraced. White ii 466–85 includes translations of the letters in Shelley and Mary and Viviani della Robbia; for a further letter, see Herbert Huscher, ‘A New Viviani Letter’, K-SMB xiv (1963) 30–3. Three letters from Viviani to Mary in Bodleian MS. Abinger c. 45 107–12 remain unpublished. Sources. Critics have typically considered the main body of the poem to be divided into three sections: the address to ‘Emily’ and the exploration of love (ll. 1–189); the speaker’s ‘idealized history of [his] life and feelings’ (ll. 190–387); and the invitation to ‘Emily’ to accompany him to an island-paradise (ll. 388–591). The first of these is aligned with a central tenet of much of S.’s mature writing which holds to the view that ‘Love is celebrated everywhere as the sole law which should govern the moral world’ (Preface to L&C ll. 254–5). His translation of Plato’s Symposium and his essay On Love from the summer of 1818, as well as WA, composed in August 1820 and posted to Ollier on 20 January 1821 (L ii 257), in various ways philosophise upon and celebrate love. That S. found this topic of inexhaustible interest is evident from his letter to John Gisborne of 22 October 1821, where following his teasing complaint that in respect of Epipsychidion even the educated ‘are inclined to approximate me to the circle of a servant girl & her sweetheart’, he vowed ‘to write a Symposium of my own to set all this right’ (L ii 363). What distinguishes Epipsychidion is its engagement with the work of Dante, especially Il Convivio (The Banquet), the first canzone of which S. had translated in Ye who [      ] the third Heaven move (Longman iv 110–5, no. 390), and La Vita Nuova (The New Life). Mary records reading the latter between 30 January and 12 February 1821, during the period when Epipsychidion is likely to have been composed, noting directly after a visit to ‘Emilia’ on 31 January that ‘S. reads the vita nuova aloud to me in the evening’ (Mary Jnl i 351–3; 351). In DP, drafted between late January and early March 1821, S. wrote that ‘Dante understood the secret things of love . . . His Vita Nuova is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment and language: it is the idealized history of that period, and those intervals of his life which were dedicated to love’ (Reiman (2002) para. 26). This points to the delicate way in which the ‘idealized history’ (to adopt the expression that S. used to describe his poem in his letter to John Gisborne of 18 June 1822) in Epipsychidion is modelled on Dante’s Vita Nuova. Paragraph 26 of DP also draws attention to other sources that inform Epipsychidion including Paradiso (‘a perpetual hymn of ever-lasting love’), the works of Plato (‘Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato alone of all the antients’) and Shakespeare and Rousseau who, amongst other writers, ‘have celebrated the dominion of love’. In addition, in formal terms, the Dantean device of the congedo that frames the poem in ll. 592–604 looks back to the translation of the congedo from the first Canzone of Il Convivio at the end of the Advertisement. Alan Weinberg suggests how the commentary to the second Book of Il Convivio informs the poem: Dante’s distinction between literal and allegorical meanings disallows the crude assumption that a personified beloved must necessarily be a person. Thus the ‘donna gentile’ turns out to be an abstraction, Lady Philosophy, and not a flesh and blood rival of Beatrice. It is on these grounds that the relationship with ‘Emily’ in Epipsychidion should not be reduced to an ordinary affair of passion, but rather be regarded as

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The autobiographical section has several precedents in S.’s oeuvre, as noted in Baker 224: ‘Alastor provides an earlier example of the central movement of the poem, the history of the search for an epipsyche, while the Laon-Cythna, Lionel-Helen, and Prometheus-Asia relationships have all involved, with certain variations, a similar story’. Parallels with the earliest of these poems are explored usefully by Mark Sandy in ‘Quest Poetry: Alastor and Epipsychidion’, in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley 272–88. Earlier models also include the explicitly personal, almost confessional stanzas 5–7 of Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and the Dedication to L&C where the speaker narrates a detailed account of his inner life to a female addressee. The escape narrative in the final part of the poem has parallels in The Fugitives (Longman iv 26–34, no. 369) and with the ‘bark’ to be ‘pilot[ed]’ to a ‘healing paradise’ in Lines Written among the Euganean Hills (ll. 341 and 355). The island destination constitutes a cultured pastoral idyll and as such shares qualities with the conviviality imagined in the final verse paragraph of LMG. Holmes characterises Epipsychidion justly as ‘a conscious piece of rhetorical improvisation partly influenced by the performances of Sgricci’ (Holmes 631). This perspective, combined with Stopford A. Brooke’s observation that ‘It is the most rapid of all [S.’s] works’ (Epipsychidion: A  Type Fac-Simile Reprint of the Original Edition (1887) p.  xxxiii), point as contexts for the poem’s peculiar energy towards Tommaso Sgricci’s art and S.’s own experiments with improvisation (see Longman iv 379–81, Appendix B, Orpheus). In this regard it is not insignificant that one of the works loaned by the Shelleys to Viviani was Corinne, a novel about an improvisatrice. The poem’s awareness of its own art and of the limitations of language, widely recognised by critics as pervasive, led D. J. Hughes to claim that ‘the poem is ultimately about poetry itself and the process by which it is created’ (‘Coherence and Collapse in Shelley, with Particular Reference to Epipsychidion’, ELH xxviii (1961) 260–83 (265)). Epipsychidion may in this way be seen as being in dialogue with DP. ‘Emily’ is the means through which the speaker explores the creative process just as S.’s intense relationship with Teresa Viviani was, at its outset, accompanied by an exchange of writings. Form. The distinctive character of the poem’s metre has attracted comment. The author of ‘Blank Verse’ in the Cornhill Magazine xv (1867) 620–40 remarks that ‘It is noticeable that both Keats and Shelley make an Elizabethan use of the so-called heroic couplet. Epipsychidion and Lamia are written, not in the metre of Dryden, Churchill, Pope, and Crabbe, but in that of Marlowe and Fletcher’ (638). C. S. Lewis in ‘Shelley, Dryden, and Mr Eliot’ qualifies this perspective, differentiating S.’s handling of metre from Keats’s and finding parallels in Dryden rather than the Elizabethans: It is particularly interesting to notice the internal, perhaps unconscious, control which arises amidst the very intensity of the experience and tightens up the metrical form: the first forty lines are almost ‘stopped couplets’ and the whole movement is much closer to Dryden’s couplet than to that of Keats. (Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (1969) 187–208 (203))

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Criticism. The quotation from Vita Nuova xxv in the Advertisement has been taken by many critics as a licence to identify Epipsychidion with aspects of S.’s own life. On this interpretative basis, the poem has caused unease even to S.’s most sympathetic readers. Swinburne remarked that ‘the passages in which the special experience of the writer is thrust forward under the mask and muffler of allegoric rhapsody are not in any proper sense mysterious; they are simply puzzling’ (‘Notes on the Text of Shelley’, Essays and Studies (1875) 184–237 (236)). The standard account of the women and events referred to in ll. 267–383 is Kenneth Neill Cameron, ‘The Planet-Tempest Passage in Epipsychidion’, PMLA lxiii (1948) 950–72. Cameron’s article usefully summarises the history of attempts from the hypotheses of Rossetti and John Todhunter (published in the latter’s A Study of Shelley (1880) 229–53) onwards to relate this central portion of the poem to experiences in S.’s life. Stuart Curran, however, dissents sharply from Cameron’s approach, which the modern critical tradition has largely accepted. Calling Epipsychidion ‘the most perversely misread poem in Shelley’s canon’, Curran insists that ‘to dismiss the biographical template is not to distort our reading but, rather, exactly the opposite, to restore the actual conditions in which this poem was originally invested’ (‘Epipsychidion, Dante, and the Renewable Life’, Dante and Italy in British Romanticism, ed. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (2011) 93–104 (96, 99)). GM called Epipsychidion the result of S.’s ‘celebration of a young Italian girl, Emilia Viviani, as the final embodiment of the Ideal Beauty he had been seeking all his life’, adding ‘In a way, Epipsychidion . . . is the most “typical” of all Shelley’s works, an extreme concentration of a single element in his genius. But Keats would have called it “too smokeable” — too easy to smile at’. Text from Epipsychidion (1821) with the exception of the alternative readings noted in ll. 97, 282, 306 and 334. Published in Epipsychidion (1821).

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EPIPSYCHIDION: verses addressed to the noble and unfortunate lady EMILIA V —— now imprisoned in the convent of ——

¶ 51. Title. Epipsychidion:] Of the two copies of Epipsychidion (1821) inspected by the editors, the one in the British Library (C.39.d.21) has a colon after the title, whereas the one in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (Arch. AA e. 74) does not. The meaning of the title has been much debated. There is no such word as ἐπιψυχίδιον in GK; ψυχίδιον may be understood as a diminutive noun meaning ‘little soul’. Notopoulos notes that this word is found in Lucian’s Navigium 26 (Notopoulos 280). A word with the same meaning, ψυχάριον, is present in Plato’s Republic (519a). The prefix ἐπι has a range of meanings including ‘over’ and ‘upon’. Brooke suggested that ‘this soul out of my soul’ in l. 238 may be understood as S.’s translation of the title and explains its meaning thus: epipsyche would mean ‘a soul upon a soul,’ just as epicycle, in the Ptolemaic astronomy, meant ‘a circle upon a circle.’ Such ‘a soul on a soul’ might be paraphrased as a soul which is the complement of, and therefore responsive to, another soul like itself, but in higher place and of a higher order. The lower would then seek to be united with the higher, because in such union it would be made perfect, and the pre-established harmony between them be actually realised. (Epipsychidion: A Type Fac-simile pp. xlv — xlvi) Locock (who also cites the analogy with ‘epicycle’ and quotes l. 238), suggested the word means ‘literally “A little additional soul” ’ (Locock 1911 ii 453). Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat understand it as ‘On the Subject of the Soul’ and note parallels with Hadrian’s poem ‘De animula’ (On the little soul) to which Wasserman also refers (Reiman (2002) 392; Wasserman 419). One of several possible translations suggested by GM is ‘a little soul orbiting a soul’. Another interpretation is to see the word as modelled on ‘epithalamium’ (a marriage song in praise of a bride and groom). On this basis it may be understood as ‘a song sung over, or in praise of a little soul’. Several commentators have interpreted it in this way, including: Forman (‘a little poem about the soul’); Rossetti (‘A Song on the Soul’); Rogers (‘a Soul-song’); Webb (‘a “little soul song” ’); and Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (‘a song about a little soul’) (Forman 1876–7 ii 369 n. 1; Rossetti Papers, 1862–1870 (1903) 379 and n.; Rogers 245; Webb (1995) 420; Major Works 795). A. Hamilton Thompson regards ‘The Italian motto of the book [i.e. the epigraph] . . . taken from words of Emilia Viviani herself’ as ‘the best commentary on the title’ (Thompson 160). A degree of playfulness in the cryptic word ‘Epipsychidion’ should not be overlooked. A fondness for the coining of Gk words was part of the culture of ‘tea Greek & pedestrianism’ enjoyed by Peacock, Hogg, and S. at Marlow. See Peacock’s letter to Hogg of 26 September 1817 in which he puns on the compound adjective ‘conchoid’ (= in the form of a shell) to refer to S. and his newly born daughter Clara: ‘The Conchoid is well. A Conchoidion or little hermitess has just stept forth upon the stage of the world’ (Peacock L i 116). There are fourteen instances of the word ‘soul’ in the poem (ll. 38, 57, 89, 109, 238 (twice), 311, 407, 455 (twice), 477, 539, 568 and 588); the ‘doubling’ references in ll. 238 and 455 invoke the title.

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L’anima amante si slancia fuori del creato, e si crea nel infinito un Mondo tutto per essa, diverso assai da questo oscuro e pauroso baratro.

her own words.

Epigraph. L’anima . . . baratro.] ‘The loving soul flings itself out of the created world and creates in the infinite a world all for itself, quite different from this dark and frightening chasm’. These words are quoted, with some omissions, from Teresa Viviani’s essay Il vero Amore. The full text of the passage is given thus in Medwin (1913) 282–3 (the editors’ translation differs from that of Medwin and Rossetti in Rossetti 1870 ii 551): L’anima amante sdegna essere ristretta, niente può ritenerla. Essa si slancia fuori del creato, e si crea nell’ infinito, un mondo, tutto per essa, diverso assai di questo oscuro e pauroso Baratro, assorta di continuo in un estace dolcissima, è veramente beata. (‘The soul of him who loves disdains restraint — nothing can restrain it. It lances itself out of the created, and creates in the infinite a world for itself, and for itself alone, how different from this obscure and fearful den! — is in the continued enjoyment of the sweetest extacy, is truly happy.’) Rognoni 1609–10 suggests that the style of Viviani’s essay may be reminiscent of Pietro Bembo’s discourse on Platonic love in Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (1528) iv 51–70 (see Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton, ed. Daniel Javitch (2002) 245–58). Bembo’s audience includes a lady by the name of Emilia Pia.

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The Writer of the following Lines died at Florence, as he was preparing for a voyage to one of the wildest of the Sporades, which he had bought, and where he had fitted up the ruins of

Adv. 1–8. The Writer . . . character and feelings.] S.’s original conception of ‘the Writer’ is illuminated by passages from the three drafts of the Advertisement in Nbk 16. They are edited minimally and numbered for convenience. The draft Advertisement was first published in Locock Ex 4–5. [1] The following poem was found amongst other papers in the Portfolio of a young Englishman with whom the [Editor] had contracted an intimacy at Florence, brief indeed, but sufficiently long to render the Catastrophe by which it terminated one of the most painful events of his life. — [One spring when the Arno swelled by the rains swept through the [?] of Florence with the swiftness of a tempest he leapt from the Ponte della Trinità — nor were his remains ever found. canc.] He was an accomplished and amiable person but his error was, θνητος ῶν μη θνητα φρονειν, — his fate is an additional proof that ‘The tree of knowledge is not that of Life’. — He had framed to himself certain opinions, founded no doubt upon the truth of things, but built up to a Babel height; they fell [by their own weight canc.], and the thoughts that were their architects, became unintelligible one to the other, as men upon whom the confusion of tongues had fallen. [He had personified the το καλον and sought it in every form and in every opinion fell in love with it; without being voluptuous, his favourite idea was, that love, whether of man, woman or canc.] Those who know the world as it is will collect from the following poem that the only refuge from the consequences of such feelings and opinions as it expressed was that which the writer sought: those who know the world as it should be may hope that tendencies of such high emotions, shall yet, in that world (if such there be), receive [?] consummation. — [For the love of woman which these verses express was but the form of that universal Love which Plato taught. canc.] The melancholy charge of consigning the body of my poor friend to the grave, was committed to me by his desolated family. I caused him to be buried in a spot previously selected by himself, and on the (ff. 102v rev.—101r rev.; BSM iv, Pt II, 28–35) [2] [The following Poem was found in the PF of a young Englishman, who died on his passage from Leghorn to the Levant. — He had bought one of the Sporades and left canc.] He was accompanied by a lady, who appeared to be his wife and an effeminate looking youth, to whom he shewed so excessive an attachment as to give rise to the suspicion that she was a woman — At his death this suspicion was confirmed; its object speedily found a refuge from the torments of the brute multitude, and from the [    ] of her grief in the same grave that contained her lover. — He had bought one of the Sporades, and fitted up a Saracenic castle which accident had preserved in some repair with simple elegance, and it was his intention to dedicate the remainder of his life to undisturbed intercourse with his companions (ff. 100v rev.—100r rev.; BSM iv, Pt II, 36–9) [3] The writer of these lines died at Florence in January 1821 while he was preparing to leave Italy [for canc.] one of the wildest of the Sporades, where he bought and fitted up the ruins of some old building — His life was singular, less on account of the romantic vicissitudes which diversified it, than the ideal tinge which they received from his own character and feelings. — (ff. 100r rev.—99v rev.; BSM iv, Pt II, 38–41)

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an old building, and where it was his hope to have realised a scheme of life, suited perhaps to that happier and better world of which he is now an inhabitant, but hardly practicable in this. His life was singular; less on account of the romantic vicissitudes which diversified it, than the ideal tinge which it received from his own character and feelings. The present Poem, like the Vita Nuova of Dante, is sufficiently intelligible to a certain class of readers without a matter-of-fact history of the circumstances to which it relates; and to a certain other class it must ever remain incomprehensible, from a defect of a common organ of perception for the ideas of which it treats. Not but that, gran vergogna sarebbe a colui, che rimasse cosa sotto veste di figura, o di colore rettorico: e domandato non sapesse denudare le sue parole da cotal veste, in guisa che avessero verace intendimento. The present poem appears to have been intended by the Writer as the dedication to some longer one. The stanza on the opposite page is almost a literal translation from Dante’s famous Canzone Voi, ch’ intendendo, il terzo ciel movete, & c. In [1], the Ponte della Trinità (The Bridge of the Holy Trinity) refers to a bridge over the river Arno in Florence. θνητος ῶν μη θνητα φρονειν is translated in Rogers 75 as ‘being a mortal to aspire to immortal things’; το καλον translates as ‘beauty’. Sentiments like those in the first of the Gk passages are found in lines from the plays of Euripides where the difference between gods and mortals is emphasised: τὸ σοφὸν δ’ οὐ σοφία/τό τε μὴ θνατὰ φρονεῖν (‘Cleverness is not wisdom,/nor is it wise to think thoughts not mortal’) (Bacchae 395–6); θνητὸς ὢν θεῷ (‘man against god’) (Bacchae 795); and ἀρετῇ σε νικῶ θνητὸς ὢν θεὸν μέγαν (‘In goodness I, though mortal, surpass you, a mighty god’) (Heracles 342; a line that S. copied in Nbk 14 p. 137 rev. (BSM v 286–7)). ‘The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life’ is from Byron, Manfred I i 12. The building of the city and tower of Babel is referred to in Genesis xi 1–9. In [2], ‘He was accompanied by a lady’ recalls the ‘Lady’ who ‘came with’ the Maniac to Venice in J&M (no. 198) 246. Adv. 1. Florence] Dante’s birthplace and the cradle of Italian literature. Adv. 1–7 as he was preparing for a voyage . . . hardly practicable in this.] Cp. S.’s letter to Mary of 15–16 August 1821 from Ravenna: My greatest content would be utterly to desert all human society. I would retire with you & our child to a solitary island in the sea, would build a boat, & shut upon my retreat the floodgates of the world. — I would read no reviews & talk with no authors. — . . . So on this plan I would be alone & would devote either to oblivion or to future generations the overflowings of a mind which, timely withdrawn from the contagion, should be kept fit for no baser object — But this it does not appear that we shall do. — (L ii 339) Adv. 2. the Sporades] This name (= ‘the scattered’) has been applied since classical times to various groups of islands in the Aegean Sea most of which have no permanent inhabitants. Pliny identifies a number of islands so-called in Nat. Hist. iv 68–71. Adv. 7–8. His life was singular . . . his own character and feelings.] Cp. the description of the Poet in the Preface to Alastor ll. 2–11 and of Julian in the Preface to J&M ll. 20–5. Adv. 9. the Vita Nuova of Dante] For the significance of this work in relation to Epipsychidion, see the headnote. Adv. 8–12. The present Poem . . . ideas of which it treats.] See S.’s letters to Ollier of 16 February (L ii 263) and John Gisborne of 22 October 1821 (L ii 363) cited in the headnote. Cp. the Preface to PU ll. 124–6 where a similar appeal is made to a refined readership. Adv. 12–14. gran vergogna . . . verace intendimento.] ‘it would be a disgrace if someone composing in rhyme introduced a figure of speech or rhetorical ornament, and then on being asked could not divest his words of such covering so as to reveal a true meaning’ (trans. Barbara Reynolds). From Dante, Vita Nuova xxv. The Italian in the Advertisement corresponds with the text of Delle opere di Dante Alighieri, ed. Anton Maria Biscioni, 2 vols (1793) (Biscioni) i 259 (an edition discussed in the

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The presumptuous application of the concluding lines to his own composition will raise a smile at the expense of my unfortunate friend: be it a smile not of contempt, but pity. S. My Song, I fear that thou wilt find but few Who fitly shall conceive thy reasoning, Of such hard matter dost thou entertain; Whence, if by misadventure, chance should bring 5 Thee to base company, (as chance may do) Quite unaware of what thou dost contain, I prithee, comfort thy sweet self again, My last delight! tell them that they are dull, And bid them own that thou art beautiful. headnote to Ye who [ ] the third Heaven move, Longman iv, no. 390), with the exception of the two instances of the word veste which in both cases read vesta in the original. Adv. 15–16. The present poem . . . some longer one.] GM suggests intriguingly that this sentence may be a coded allusion to the word Epipsychidion. The three drafts of this sentence read as follows in Nbk 16 ff. 101r rev., 97r rev. and 96v rev.: ‘The verses seem to have been written as a sort of dedication of some work to have been presented to [his mistress, — canc.] the person whom they address: but his papers afford no trace of such a work. — ’; ‘The verses were apparently intended by the writer to accompany some longer poem or collection of poems, of which however there were no remains [in his canc.] portfolio. — ’; ‘It was evidently intended to be prefixed to a longer poem or series of poems, — but among his papers there are no traces of such a collection’ (BSM iv, Pt II, 34–5, 50–1, 52–3). Adv. 16–17. The stanza . . . Voi, ch’ intendendo, il terzo ciel movete, & c.] The stanza referred to is a translation of Voi che’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete ll. 53–61, the congedo of the first Canzone in Dante’s Il Convivio. For S.’s translation of the whole canzone, see Ye who [   ] the third Heaven move. the opposite page] ‘From the word opposite being employed here in Shelley’s edition [Epipsychidion (1821)], it may be fairly assumed that, although the stanza was printed on the back of the “advertisement,” he meant it to be on the back of the title-page’ (Forman 1876–7 ii 367–8 n. 2). As Forman notes, the stanza is given at the back of the fly-title facing the Advertisement in 1839 iv 58. It is printed in a smaller font than that of the poem in Epipsychidion (1821). Adv. 20. my unfortunate friend] A similar narrative framework seems to be employed in Dal spiro della tua mente, [è] istinta (Longman iv, no. 395), in which the narrator referred to in l. 23 sympathises with the ‘Ausonio’ (Italian) of l. 24. Adv. 21. S.] In his letter to Ollier of 16 February  1821 enclosing Epipsychidion, S. remarked that ‘The . . . poem, I desire, should not be considered as my own; indeed, in a certain sense, it is a production of a portion of me already dead; and in this sense the advertisement is no fiction’ (L ii 262–3). My Song . . . thou art beautiful.] The original is given thus in Biscioni i 41: Canzone, i’ credo, che saranno radi Color, che tua ragione intendan bene, Tanto lor parli faticosa e forte; Onde, se per ventura egli addiviene, Che tu dinanzi da persone vadi, Che non ti paian d’ essa bene accorte; Allor ti priego che ti riconforte, Dicendo lor, diletta mia novella: Ponete mente almen, com’ io son bella. The one significant difference between S.’s translation and that in Ye who [ ] the third Heaven move is base company (l. 5) instead of ‘such company’ (l. 57). The word base strengthens his addition (in ll. 8 and 60) of the words tell them that they are dull which are absent in the original. In these respects his translation is not entirely faithful to the original, as he acknowledges (almost a literal translation).

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Epipsychidion Sweet Spirit! Sister of that orphan one, Whose empire is the name thou weepest on,

1–4. For the Italian versions of the first two couplets of the poem, which may have been written before the English versions of these lines, see Fragments connected with Epipsychidion N and O (Longman iv 187). 1. Sweet Spirit!] Cp. ‘Spirit sweet!’ in the draft of Rose leaves, when the rose is dead; see the note to ll. 5–6 of that poem. that orphan one] There is scholarly debate about whether these words refer to the spirit of Mary or to that of S. Garnett asserted in Relics 97 that ‘The orphan one, Emilia’s spiritual sister, is Mary Shelley, whose mother died in giving her birth’. In response to a review of Rossetti 1870 (where Rossetti had remarked that ‘This couplet has often been cited as unintelligible’ (ii 551)), Garnett repeated the claim in a letter to the Editor of the Times (25 January 1871) 11: I proposed, or rather stated, my interpretation simply because I knew it to be right. Its correctness is shown by the circumstance that Emilia Viviani and Mrs. Shelley were accustomed to address each other as ‘sisters.’ Many letters from the former to the latter are preserved, in all of which Mrs. Shelley is addressed as ‘Cara Sorella.’ Adolfo de Bosis replied cogently in ‘On the first two Lines of Epipsychidion’, K-SMB ii (1913) 14–19 that that orphan one is in fact the spirit of S. himself. In support, he cited Fragment O, the Italian version of ll. 1–2. The anonymously authored article ‘Our Library Table’ in The Athenaeum 3140 (31 December 1887) 893 had anticipated de Bosis, concluding that ‘the Italian words’ in Fragment O ‘point pretty clearly (so it appears to us) to Shelley himself ’. Locock reported that Rossetti: points out to me that the natural interpretation of Shelley’s Italian lines and their Petrarchan model is evidence against Garnett’s generally accepted explanation — that the “orphan one” is Mary Shelley. No doubt it was Emilia’s custom to address Mary as “Cara Sorella,” but this would not preclude a similarly imaginative relationship with Shelley. The “name,” as Garnett says, is Shelley’s own. (Locock 1911 ii 453–4) He goes on to make the dubious suggestion that Rossetti’s speculation about the Italian biscelle as a nickname for S. (see headnote to A snake came to pay the mastiff a visit, Longman iv 374–7, no. 408) ‘might meet the case’. Tirsi is a possible candidate since Tirsi and Emilia are names that S. and Teresa Viviani adopted for one another. Her poem Il Ritratto di Tirsi (The Portrait of Thyrsis), discussed in the headnote to Dal spiro della tua mente, [è] istinta (Longman iv, no. 395), is apparently addressed to S. However, de Bosis’s alternative and ingenious conjecture deserves serious consideration: Now, the name of Percy (Emilia in her frequent letters calls him “mio adorabile, mio sensibile Percy”) suggests to an Italian lover the idea of “lost” (Persi — means lost). Such a name, unknown to Italians, provokes invariably from them the question, ingenuous, jesting, or sorrowful: “Lost?” . . . So the dear name was to Emilia fatally interwoven with sorrow. She wept on it . . . (18)

586

shelley: selected poems In my heart’s temple I suspend to thee These votive wreaths of withered memory.

5

Poor captive bird! who, from thy narrow cage, Pourest such music, that it might assuage The rugged hearts of those who prisoned thee, Were they not deaf to all sweet melody; This song shall be thy rose: its petals pale 10 Are dead, indeed, my adored Nightingale! But soft and fragrant is the faded blossom, And it has no thorn left to wound thy bosom.

3–4. Cp. Horace, Odes I v 13–16: me tabula sacer votiva paries indicat uvida suspendisse potenti vestimenta maris deo. (‘As for me, a votive tablet on his temple wall records that I have dedicated my drenched clothes to the deity who rules the sea.’) 3. my heart’s temple] Cp. Lucretius, De Re. Nat. i 737: ‘adyto tamquam cordis’ (‘the holy place of the heart’). 4. Cp. Fiordispina (Longman iv, no. 378) l. 130. 5–9. According to Medwin, the source of these lines and ll. 13–18 may have been the following ‘pathetic lamentation’ by Teresa Viviani when he and S. first met her in the Convent of St Anna: There was a lark in the parloir, that had lately been caught. ‘Poor prisoner,’ said she, looking at it compassionately, ‘you will die of grief ! How I pity thee! What must thou suffer, when thou hearest in the clouds, the songs of thy parent birds, or some flocks of thy kind on the wing, in search of other skies — of new fields — of new delights! But like me, thou wilt be forced to remain here always — to wear out thy miserable existence here. Why can I not release thee?’ (Medwin (1913) 279–80) See also Pacchiani’s comment reported in Medwin (1913) 277–8: ‘ “Poverina,” . . . “she pines like a bird in a cage[”]’. In his letter to Claire of 29 April 1821, S. comments of Viviani: ‘Poor thing! she suffers dreadfully in her prison’ (L ii 288). 6. Pourest] Cp. To a Sky-Lark l. 4 and Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ ll. 57–8: ‘While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad/In such an ecstasy’. See also the song of the nightingale in ll. 4–15 of The Woodman and the Nightingale (Longman iv 54–61, no. 377), itself probably inspired by S.’s reading of Keats’s poem. 7. rugged hearts] Cp. The Woodman and the Nightingale l. 1: ‘rough heart’. 9–10. Cp. the analogy between dead rose leaves and poetry in Rose leaves, when the rose is dead ll. 1–4 and see the note to l. 3 of that poem.

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High, spirit-winged Heart! who dost for ever Beat thine unfeeling bars with vain endeavour, 15 Till those bright plumes of thought, in which arrayed It over-soared this low and worldly shade, Lie shattered; and thy panting, wounded breast Stains with dear blood its unmaternal nest! I weep vain tears: blood would less bitter be, 20 Yet poured forth gladlier, could it profit thee. Seraph of Heaven! too gentle to be human, Veiling beneath that radiant form of Woman All that is insupportable in thee Of light, and love, and immortality! 15. Webb (1995) 422 cps S.’s trans. of Ion: ‘the souls of the poets, . . . arrayed as they are in the plumes of rapid imagination, . . . speak truth’ (Julian vii 238). Rognoni 1610 cps OL 7. 16. shade] ‘unreal state of existence’ (Concordance). 18. unmaternal nest] The nest is unmaternal because the bird has been taken from its home and is now confined. There is also a possible reference here to the hostility of Teresa Viviani’s stepmother towards her stepdaughters. Of her Medwin writes: By his [Teresa’s father’s] first countess he had two grown-up daughters, and in his old age had the boldness, the audacity I might say, to take unto himself a wife not much older than either. This lady, whose beauty did not rival that of the Count’s children, was naturally jealous of their charms, and deemed them dangerous rivals in the eyes of her Cavaliere; and exerting all her influence over her infatuated husband, persuaded him, though their education was completed, to immure them in two convents (pensions, I should say, or as they are called, conservatorios) in his native city. (Medwin (1913) 277) 21–4. Cp. WA 151–2. Line 23 may also be compared with Panthea’s speech in PU II v 17–18. These lines recall the language of Dante’s stil nuovo in which the woman is addressed as ‘angel’. Locock 1911 ii 454 records parallels noted by Ackermann in Vita Nuova xix ll. 43–4 and xli ll. 7–8, and in Convivio III 59–60; Braida, Dante and the Romantics 113 cps Paradiso xiv 79–81. Seraph of Heaven may also be compared with ‘un’angela che’n cielo è coronata’ in l. 29 of the first Canzone of Dante’s Il Convivio, which S. translates in Ye who [  ] the third Heaven move l. 28 as ‘a bright Seraph sitting crowned on high’. See also the first of the two sonnets in Dante, Vita Nuova xxvi: Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare la donna mia quand’ella altrui saluta, ch’ogne lingua deven tremando muta, e li occhi no l’ardiscon di guardare. Ella si va, sentendosi laudare, benignamente d’umiltà vestuta; e par che sia una cosa venuta da cielo in terra a miracol mostrare. Mostrasi sì piacente a chi la mira, che dà per li occhi una dolcezza al core, che’ntender no la può chi no la prova:

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25 Sweet Benediction in the eternal Curse! Veiled Glory of this lampless Universe! Thou Moon beyond the clouds! Thou living Form Among the Dead! Thou Star above the Storm! Thou Wonder, and thou Beauty, and thou Terror! 30 Thou Harmony of Nature’s art! Thou Mirror In whom, as in the splendour of the Sun, All shapes look glorious which thou gazest on! Aye, even the dim words which obscure thee now Flash, lightning-like, with unaccustomed glow; e par che de la sua labbia si mova un spirito soave pien d’amore, che va dicendo a l’anima: ‘Sospira.’ (‘So gentle and so full of dignity my lady appears when she greets anyone that all tongues tremble and fall silent and eyes dare not look at her. She goes on her way, hearing herself praised, graciously clothed with humility; and seems a creature come down from heaven to earth to make the miraculous known. She appears so beautiful to those who gaze at her that through the eyes she sends a sweetness into the heart such as none can understand but he who experiences it; and from her lips seems to come a spirit, gentle and full of love, that says to the soul: “Sigh.” ’ Trans. F&B) 25. Cp. Adonais 480. 26. Of this line, L. Winstanley, ‘Platonism in Shelley’, Essays and Studies iv (1913) 72–100 (97) comments: In the Phaedrus beauty is described as the only one of the ideas which has a perfectly clear and distinct image upon earth; . . . Emily . . . is the mirror which reflects most brightly the glory of the unseen world. The beauty of her mind is far greater than the beauty of her body, which is only its dim reflection; she is an image of the eternal beauty. lampless] Cp. ll. 311 and 503 and also The Cenci V iv 59, and PU II iv 162, IV 245 and IV 378. 29. thou Beauty] Cp. the description of Beatrice in ll. 49–50 of the canzone in Vita Nuova xix: ‘ella è quanto de ben pò far natura;/per essemplo di lei bieltà si prova’ (‘She is the most perfect thing that Nature can produce: beauty is known as imaged in her’, trans. F&B). thou Terror!] See Socrates’s description of the conflict within the soul of the lover in Plato, Phaedrus 253c — 256e, esp. 254e: ‘And so it happens time and again, until the evil steed casts off his wantonness; humbled in the end, he obeys the counsel of his driver, and when he sees the fair beloved is like to die of fear. Wherefore at long last the soul of the lover follows after the beloved with reverence and awe.’ (Trans. R. Hackforth, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (1961)) 30–2. Thou Mirror . . . gazest on!] Cp. Fiordispina ll. 42–3 and ‘a mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness’ in On Love (Reiman (2002) 504). As well as noting these parallels, Locock 1911 ii 454 cps Shakespeare’s Sonnet xx ll. 5–6: ‘An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,/Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth’. Richard Ackermann, Shelley’s Epipsy­chidion und Adonais (1900) 66 cps ll. 1–2 of the sonnet in Dante’s Vita Nuova xxi: ‘Ne li occhi porta la mia donna Amore,/ per che si fa gentil ciò ch’ella mira’ (‘My lady bears Love in her eyes, so that she ennobles all she looks at’, trans. F&B). 33. dim words which obscure thee now] Locock 1911 ii 454 cps Sonnets xvii ll. 3–4 in which the poet describes his verse ‘but as a tomb,/Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts’.

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35 I pray thee that thou blot from this sad song All of its much mortality and wrong, With those clear drops, which start like sacred dew From the twin lights thy sweet soul darkens through, Weeping, till sorrow becomes ecstasy: 40 Then smile on it, so that it may not die. I never thought before my death to see Youth’s vision thus made perfect. Emily, I love thee; though the world by no thin name Will hide that love, from its unvalued shame. 45 Would we two had been twins of the same mother! Or, that the name my heart lent to another Could be a sister’s bond for her and thee, Blending two beams of one eternity! Yet were one lawful and the other true, 50 These names, though dear, could paint not, as is due, How beyond refuge I am thine. Ah me! I am not thine: I am a part of thee.

38. the twin lights . . . darkens through] The topos here is of the eyes (the twin lights) as the window of the soul. In Plato, Phaedo 82e the soul is ‘a helpless prisoner, chained hand and foot in the body, compelled to view reality not directly but only through its prison bars’ (trans. Hugh Tredennick, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato); earlier in the same dialogue (66a), the body is ‘an impediment which by its presence prevents the soul from attaining to truth and clear thinking’. S.’s use of darkens suggests ‘to deprive of intellectual or spiritual light’ (OED 7): the ‘impediment’ of ‘Emilia’s’ soul by its association with her body is represented by the idea that the former does not positively radiate intellectual or spiritual light through her eyes as it ‘view[s] reality’; rather, in its compromised state, her soul is only capable of darkening, weakly. For further uses of lights to mean ‘eyes’, see ll. 87 and 557. 42. Of this line Nora Crook remarks: ‘ “Emily” holds out the promise of lost early love restored’ (‘Shelley and Women’ in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley 65–82 (75)). Youth’s vision recalls the Poet’s dream of the ‘veilèd maid’ in Alastor 151–91. 43–4. I love you, although the world to its great shame disallows the use of this word to describe a relationship such as ours. The comma in l. 44 is rhetorical. The first, mostly cancelled draft of these lines in Nbk 17 p. 48 reads: I love thee . . . though to you I cannot be/Lover or brother. The subsequent draft reads: I [love thee canc.] though by no [conceded canc.] name/Is it [permitted canc.] to declare the same. — Cp. S.’s letter to Elizabeth Hitchener of 16 October 1811: ‘you . . . I will dare to say I love, nor do I risk the possibility of that degrading & contemptible interpretation of this sacred word’ (L i 149). 43. the world] Cp. the world as it is and the brute multitude in the passages from drafts [1] and [2] of the Advertisement (cited in the note to Adv. 1–9) and base company in l. 5 of the prefatory translation of the congedo of Voi che’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete. 44. unvalued] ‘Both great and unmerited’ (Major Works 796). 45. Cp. Song of Solomon viii 1: ‘O that thou wert as my brother, that sucked the breasts of my mother!’. 51–2. I am thine . . . I am a part of thee.] Anticipating the description of the Being of l. 190 as this soul out of my soul in l. 238. A similar idea is expressed in S.’s essay On Love: ‘We are born into the world and there is something within us which from the instant that we live and move thirsts after its likeness’ (Reiman (2002) 504). 51. beyond refuge] helplessly.

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Sweet Lamp! my moth-like Muse has burnt its wings; Or, like a dying swan who soars and sings, 55 Young Love should teach Time, in his own grey style, All that thou art. Art thou not void of guile, A lovely soul formed to be blest and bless? A well of sealed and secret happiness, Whose waters like blithe light and music are, 60 Vanquishing dissonance and gloom? A Star Which moves not in the moving Heavens, alone?

53–71. Rognoni 1610 cps the catalogue of similes that attempt to express the essence of the subject addressed in To a Sky-Lark ll. 31–60. 54–69. Lines 54, 56–66 and 69 draw upon Fragments connected with Epipsychidion E (Longman iv 179– 80) ll. 8, 10–14 and 19–25. 54. An allusion to Socrates’s words in Plato, Phaedo 84e — 85a: ‘Evidently you think that I have less insight into the future than a swan; because when these birds feel that the time has come for them to die, they sing more loudly and sweetly than they have sung in all their lives before, for joy that they are going away into the presence of the god whose servants they are.’ (Trans. Tredennick, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato) See also Alastor 275–90 and note. 55. Time, in his own grey style] Cp. MA 90. 57. Cp. the account of Beatrice in ll. 15–28 of the canzone of Dante’s Vita Nuova, xix: Angelo clama in divino intelletto e dice: ‘Sire, nel mondo si vede maraviglia ne l’atto che procede d’un’anima che’nfin qua su risplende.’ Lo cielo, che non have altro difetto che d’aver lei, al suo segnor la chiede, e ciascun santo ne grida merzede. Sola Pietà nostra parte difende, che parla Dio, che di madonna intende: ‘Diletti miei, or sofferite in pace che vostra spene sia quanto me piace là’v’è alcun che perder lei s’attende, e che dirà ne lo inferno: “O mal nati, io vidi la speranza de’ beati”.’ (‘An angel cries in the divine intellect, saying: “Lord, in the world there appears a marvel in act, proceeding from a soul whose splendour reaches even here on high!” Heaven, whose only lack is the lack of her, begs her from its Lord, and every saint cries out for this favour. Pity alone defends our cause, so that God, his mind on my lady, says: “My loved ones, bear it patiently that your hope remains as long as I please in the place where there is one who knows he will lose her, and who in hell will declare: ‘O ill-fated ones, I have seen the hope of the blessed.’ ” ’ Trans. F&B) 58. Cp. Song of Solomon iv 12: ‘A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed’. 60–1. A Star . . . alone?] A reference to Polaris, or the North Star. Relatively static in the Northern sky, it is used as a guiding star, or lodestar (cp. l. 219). Cp. Faerie Queene I ii 1: ‘the stedfast starre’.

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A smile amid dark frowns? a gentle tone Amid rude voices? a belovèd light? A Solitude, a Refuge, a Delight? 65 A lute, which those whom love has taught to play Make music on, to soothe the roughest day And lull fond grief asleep? a buried treasure? A cradle of young thoughts of wingless pleasure? A violet-shrouded grave of Woe? — I measure 70 The world of fancies, seeking one like thee, And find — alas! mine own infirmity. She met me, Stranger, upon life’s rough way, And lured me towards sweet Death; as Night by Day, Winter by Spring, or Sorrow by swift Hope, 75 Led into light, life, peace. An antelope, In the suspended impulse of its lightness, Were less etherially light: the brightness Of her divinest presence trembles through Her limbs, as underneath a cloud of dew 80 Embodied in the windless Heaven of June Amid the splendour-wingèd stars, the Moon

65–6. Cp. With a Guitar. To Jane. Locock 1911 ii 455 cps Agathon’s speech in Plato’s Symposium 196e: ‘every one, even if before he were ever so undisciplined, becomes a poet as soon as he is touched by Love; a sufficient proof that Love is a great poet, and well skilled in that science according to the discipline of music.’

(S.’s trans., Julian vii 191)

69–71. I measure . . . infirmity] These lines appear in Fragments connected with Epipsychidion G (Longman iv 180). 70. fancies] ‘visionary thoughts, imaginations, caprices’ (Concordance). 72–3. She met me . . . sweet Death] In the first, heavily worked version of these lines amidst the draft of Fiordispina in Nbk 17 p. 61 (BSM vi 208–9), stranger is cancelled and reader written above. For further details, see Fragments connected with Fiordispina (Longman iv, no. 378 Appendix) B. 73–123. as Night by Day . . . summer grave.] With the exception of ll. 118–19, these lines appear to draw upon the draft of Fiordispina ll. 60–2 and 69–114 in Nbk 17 pp. 60–7 (BSM vi 206–21). 73. And lured me towards sweet Death] There are resonances here with the veiled maid’s luring of the Poet to his death in Alastor. 77–82. the brightness . . . inextinguishably beautiful] Cp. the description of Asia in PU II v 54–9. Zacchetti, Shelley e Dante 264 n. 4 cps Paradiso xxiii 25–7: Quale ne’ plenilunïi sereni Trivïa ride tra le ninfe etterne che dipingon lo ciel per tutti i seni

592

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Burns, inextinguishably beautiful: And from her lips, as from a hyacinth full Of honey-dew, a liquid murmur drops, 85 Killing the sense with passion; sweet as stops Of planetary music heard in trance. In her mild lights the starry spirits dance, The sunbeams of those wells which ever leap Under the lightnings of the soul — too deep (‘As in the calm full moon, when Trivia smiles, In peerless beauty,’mid th’ eternal nymphs, That paint through all its gulfs the blue profound’) 81–2. the Moon . . . inextinguishably beautiful] Cp. Wordsworth, The Excursion iv 1059–62: As the ample Moon, In the deep stillness of a summer even Rising behind a thick and lofty Grove, Burns like an unconsuming fire of light 83–5. Ackermann, Shelley’s Epipsychidion und Adonais 66 cps ll. 12–14 of the first of the two sonnets in Dante’s Vita Nuova xxvi cited in the note to ll. 21–4. 83–4. Cp. Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner ll. 406–7: ‘The other was a softer voice,/As soft as honey-dew’. 84. honey-dew] nectar. Associated with poetic inspiration in Coleridge, Kubla Khan l. 53: ‘For he on honey-dew hath fed’. 85. sense] ‘The means by which sensation is experienced’ (Major Works 796). sweet as stops] stops = notes. Cp. Paradise Lost vii 596: ‘organs of sweet stop’. 86. planetary music] A reference to the Pythagorean concept of the harmony of the spheres explained in Aristotle, De Caelo 290b and Cicero, De Re Publica vi 17–18, and mentioned in Plato, Republic 617b: And the spindle turned on the knees of Necessity, and up above on each of the rims of the circles a Siren stood, borne around in its revolution and uttering one sound, one note, and from all the eight there was the concord of a single harmony.

(Trans. Paul Shorey, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato)

The idea that such music is not audible to mortals (except, according to l. 86, when they are in trance) is found in Q Mab vi 41 and viii 18 and, among other examples, in The Merchant of Venice V i 60–5; Milton, ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ ll. 125–32; Pope, An Essay on Man i 201–4; and Wordsworth, Peter Bell, A Tale in Verse (1819) Prologue, ll. 88–9. The music of the spheres is referred to in With a Guitar. To Jane ll. 74–8 and the phrase ‘planetary music’ is found in DP: Few poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful whether the alloy of costume, habit, etc., be not necessary to temper this planetary music for mortal ears.

(Reiman (2002) para. 12)

The concept is also found in Una Favola: ‘Cantavano sì dolcemente che forse l’armonia delle sfere alla quale le stelle ballano, è meno soave’ (‘They sang with such sweetness that perhaps the harmony of the spheres, to which the stars dance, is not so sweet’, BSM xxi 250–1; Relics 68). 89. too deep] Recalling Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ l. 206 and Alastor 713.

51 epipsychidion 90

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For the brief fathom-line of thought or sense. The glory of her being, issuing thence, Stains the dead, blank, cold air with a warm shade Of unentangled intermixture, made By Love, of light and motion: one intense Diffusion, one serene Omnipresence, Whose flowing outlines mingle in their flowing Around her cheeks and utmost fingers, glowing With the unintermitted blood, which there Quivers, (as in a fleece of snow-like air The crimson pulse of living morning quiver,) Continuously prolonged, and ending never, Till they are lost, and in that Beauty furled Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world; Scarce visible from extreme loveliness. Warm fragrance seems to fall from her light dress, And her loose hair; and where some heavy tress The air of her own speed has disentwined, The sweetness seems to satiate the faint wind; And in the soul a wild odour is felt,

90. fathom-line] ‘measuring power’ (Concordance). A fathom-line is used to test the depth of water. The word is found in Henry IV, Pt 1 I iii 204 and Byron, ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’ (1816) l. 110. 91–104. Cp. PU II v 48–71 and WA 81–8. 91–2. Contrast the use of ‘stain’ and ‘Stains’ in Adonais 356 and 463. 91. thence] ‘From her eyes’ (Locock 1911 ii 455). 97. fingers,] Nbk 17 p. 63; fingers Epipsychidion (1821). See Fiordispina l. 91. 98. unintermitted] unceasing. 100. The crimson pulse of living Morn may quiver), Rossetti 1870. Rossetti explains his emendation thus: ‘A horrid violation of grammar is given in previous editions . . . The words “morn may” might easily be misread and misprinted as “morning.” I trust therefore that the reader will tolerate this emendation’ (Rossetti 1870 ii 551). The reading in Nbk 17 p. 63 (BSM vi 212–13) is clearly morning. As suggested in Major Works 796, it may be that ‘In the process of redrafting, Shelley failed to notice the lack of agreement between singular noun and plural verb’. However, Forman justifies the reading in Epipsychidion (1821) thus: I incline to the supposition that the line stands in the first edition as Shelley meant it to stand, and that this is another case in which he uses the subjunctive mood after a word which is not generally followed by that mood. (Forman 1876–7 ii 372 n. 2) For the drafting of this line in Nbk 17, see the note to Fiordispina l. 94. 102–4. in that Beauty . . . loveliness.] Cp. Adonais 478–86. 106–7. where . . . disentwined] Where her quick movement has led the wind to disentangle a heavy tress of her hair. Cp PU II iii 48. 109. wild odour] Cp. PU IV 256.

594 110

115

120

125

130

shelley: selected poems Beyond the sense, like fiery dews that melt Into the bosom of a frozen bud. — See where she stands! a mortal shape endued With love and life and light and deity, And motion which may change but cannot die; An image of some bright Eternity; A shadow of some golden dream; a Splendour Leaving the third sphere pilotless; a tender Reflection of the eternal Moon of Love Under whose motions life’s dull billows move; A Metaphor of Spring and Youth and Morning; A vision like incarnate April, warning, With smiles and tears, Frost the Anatomy Into his summer grave. Ah, woe is me! What have I dared? where am I lifted? how Shall I descend, and perish not? I know That Love makes all things equal: I have heard By mine own heart this joyous truth averred: The spirit of the worm beneath the sod In love and worship, blends itself with God. Spouse! Sister! Angel! Pilot of the Fate Whose course has been so starless! O too late

111. bud. —]The dash in Epipsychidion (1821) is noticeably extended. 113–15. Line 114 appears first to have been inserted between ll. 113 and 115 in Nbk 17 p. 65 (BSM vi 216–17) then cancelled and a revised version w ­ ritten beneath. No rhyming partner for it is evident on this or the surrounding pages of the nbk. 116. A shadow] The draft in Nbk 17 p. 67 (BSM vi 220–1) reads The phantom. 117. the third sphere] The third sphere or the third Heaven (il terzo ciel) is that of Venus or Love and is referred to in the opening line of the first Canzone of Dante’s Il Convivio cited in the Advertisement (see Così la Poesia, incarnata diva (Longman iv 200, no. 395 Appendix) l. 8 and note). The draft in Nbk 17 p. 66 (BSM vi 218–19) reads the morning planet (another name for Venus). 118. of] on 1839, 1840. 122. Anatomy] ‘Living being reduced to “skin and bone”; a withered or emaciated creature, a “walking skeleton” ’ (OED 6). 124–5. how/Shall I descend, and perish not?] Bryan Shelley, Shelley and Scripture: The Interpreting Angel (1994) 182 notes an echo in 1 Samuel xxvi 10: ‘or he shall descend into battle, and perish’. For the possibility that some of the biblical echoes in the poem result from S. having recently read those Books of the Old Testament referred to in Il Convivio, see the headnote to Ye who [  ] the third Heaven move. 128–9. Cp. Lines to — [Sonnet to Byron] (Longman v, no. 429) ll. 13–14. 130–1. Pilot of the Fate . . . starless] Emily is momentarily represented as the speaker’s guide, as Virgil and Beatrice are Dante’s throughout the Commedia. The implication of Whose course has been so starless is that the speaker has so far been in a kind of Hell (no stars are visible in Inferno). Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso all end with the word stelle (stars). 130. Spouse! Sister!] Cp. ‘my sister, my spouse’ in Song of Solomon iv 9, 10, 12 and v 1. Shelley, Shelley and Scripture 144 comments of this collocation that ‘The spouse-sister association . . . reminds us that in the primitive Hebrew culture, a man might marry one as close as his half-sister’. The superiority of

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Belovèd! O too soon adored, by me! For in the fields of immortality My spirit should at first have worshipped thine, A divine presence in a place divine; Or should have moved beside it on this earth, A shadow of that substance, from its birth; But not as now: — I love thee; yes, I feel That on the fountain of my heart a seal Is set, to keep its waters pure and bright For thee, since in those tears thou hast delight. We — are we not formed, as notes of music are,

brother- sister love to relationships between men and women sanctioned by the religious institution of marriage is central to R&H (Longman ii, no. 144) and L&C. However, the address Sister! in this line and in l. 415 (my heart’s sister) is perhaps best explained by reference to the words ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ as used by S. in his letter to Elizabeth Hitchener of 16 October 1811. There, in discussing his future inheritance, he seeks to educate Hitchener in his immaterial and non-proprietorial conception of Love: I will open to you my views — on my coming to the estate which worldly considered is mine, but which actually I  have not more, perhaps not so great a right to as you, Justice demands that it shd. be shared between my [real deleted] sisters? does it or does it not? Mankind are as much my brethren & sisters as they, all ought to share — this cannot be, it must be confined. But thou art the sister of my soul — he is it’s brother — surely these have a right. Consider this subject, write to me on it; divest yourself of individuality, dare to place self at a distance which I know you can, spurn those bug-bears gratitude, obligation,  & modesty — the world calls these virtues; they are well enough for the world, it wants a chain, it hath forged one for itself, but with the sister of my soul I have no obligation, to her I feel no gratitude, I stand not on etiquette, alias insincerity. The ideas excited by these words are varying, frequently unjust, always selfish. Love in the sense which we understand it needs not these succedanea. —

(L i 150–1)

It is clear from her correspondence with the Shelleys where she frequently addresses S. and Mary as ‘Fratello’ (‘Brother’) and ‘Sorella’ (‘Sister’) (see, e.g., Shelley and Mary iii 569, 571; Viviani della Robbia 75–6; trans. White ii 470–1) that Teresa Viviani had been inducted into such a discourse which was intended to define their relationships in non-exclusive and spiritual terms. Angel!] Recalling, for example, Vita Nuova xxvi: ‘Diceano molti, poi che passata era: “Questa non è femmina, anzi è uno de li bellissimi angeli del cielo.” ’ (‘Often people said, when she had passed: “This is no woman; this is one of the fairest angels of Heaven.” ’ Trans. Reynolds). 133–4. S.’s fields of immortality combined with at first suggests Platonic pre-existence, as noted in Winstanley, ‘Platonism in Shelley’ 83. See Socrates in Phaedo 76c: ‘Then our souls had a previous existence . . . before they took on this human shape. They were independent of our bodies, and they were possessed of intelligence’ (trans. Tredennick, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato). The idea of a soul worshipping another before birth seems contingent upon it being ‘possessed of intelligence’. 138–40. I feel . . . Is set] Cp. Song of Solomon viii 6: ‘Set me as a seal upon thine heart’. 142–6. These lines draw upon Fiordispina ll. 31–5. For the analogy between love and music, see Eryximachus’s speech in Symposium 187c: ‘Music is then the knowledge of that which relates to love in harmony and rhythm. In the very system of harmony and rhythm, it is easy to distinguish love’ (S.’s trans., Julian vii 181).

596

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shelley: selected poems For one another, though dissimilar; Such difference without discord, as can make Those sweetest sounds, in which all spirits shake As trembling leaves in a continuous air? Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wrecked. I never was attached to that great sect,

145–6. shake .  .  . continuous air] Cp. Purgatorio xxviii 9–11 and S.’s trans. of these lines in Dante’s Purgatorio Canto XXVIII, 1–51 (Longman iii 478–83, no. 331): non di più colpo che soave vento; per cui le fronde, tremolando, pronte tutte quante piegavano (Like the soft stroke of a continuous wind In which the passive leaves tremblingly were All bent) 146. air] = (1) breeze; (2) tune. See Paradise Lost iv 264–6: airs, vernal airs, Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune The trembling leaves . . . 147. Shelley, Shelley and Scripture 142 cps Proverbs viii — ix. 148. Beacon] ‘To furnish with beacons; to mark the position of, by beacons or a ­beacon’ (OED 3). Cp. Adonais 495 where ‘Beacons’ is used in a different sense (‘To shine like a beacon’ (OED 4)). 149–61. These lines draw upon Fragments connected with Epipsychidion B (Longman iv 174–6) ll. 6–18. 149–59. I never was attached . . . longest journey go.] A source for these lines and Narrow/The heart that loves . . . A sepulchre for its eternity in ll. 169–73 is Diotima’s speech in Symposium 210a — b: ‘He who aspires to love rightly, ought from his earliest youth to seek an intercourse with beautiful forms, and first to make a single form the object of his love, and therein to generate intellectual excellences. He ought, then, to consider that beauty in whatever form it resides is the brother of that beauty which subsists in another form; and if he ought to pursue that which is beautiful in form, it would be absurd to imagine that beauty is not one and the same thing in all forms, and would therefore remit much of his ardent preference towards one, through his perception of the multitude of claims upon his love.’

(S.’s trans., Julian vii 205)

The hostility towards marriage as an institution that sanctions the code/Of modern morals (ll. 153– 4) pervades S.’s writings. See, e.g., the Note to Q Mab v 189, L&C, R&H, The Fugitives and Ginevra (Longman iv 203–20, no. 398). For sources in the writings of Godwin and others of S.’s views on marriage, see the commentary to the Note to Q Mab v 189. This passage is pertinent to Webb’s interpretation of the poem’s title as meaning ‘ “little soul song”, on the analogy of epithalamion to which it provides a more liberated alternative’ (Webb (1995) 420; see note on Title). 149–50. that great sect,/Whose doctrine] The connection between S.’s atheism and his ‘anti-matrimonialism’ is evident as early as his letter to Hogg of 8 May 1811: Yet marriage is hateful detestable, — a kind of ineffable sickening disgust seizes my mind when I  think of this most despotic most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine it’s energies. Yet this is Xtianity — & Xt must perish before this can fall; I do {not now}

51 epipsychidion 150

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Whose doctrine is, that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend To cold oblivion, though it is in the code Of modern morals, and the beaten road Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread, Who travel to their home among the dead By the broad highway of the world, and so With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe, The dreariest and the longest journey go. True Love in this differs from gold and clay, That to divide is not to take away. even speak of Xt as Xt is but {as the} world have made him; for anti-matrimonialism is as necessarily connected with infidelity as if Religion & marriage began their course together . . .

(L i 80)

154. the beaten road] The Godwinian Gwyn describes the institution of marriage thus in George Crabbe’s ‘The Gentleman Farmer’ ll. 144–5 in Tales (1812): ‘ “Absurd! That none the beaten road should shun,/But love to do what other dupes have done.” ’ 156. among the dead] See S.’s letter to Hogg of 22 October 1821: ‘I knew a very interesting Italian lady last winter, but she is now married; which, to quote our friend Peacock, is you know, the same as being dead. — ’ (L ii 360). 157. the broad highway of the world] Cp. Wordsworth, ‘The Brothers’ l. 191: ‘Yet all in the broad high-way of the world’. 160–89. On the infinity of love, see Virgil’s speech to Dante in Purgatorio xv 46–75 esp. 67–75: ‘ Quello infinito e ineffabil bene che là sù è, così corre ad amore com’ a lucido corpo raggio vene. Tanto si dà quanto trova d’ardore; sì che, quantunque carità si stende, cresce sovr’ essa l’etterno valore. E quanta gente più là sù s’intende, più v’è da bene amare, e più vi s’ama e come specchio l’uno a l’altro rende.[’]

[]

([‘]The highest good Unlimited, ineffable, doth so speed To love, as beam to lucid body darts, Giving as much of ardour as it finds. The sempiternal effluence streams abroad Spreading, wherever charity extends. So that the more aspirants to that bliss Are multiplied, more good is there to love, And more is lov’d; as mirrors, that reflect, Each unto other, propagated light.[’]) A similar idea is expressed in Peacock’s Rhododaphne ii 1–12: Does Love so weave his subtle spell, So closely bind his golden chain, That only one fair form may dwell In dear remembrance, and in vain

598

shelley: selected poems Love is like understanding, that grows bright, Gazing on many truths;’tis like thy light, May other beauty seek to gain A place that idol form beside In feelings all pre-occupied? Or does one radiant image, shrined Within the inmost soul’s recess, Exalt, expand, and make the mind A temple, to receive and bless All forms of kindred loveliness?

(Peacock Works vii 19)

160. True Love] Echoing the title of Teresa Viviani’s essay, Il vero Amore (see note to epigraph). Although it dates from his youth, S.’s letter to Elizabeth Hitchener of ?11 November 1811 provides an illuminating gloss on this concept: What is Love, or Friendship, is it something material, a ball an apple a plaything which must be taken from one to be given to another. Is it capable of no extension, no communication. — Ld. Kames defines love to be a particularization of the general passion, but this is the love of sensation of sentiment. The absurdest of absurd vanities; it is the love of pleasure, not the love of happiness. — The one is a love which is self-centered self devoted self-interested; it desires it’s own interest, it is the parent of jealousy, its object is the plaything which it desires to monopolize — selfishness, monopoly is its very soul, & to communicate to others part of this love were to d{es}troy its essence, to annihilate this chain of straw. — But Love, the Love which we worship — Virtue Heaven disinterestedness, in a word friendship, which has as much to do with the senses as with yonder mountains — that which seeks the good of all; the good of it’s object first, not because that object is a minister to it’s pleasures, not merely because it even contributes to its happiness; but because it is really worthy, because it has power sensibilities is capable of abstracting self and loving virtue for Virtues own loveliness, desiring the happiness of others not from the obligation of fearing Hell or desiring Heaven, but for pure simple unsophisticated Virtue.

(L i 173)

On the misreading of True for Free in the draft of this line in Fragments connected with Epipsychidion B, see the note to l. 17 of that Fragment. 162–89. Lines 162–72, 174–87 and 189 draw upon Fragments connected with Epipsychidion I (Longman iv 181–2) ll.1–19, 21–2 and 24–8. 162–3. Love . . . grows bright,/Gazing on many truths] As with ll. 149–59, there are echoes in these lines of Diotima’s speech to Socrates in Symposium. See 210e — 211b: ‘He who has been disciplined to this point in Love, by contemplating beautiful objects gradually, and in their order, now arriving at the end of all that concerns Love, on a sudden beholds a beauty wonderful in its nature. This is it, O Socrates, for the sake of which all the former labours were endured. It is eternal, unproduced, indestructible; neither subject to increase nor decay . . . All other things are beautiful through a participation of it, with this condition, that although they are subject to production and decay, it never becomes more or less, or endures any change. When any one, ascending from a correct system of Love, begins to contemplate this supreme beauty, he already touches the consummation of his labour.’

(S.’s trans., Julian vii 206)

163–6. thy light .  .  . mirrors] Rognoni 1611 cps DP (composed at the same time or shortly after Epipsychidion): ‘The drama, so long as it continues to express poetry, is as a prismatic and many-sided mirror’ (Reiman (2002) para. 17).

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Imagination! which from earth and sky, And from the depths of human fantasy, As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills The Universe with glorious beams, and kills Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow Of its reverberated lightning. Narrow The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, The life that wears, the spirit that creates One object, and one form, and builds thereby A sepulchre for its eternity. Mind from its object differs most in this: Evil from good; misery from happiness; The baser from the nobler; the impure And frail, from what is clear and must endure. If you divide suffering and dross, you may Diminish till it is consumed away; If you divide pleasure and love and thought, Each part exceeds the whole; and we know not How much, while any yet remains unshared, Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared: This truth is that deep well, whence sages draw

167–8. kills . . . sun-like arrow] Cp. Song of Apollo ll. 13–14 and OL (Longman iii, no. 322) 138. 168. Error, the worm] For other examples of the personification of Error in S.’s poems, see OL 138, WA 51, Ode to Naples (Longman iv, no. 343) A l. 93 and Hellas (Longman v, no. 411) 986. a sun-like arrow] Turner 274 cps ‘lucida tela diei’ (‘the bright shafts of day’) in Lucretius, De Re. Nat. i 147, ii 60 and iii 92 (see also vi 40). 184. This truth is that deep well] Cp. PU II iv 116, and PB3 (Longman iii, no. 239) 539–40 and note.

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185

The unenvied light of hope; the eternal law By which those live, to whom this world of life Is as a garden ravaged, and whose strife Tills for the promise of a later birth The wilderness of this Elysian earth.

190

There was a Being whom my spirit oft Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft, In the clear golden prime of my youth’s dawn, Upon the fairy isles of sunny lawn, Amid the enchanted mountains, and the caves Of divine sleep, and on the air-like waves Of wonder-level dream, whose tremulous floor Paved her light steps; — on an imagined shore, Under the grey beak of some promontory She met me, robed in such exceeding glory, That I beheld her not. In solitudes Her voice came to me through the whispering woods, And from the fountains, and the odours deep Of flowers, which, like lips murmuring in their sleep Of the sweet kisses which had lulled them there, Breathed but of her to the enamoured air; And from the breezes whether low or loud, And from the rain of every passing cloud,

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185. unenvied] ‘Because common to all’ (Locock 1911 ii 456). 186–9. Shelley, Shelley and Scripture 182 cps Isaiah li 3: ‘For the Lord . . . will make her wilderness like Eden’. 189. Cp. PU II v 81. 196. wonder-level] Not in OED. ‘[O]n a par with miracles or wonders’ (Concordance). 198. beak] point. Carlos Baker, ‘A Note on Shelley and Milton’, MLN lv (1940) 585–9 (587) cps Lycidas l. 94 (quoted in the note to ll. 236–8), where ‘beaked’ = ‘pointed’, as in WA 483. 199. exceeding glory] Shelley, Shelley and Scripture 144 n. 19 cps 2 Corinthians iv 17: ‘For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory’. 200. I beheld her not] I could not see her. See Vita Nuova xix 55–6: ‘voi le vedete Amor pinto nel viso,/ là’ve non pote alcun mirarla fiso’ (‘you see Love depicted in her face, there where no one can fix his gaze’, trans. F&B). 200–9. In solitudes . . . all silence.] The beloved is not seen directly but is perceived through the appearances of nature as is the Spirit of Beauty in Hymn to Intellectual Beauty ll. 1–12. 203–4. like lips murmuring . . . lulled them there] Cp. Keats, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ ll. 29–34: She took me to her elfin grot, And there she wept and sighed full sore, And there I shut her wild wild eyes With kisses four. And there she lullèd me asleep And there I dreamed — Ah! woe betide!

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And from the singing of the summer-birds, And from all sounds, all silence. In the words Of antique verse and high romance, — in form Sound, colour — in whatever checks that Storm Which with the shattered present chokes the past; And in that best philosophy, whose taste Makes this cold common hell, our life, a doom As glorious as a fiery martyrdom; Her Spirit was the harmony of truth. — Then, from the caverns of my dreamy youth I sprang, as one sandalled with plumes of fire, And towards the lodestar of my one desire, I flitted, like a dizzy moth, whose flight Is as a dead leaf’s in the owlet light, When it would seek in Hesper’s setting sphere A radiant death, a fiery sepulchre, As if it were a lamp of earthly flame. — But She, whom prayers or tears then could not tame, Past, like a God throned on a winged planet,

209–16. In the words . . . truth. —] The Spirit (l. 216) of the Being (l. 190) is evident in literature (antique verse and high romance) and thought (best philosophy), as well as in nature (ll. 200–9). 209–11. In the words . . . colour] What appears to be an early draft of lines for this passage in Nbk 17 p. 99 (BSM vi 286–7) reads All harmony of high design, all hope/Of oversoaring Fame’s eternal cope. The first attempt at the first line reads All melody of music & of words. 210. romance] A characteristically Keatsian word (the sole instance in Con­cordance). See, e.g., ‘Sleep and Poetry’ l. 10 (‘a high romance’), Endymion iii 149 (‘No tumbling water ever spake romance’), ‘Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil’ l. 387 (‘O for the gentleness of old Romance’) and ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ ll. 40–1 (‘triumphs gay/Of old romance’). 211–12. in whatever checks . . . chokes the past] The Spirit of the Being preserves the harmony of truth (l. 216) in those art forms — literature, sculpture, music and painting (In the words .  .  . colour) — of the past that the turmoil of the present threatens to extinguish. 213–15. whose taste . . . a fiery martyrdom] Having access to such wisdom makes our fate (doom) as living beings as illustrious as those who die in the cause of a greater good (martyr[s]). 213. in that best philosophy] The first draft of this line in Nbk 17 p.  99 (BSM vi 286–7) reads in the wonders of that wisdom; the wonders is cancelled and best written above, that wisdom is cancelled and philosophy written beneath. 214. this cold common hell, our life] Turner 274 cps Lucretius, De Re. Nat. iii 978–79: ‘Atque ea nimirum quaecumque Acherunte profundo/prodita sunt esse, in vita sunt omnia nobis’ (‘And assuredly whatsoever things are fabled to exist in deep Acheron, these all exist for us in this life’). 218–24. Cp. The Woodman and the Nightingale ll. 24–32. 221. owlet light] S.’s usage of this term is the first example recorded in OED. Since owl-light = ‘Twilight, dusk; dim or poor light’ (OED), the phrase owlet light may suggest ‘early dusk’. 222. Hesper’s] Hesper = the evening star. See l. 374 and note. 226–7. Shelley, Shelley and Scripture 182 cps Daniel vii 9–10: ‘his throne was like the fiery flame, and his wheels as burning fire. A fiery stream issued and came forth from before him’. Schulze, ‘The Dantean

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shelley: selected poems Whose burning plumes to tenfold swiftness fan it, Into the dreary cone of our life’s shade; And as a man with mighty loss dismayed, I would have followed, though the grave between Yawned like a gulf whose spectres are unseen: When a voice said: — ‘O Thou of hearts the weakest, The phantom is beside thee whom thou seekest.’ Then I — ‘where?’ the world’s echo answered ‘where!’ And in that silence, and in my despair, I questioned every tongueless wind that flew Over my tower of mourning, if it knew Whither’twas fled, this soul out of my soul;

Quest of Epipsychidion’ 202 suggests that S.’s ‘references to “a God throned on a winged planet” and to “tenfold swiftness,” besides recalling the glory of Beatrice, may pun on features of Dante’s universe’ referred to in Convivio II iii — vii, and xiv. 226. Rognoni 1611 cps PU IV 317. throned] Cp. ‘throned aloft’ in Ye who [  ] the third Heaven move l. 17 and note. 228. dreary cone] The conical shadow projected into space by the earth. See PU IV 444 and note. Turner 275 cps Lucretius, De Re. Nat. v 764: ‘rigidas coni . . . umbras’ (‘the sharp-drawn shadows of the cone’, trans. Cyril Bailey). 232–3. ‘O Thou .  .  . thou seekest.’] Cp. the inscription beneath the tenth Plate in Part V, Letter ix of Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761): ‘Où veux-tu fuir? Le Phantôme est dans ton coeur’ (Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols (1959–95) ii 770). The Plate is reproduced above a translation of the inscription — ‘Whither wilst thou flee? The Phantom is in thine heart’ — in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or The New Heloise, ed. and trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché (1997) 504. Schulze, ‘The Dantean Quest of Epipsychidion’ 203 suggests an allusion to Narcissus that marks ‘a departure from Dante’. 236–8. Cp. Lycidas ll. 91–4: He asked the waves, and asked the felon winds, What hard mishap hath doomed this gentle swain? And questioned every gust of rugged wings That blows from off each beaked promontory 238. this soul out of my soul] Brooke interprets these words to be S.’s translation of the word ‘Epipsychidion’ (see note to Title). See the following passage in On Love: We dimly see within our intellectual nature a miniature as it were of our entire self, yet deprived of all that we condemn or despise, the ideal prototype of every thing excellent or lovely that we are capable of conceiving as belonging to the nature of man. Not only the portrait of our external being, but an assemblage of the minutest particulars of which our nature is composed: a mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness: a soul within our soul that describes a circle around its proper Paradise which pain and sorrow or evil dare not overleap.

(Reiman (2002) 504)

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And murmured names and spells which have control Over the sightless tyrants of our fate; But neither prayer nor verse could dissipate The night which closed on her; nor uncreate That world within this Chaos, mine and me, Of which she was the veiled Divinity, The world I say of thoughts that worshipped her: And therefore I went forth, with hope and fear And every gentle passion sick to death, Feeding my course with expectation’s breath, Into the wintry forest of our life;

Turner 281 cps Lucretius, De Re. Nat. iii 275, 280–1: atque anima est animae proporro totius ipsa. . . . . . . atque animae quasi totius ipsa proporrost anima et dominatur corpore toto. (‘it is itself furthermore the spirit of the whole spirit . . .  . [It] is furthermore itself as it were the spirit of the whole spirit and lords it in all the body.’) White ii 254–5. notes a comparable instance of this wording in S.’s letter to Godwin of 10 January 1812: ‘The sublime interest of poetry, lofty and exalted atchievements, the proselytism of the world, the equalization of its inhabitants were to me the soul of my soul. — ’ (L i 228). 239–40. Cp. Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, esp. ll. 27–31. 240. sightless] The sense seems to be ‘blind’ as well as ‘invisible’. 242–5. nor uncreate . . . worshipped her] One interpretation of the referents of mine and me in these lines is: ‘Neither prayer nor verse could dispel the darkness which enshrouded the Being nor could they dissolve that world of thoughts (mine) that worshipped her within the chaos of my life (me) since she presided over that world unseen (as a veiled Divinity)’. Another is provided by Sperry in Shelley’s Major Verse 169–70: The lines expose a paradox central to the poem. The “veiled Divinity” may have vanished, but she remains crucial to the identity of her lover. Thus he insists on distinguishing between two parts of himself, a dark and engulfing “Chaos” that is “mine,” and a central core of being, an immutable “me,” formed and indelibly marked by her spirit. The division reflects an idealization that involves splitting of the ego into separate parts, one pure and harmonious, reflecting only her, the other evil and demonic and subject to the malign influences of the world. 242–3. nor uncreate . . . Chaos] See Ode to Naples A l. 138. 249. the wintry forest of our life] Woodberry (1901) 633 cps Una Favola where ‘Amore’ (Love) leads ‘il giovane’ (the youth) to ‘uno bosco solitario’ (‘a solitary wood’) where ‘il giovane seguitava per un anno intero i passi incerti di questo compagno e duce suo’ (‘the youth for a whole year followed the uncertain footsteps of this his companion and guide’) (BSM xxi 252–3; Relics 68). The allegory of a journey through a forest is continued in l. 321.

604 250

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shelley: selected poems And struggling through its error with vain strife, And stumbling in my weakness and my haste, And half-bewildered by new forms, I passed Seeking among those untaught foresters If I could find one form resembling hers, In which she might have masked herself from me. There, — One, whose voice was venomed melody Sat by a well, under blue night-shade bowers; The breath of her false mouth was like faint flowers, Her touch was as electric poison, — flame Out of her looks into my vitals came, And from her living cheeks and bosom flew A killing air, which pierced like honey-dew Into the core of my green heart, and lay Upon its leaves; until, as hair grown grey O’er a young brow, they hid its unblown prime With ruins of unseasonable time. In many mortal forms I rashly sought

256–66. One, whose voice venomed melody . . . time.] In his article ‘Shelley, By One Who Knew Him’ in the Atlantic Monthly xi (1863) 184–204 (200), Thornton Hunt claimed that these lines were ‘a plain and only too intelligible reference to’ an encounter S. had with a prostitute in his youth. Building on this suggestion, Nora Crook and Derek Guiton in Shelley’s Venomed Melody (1986) 148 offer a detailed reading of this passage in terms of the depiction of sexually transmitted disease: The image of the nightshade hanging over the water and thus poisoning the springs of life is reinforced by other details. The ‘venomed melody’ recalls ‘prostitution’s venomed bane’. The details of the woman’s breath, redolent of faint flowers, and the killing air, allude to the belief that syphilis was originally spread by exhalations. But the disease also spreads by contact: ‘Her touch was as electric poison’. These details, taken with others . . . furnish as precise a description of a disease which is the province of both surgeon and physician as it is possible to accommodate within the metaphoric conventions that Shelley employs. 256–64. There are subtle echoes here (particularly in venomed, breath, false, poison and killing) of Keats, ‘Lamia’ i 287ff. and ii 249ff. 257. night-shade] = the poisonous Solanum dulcamara (‘bittersweet’). For the symbolic significance of this plant in S.’s poems, see Passion: To the [Woody Nightshade] (Longman i 189–91, no. 66) and headnote; Q Mab viii 129 and note; and PU III iv 79 and note. 262. honey-dew] Denoting, according to Crook and Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody 148–9, ‘the gummy excrement left on leaves by aphids’ and ‘thus an antithesis to honey-dew meaning nectar’ in l. 84. 264–5. as hair grown grey/O’er a young brow] As recorded in the note to ’Twas the 20th of October (Longman iii 192–3, no. 256) ll. 3–4, prematurely grey and thinning hair is associated with the protagonists of Alastor (413) and L&C (457). As noted in Bieri 557, the youth is described thus in Una Favola: ‘le soffranze più che gli anni avevano imbiancita la chioma’ (BSM xxi 258–9) (‘sorrows rather than years had blanched his locks’ (Relics 71)). Crook and Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody 6, 149 suggest that hair grown grey is another example of pathological imagery associated with syphilis. 265. unblown prime] Cp. Adonais 52. 267–383. This section is central to interpretations of Epipsychidion as, in Richard Holmes’s terminology, ‘a poème à clef ’ and ‘the most nakedly autobiographical poem [S.] ever wrote’ (Holmes 632, 635). He

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The shadow of that idol of my thought. And some were fair — but beauty dies away: Others were wise — but honeyed words betray: And One was true — oh! why not true to me? Then, as a hunted deer that could not flee, I turned upon my thoughts, and stood at bay, Wounded and weak and panting; the cold day Trembled, for pity of my strife and pain. When, like a noon-day dawn, there shone again

comments of the ‘series of references to actual women and events in Shelley’s life’ that they ‘are only intended to be partially disguised, and were certainly meant to be interpreted by the most intimate of [S.’s] circle’ (632). The standard account of the women and events referred to in these lines is Kenneth Neill Cameron, ‘The Planet-Tempest Passage in Epipsychidion’, PMLA lxiii (1948) 950–72, discussed in the headnote. 268. that idol of my thought] Webb (1995) 423 cps On Christianity (Prose Works 246–71 (261)): ‘Every human mind has, what Lord Bacon calls its idola specus [idols of the cave], peculiar images which reside in the inner cave of thought’. 269–71. Cameron, ‘The Planet-Tempest Passage’ 951 plausibly suggests that these lines ‘deal with events that took place prior to the meeting with Mary’. Although his identification of Mrs Boinville as amongst the wise of l. 270 is persuasive (for the lasting impression she made on S., see the headnote to Thy gentle face, [?] dear (Longman iv 46–51, no. 373)), the One of l. 271 seems more likely to refer to Harriet Grove rather than, as Cameron supposes, Harriet Westbrook since in a cancelled passage in the Dedication to L&C, S. alludes to Harriet Grove as ‘One whom I found was dear but false to me’ (see the note to L&C ll. 51–4). It seems likely that Harriet Westbrook is amongst the fair referred to in l. 269 (Cornelia Turner, whose relationship with S. is discussed in the headnote to Thy gentle face, [?] dear may be another, as noted in White ii 262). Peacock remembered her thus: She had a good figure, light, active, and graceful. Her features were regular and well proportioned. Her hair was light brown, and dressed with taste and simplicity. In her dress she was truly simplex munditiis [simple in elegance; from Horace, Odes 1 v 15]. Her complexion was beautifully transparent; the tint of the blush rose shining through the lily.

(Peacock Works viii 95)

269. beauty dies away] A possible echo of Keats, ‘Ode on Melancholy’ l. 21: ‘She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die’. 272–4. as a hunted deer . . . weak and panting] S.’s self-identification with the mythological huntsman Actaeon, turned into a deer by the goddess Artemis after he sees her bathing then pursued and killed by his own hounds, foreshadows Adonais 274–9. See the note to those lines and also PU I 454–7 and note. Tilar J. Mazzeo notes that Mary’s suggestion that ‘Petrarch narrates the early story of his love’ in ll. 147–60 of his canzone ‘Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade’ ‘also applies to the Actaeon image in . . . Epipsychidion’ (MSLL i 15 and 15–16 n. e). The lines referred to are as follows: I’ segui’ tanto avanti il mio desire ch’ un dì, cacciando sì com’ io solea, mi mossi, e quella fera bella et cruda in una fonte ignuda si stava, quando’l sol più forte ardea. Io perché d’altra vista non m’appago stetti a mirarla, ond’ ella ebbe vergogna

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shelley: selected poems Deliverance. One stood on my path who seemed As like the glorious shape which I had dreamed, As is the Moon, whose changes ever run Into themselves, to the eternal Sun; The cold chaste Moon, the Queen of Heaven’s bright isles,

et per farne vendetta o per celarse l’acqua nel viso co le man mi sparse. Vero dirò; forse e’ parrà menzogna: ch’ i’ senti’ trarmi de la propria imago et in un cervo solitario et vago di selva in selva ratto mi trasformo, et ancor de’ miei can fuggo lo stormo. (‘I followed so far my desire that one day, hunting as I was wont, I went forth, and that lovely cruel wild creature was in a spring naked when the sun burned most strongly. I, who am not appeased by any other sight, stood to gaze on her, whence she felt shame and, to take revenge or to hide herself, sprinkled water in my face with her hand. I shall speak the truth, perhaps it will appear a lie, for I felt myself drawn from my own image and into a solitary wandering stag from wood to wood quickly I am transformed and still I flee the belling of my hounds.’) There is a pencil cross against the first line of ‘Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade’ in S.’s copy of Le Rime di Francesco Petrarca, 2 vols (1778) [Ogden A283] i 24 in University College London Library Special Collections. 277. One] Mary. That Mary, like S., thought of their relationship in spiritual terms is evident from her unpublished ‘Life of Shelley’ where she describes herself as ‘the chosen mate of a celestial spirit’ (Mary LL iv 226). 281. The cold chaste Moon] Referring to her grief after S.’s death, Mary told Byron in a letter of 21 October 1822 ‘now I am truly cold moonshine’ (Mary L i 284), apparently acknowledging this description of her. There is also acceptance of S.’s identification of her with the moon in her journal entry for 5 October 1822: Well I shall commence my task, commemorate the virtues of the only creature on earth worth loving or living for, & then maybe I may join him, Moonshine may be united to her planet & wander no more, a sad reflection of all she loved, on earth.

(Mary Jnl ii 434)

Her poem The Choice, composed May — July 1823 and first published by Forman in 1876 (MSLL iv p. xxx), includes self-reproach for her ‘cold neglect’ of S. (l. 33) perhaps with reference to a chaste cold bed (l. 299) as well as this line. As noted by Pamela Clemit (MSLL iv 118 n. a), several lines of her poem echo Epipsychidion, about which Mary was silent in her editions of S.’s works. From Teresa Viviani’s letter to Mary of 24 December 1820, it is clear that S. had communicated to her his view that Mary was ‘cold’: ‘Tu mi sembri un poco fredda, talvolta, e mi dai qualche soggezione; ma conosco, che tuo Marito disse bene, allorchè disse: che la tua apparente freddezza, non è che la cenere che ricuopre un cuore affettuoso’ (‘You seem to me a little cold sometimes, and that causes me an uncomfortable feeling; but I know that your husband said well when he said that your apparent coldness is only the ash which covers an affectionate heart’) (Bodleian MS. Abinger c. 45 ff. 50v — 51r; this passage is published,

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Who makes all beautiful on which she smiles, That wandering shrine of soft yet icy flame Which ever is transformed, yet still the same, And warms not but illumines. Young and fair As the descended Spirit of that sphere, She hid me, as the Moon may hide the night From its own darkness, until all was bright Between the Heaven and Earth of my calm mind, And, as a cloud charioted by the wind, She led me to a cave in that wild place, And sat beside me, with her downward face Illumining my slumbers, like the Moon Waxing and waning o’er Endymion. And I was laid asleep, spirit and limb, And all my being became bright or dim As the Moon’s image in a summer sea, According as she smiled or frowned on me; And there I lay, within a chaste cold bed:

not entirely accurately, in Shelley and Mary iii 559 and Viviani della Robbia 84; the translation is from White ii 476). On the association of the moon with coldness in S.’s poems, see, e.g., ‘The pale, the cold, and the moony smile’ (Longman i 424–7, no. 93) l. 1, To Constantia (‘The red Rose that drinks the fountain dew’) (Longman ii 328–9, no. 147) l. 5 and Ode to Heaven l. 16. 282. smiles,] Forman 1876–7; smiles. Epipsychidion (1821). As noted in Forman 1876–7 ii 378 n. 1, the reading in Epipsychidion (1821) is a misprint. 283–4. Cp. the idea of permanence within the constantly changing physical world expressed in OL 76–9 (see also the note to those lines). 285–9. See S.’s letter to Mary of 28 October 1814: ‘Your thoughts alone can waken mine to energy. My mind without yours is dead & cold as the dark midnight river when the moon is down’ (L i 414). 286. the descended Spirit] Locock 1911 ii 456 cps Keats, ‘Lamia’ i 265: ‘a descended Pleiad’. 291–8. Lines which include two allusions to Keats’s poems. Cp. She led me . . . slumbers (ll. 291–3) with Keats, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ ll. 29–34 (quoted in the note to ll. 203–4). The myth of Endymion (ll. 294–8), the young shepherd with whom the goddess of the Moon (Diana) falls in love, which is mentioned in WA 587–8, is the basis of Keats’s poem of that title of 1818. 292–3. with her downward face . . . my slumbers] Cp. S. to Mary, 27 October 1814: ‘Oh! those redeeming eyes of Mary that they might beam upon me before I sleep!’ (L i 412). 295. Major Works 797 notes an ‘echo, ironic in effect’ of Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’ ll. 46–7: ‘we are laid asleep/In body, and become a living soul’. 299–301. ‘La Vita’ (Life) and her sister ‘La Morte’ (Death) are the twin enchantresses of the wood into which the youth is led by Love in Una Favola (see note to l. 249). Death inhabits a cavern (see l. 305) from which she flees when the youth declares his love for her (BSM xxi 252–9; Relics 69–71). These lines recall Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner (1817) ll. 193–4 (‘The Night-mare Life-in-Death was she,/Who thicks man’s blood with cold’), and, although the context is different (Mirtillo is lamenting his love-lorn state whereas S. is describing a mental crisis), the language of Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido III iii 493–6: ma son ben solo miserabile esempio e de’ vivi e de’ morti, non potendo né viver né morire.

608 300

305

310

shelley: selected poems Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead: — For at her silver voice came Death and Life, Unmindful each of their accustomed strife, Masked like twin babes, a sister and a brother, The wandering hopes of one abandoned mother, And through the cavern without wings they flew, And cried, ‘Away, he is not of our crew.’ I wept, and though it be a dream, I weep. What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep, Blotting that Moon, whose pale and waning lips Then shrank as in the sickness of eclipse; — And how my soul was as a lampless sea, And who was then its Tempest; and when She, The Planet of that hour, was quenched, what frost Crept o’er those waters, till from coast to coast (‘but onely wretched I am tost ’Twixt life and death; of whom it may be sed, That I am neither living, nor yet dead.’ Trans. Sir Richard Fanshawe)

301–8. These lines appear to refer to Ianthe and Charles (a sister and a brother), S.’s children by Harriet Westbrook (one abandoned mother) who committed suicide on 9 November 1816. Cameron explains them thus: Mary’s soothing rationalizations, Shelley seems to be telling us, serve only to bring up the conscience-stabbing images of his abandoned wife and children which drive him even further into his state of semi-being between life and death; and while in this condition he is hurled into the ‘storms’ of suicide and litigation.

(‘The Planet-Tempest Passage’, 965)

306. Cp. Paradise Lost vi 143: ‘All are not of thy train’. cried,] 1839, 1840; cried Epipsychidion (1821). 307. Even though this is a vision I weep now, as I did then. See S.’s letter to Mary of 16 December 1816 at the time when he was seeking custody of his children by Harriet: ‘Remember my poor babes Ianthe & Charles — how dear & tender a mother they will find in you — Darling William too! — my eyes overflow with tears’ (L i 521). S.’s use of repetition in the present line also anticipates several similar instances in Adonais (see, e.g., 1–2 and 19–20, in which ‘weep’ is repeated). See also l. 320. 308–19. What storms . . . These words conceal] The storms (l. 308) and earthquakes (l. 317) are likely to allude to the suicides in October 1816 and November 1816 of Fanny Godwin and Harriet Shelley, and the Lord Chancellor’s decision to deny S. custody of his children by Harriet in March 1817. For the ‘agonising sensations’ (L i 519) S. experienced in the aftermath of the ‘awful and appalling horror’ of Harriet’s death, see his letters to Mary of 16 December 1816 and to Byron of 17 January 1817 (L i 519–21, 529–30). Rossetti reports that Trelawny had told him that ‘even at the late period when he knew Shelley — 1822 — the impression of extreme pain which the end of Harriet had caused to the poet was still vividly present and operative’ (A Memoir of Shelley (1886) 69). 312–13. who was then its Tempest; and when She,/. . . was quenched] Cameron, ‘The Planet-Tempest Passage’ 966 identifies the Tempest (l. 312) with Eliza Westbrook who, S. told Byron, ‘may be truly said (though not in law, yet in fact) to have murdered [Harriet] for the sake of her father’s money’ (L i 530).

51 epipsychidion 315

320

325

330

335

609

The moving billows of my being fell Into a death of ice, immovable; — And then — what earthquakes made it gape and split, The white Moon smiling all the while on it, These words conceal: — If not, each word would be The key of staunchless tears. Weep not for me! At length, into the obscure Forest came The Vision I had sought through grief and shame. Athwart that wintry wilderness of thorns Flashed from her motion splendour like the Morn’s, And from her presence life was radiated Through the grey earth and branches bare and dead; So that her way was paved, and roofed above With flowers as soft as thoughts of budding love; And music from her respiration spread Like light, — all other sounds were penetrated By the small, still, sweet spirit of that sound, So that the savage winds hung mute around; And odours warm and fresh fell from her hair Dissolving the dull cold in the frore air: Soft as an Incarnation of the Sun, When light is changed to love, this glorious One Floated into the cavern where I lay,

On this basis, She,/The Planet of that hour refers to her sister Harriet who killed herself by drowning (was quenched) in the Serpentine. 316–18. A. C. Bradley, A Miscellany (1929) 173 cps Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner (1817) ll. 69 and 78: ‘The ice did split with a thunder-fit’ and ‘Glimmered the white moon-shine’. 318. See S.’s letters to Mary of December 1816 — January 1817 when he was frequently parted from her through the necessity of being in London to prepare the legal case for custody of Ianthe and Charles (in terms of the metaphor of Mary’s illumination, her presence was therefore in . . . eclipse (l. 310)). E.g. his letter to her of 11 January 1817: ‘Almost all besides that inviolable happiness which whilst you & your affection remains to me can never pass away is suspended perhaps on the issue of this trial. — ’ (L i 528). 321. obscure Forest] Cp. ‘una selva oscura’ (‘a gloomy wood’) in Inferno i 2. 332. Cp. PU I 66–7. 334. frore] Rossetti 1870; froze Epipsychidion (1821). No MS  of this line survives. The reading in Epipsychidion (1821) is almost certainly a printer’s error, as noted in Forman 1876–7 ii 380 n. 1. frore = frozen. This word is used in Paradise Lost ii 595 in the context of the iciness of Hell. Cf. also L&C 3687, R&H 1309 and PU I 121. 335–42. There are parallels in this description of ‘Emily’ (the One of l. 336) with the account of Love in Byron’s The Giaour 1131–40: ‘Yes, Love indeed is light from heaven — A spark of that immortal fire With angels shar’d — by Alla given, To lift from earth our low desire. Devotion wafts the mind above, But Heaven itself descends in love — A feeling from the Godhead caught,

610

340

345

350

355

360

365

shelley: selected poems And called my Spirit, and the dreaming clay Was lifted by the thing that dreamed below As smoke by fire, and in her beauty’s glow I stood, and felt the dawn of my long night Was penetrating me with living light: I knew it was the Vision veiled from me So many years—that it was Emily. Twin Spheres of light who rule this passive Earth, This world of love, this me ; and into birth Awaken all its fruits and flowers, and dart Magnetic might into its central heart; And lift its billows and its mists, and guide By everlasting laws, each wind and tide To its fit cloud, and its appointed cave; And lull its storms, each in the craggy grave Which was its cradle, luring to faint bowers The armies of the rainbow-wingèd showers; And, as those married lights, which from the towers Of Heaven look forth and fold the wandering globe In liquid sleep and splendour, as a robe; And all their many-mingled influence blend, If equal, yet unlike, to one sweet end; — So ye, bright regents, with alternate sway Govern my sphere of being, night and day! Thou, not disdaining even a borrowed might; Thou, not eclipsing a remoter light; And, through the shadow of the seasons three, From Spring to Autumn’s sere maturity, Light it into the Winter of the tomb,

To wean from self each sordid thought — A Ray of him who form’d the whole — A Glory circling round the soul![’] 342. living light] Weinberg, Shelley’s Italian Experience 149 cps Purgatorio xxxi 139: ‘viva luce etterna’ (‘sacred light eternal’). 345. Twin Spheres of light] The Sun and the Moon, ‘Emily’ and Mary. Twin] Thin 1839, 1840. 352–3. each in the . . . was its cradle] Cp. The Woodman and the Nightingale ll. 24–5. 354. rainbow-wingèd] Cp. PU II iv 130 and III iii 92. 355–7. those married lights . . . sleep and splendour] Referring to the Moon and the Sun (called ‘lights’ in Genesis i 16 and Paradise Lost vii 346). 360–1. Cp. Spenser, An Hymne of Heavenly Beavtie ll. 55–6: ‘But those two most, which ruling night and day,/As King and Queene, the heauens Empire sway’. 362–3. The Moon and the Sun are addressed in turn. 365. Autumn’s sere maturity] Recalling Alastor 8, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty ll. 73–7 and possibly Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ ll. 1–2 (‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,/Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun’). sere = withered.

51 epipsychidion

370

375

611

Where it may ripen to a brighter bloom. Thou too, O Comet beautiful and fierce, Who drew the heart of this frail Universe Towards thine own; till, wrecked in that convulsion, Alternating attraction and repulsion, Thine went astray and that was rent in twain; Oh, float into our azure heaven again! Be there love’s folding-star at thy return; The living Sun will feed thee from its urn Of golden fire; the Moon will veil her horn In thy last smiles; adoring Even and Morn Will worship thee with incense of calm breath And lights and shadows; as the star of Death

368–79. O Comet . . . shadows] Arabella Shore, ‘Shelley’s “Julian & Maddalo” ’, GM cclxiii (1887) 329–42 (336–7) first proposed that these lines refer to Claire Clairmont. The word ‘comet’ derives from the Gk κοαήτης meaning ‘long-haired’ (see PU II iv 139) and a reference to Claire’s appearance as well as personality may be intended. Medwin described her as ‘a brunette with very dark hair’ and ‘of a fearless and independent character’ (Medwin (1913) 169–70). Comets are traditionally portents of violent upheaval (see note to PU I 165–8) and the power of Claire’s singing is registered in terms of cosmic change in To Constantia (‘Thy voice, slow rising like a Spirit, lingers’) ll. 27–8: ‘The cope of Heaven seems rent and cloven/By the enchantment of thy strain’. Her characterisation as a comet may also allude to Byron’s ‘Churchill’s Grave’ ll. 1–2: ‘I stood beside the grave of him who blazed/The comet of a season’. Byron wrote this poem about the satirist Charles Churchill (1732–64) while reading Wordsworth with S. in Switzerland in June–July 1816. It was fair copied by Claire and published in The Prisoner of Chillon, and Other Poems (1816) (see Byron PW iv 447). 372. Thine seems to refer to thine own in l. 370 (that is, the heart of the Thou of l. 368); that may either refer to this individual heart (i.e. Claire’s), which is broken because her relationship with Byron and her separation from their daughter Allegra has caused her lasting pain, or to the heart of this frail Universe in l. 369 (in that Claire’s anguish has led to pain for others including S. himself). 373. Relations between Claire and Mary, often strained, became increasingly combustible during the summer of 1820 as instanced in Claire’s jnl entry for 4 July: ‘Heigh — ho the Clare  & the Ma/Find something to fight about every day — ’ (Claire Jnl 153). As a consequence of this and with the aim of improving her physical health, Claire went to live with the Bojti family in Florence on 20 October, returning to Pisa on 21 November. While in Pisa, where she stayed until 23 December, Claire began to visit Teresa Viviani at the Convent of St Anna with the Shelleys. S.’s distress at his separation from Claire is expressed in a letter to her of 29 October where he describes himself as ‘one ever affectionate Friend, to whom your absence is too painful for your return ever to be unwelcome’ (L ii 241–2). 374. love’s folding-star] The evening-star; love’s because it is known as Venus, folding-star because it is ‘The star that bids the shepherd fold’ (Comus 93) his sheep. See WA 74 and Hellas 1029. 374–7. Be there . . . last smiles] Cp. the reference to the sun in Paradise Lost vii 364–6: Hither as to their fountain other stars Repairing, in their golden urns draw light, And hence the morning planet gilds his horns 376. The ‘horns’ of the moon are its pointed extremities as they appear in her first and last quarters (see OED 18 and also Alastor 646–55). The prospect of the Moon’s horn being veiled may be the covert expression of a wish that Mary’s periodic hostility towards Claire will abate. 379–80. as the star of . . . Birth] Cp. With a Guitar. To Jane l. 28.

612 380

385

shelley: selected poems And Birth is worshipped by those sisters wild Called Hope and Fear — upon the heart are piled Their offerings, — of this sacrifice divine A World shall be the altar. Lady mine, Scorn not these flowers of thought, the fading birth Which from its heart of hearts that plant puts forth Whose fruit, made perfect by thy sunny eyes, Will be as of the trees of Paradise. The day is come, and thou wilt fly with me.

381–3. upon the heart . . . the altar.] Recalling ll. 3–4. 384. On the association of flowers with thought, see Rose leaves, when the rose is dead ll. 1–4 and the note to l. 3 of that poem. 387. the trees of Paradise] See Genesis ii 9: ‘And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil’. 388–591. The idea of lovers escaping to an island retreat by boat has echoes in The Fugitives as noted in Rogers 93, 102 and 244. However, there are more substantial resonances with the ‘bark’ to be ‘pilot[ed]’ to ‘our healing paradise’ in the final verse paragraph of Lines Written among the Euganean Hills ll. 335– 73. There is strong support for Webb’s suggestion that Dante’s sonnet Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io is ‘one of the shaping factors of Epipsychidion, with its climactic invitation au voyage’ (Webb 281). S. quotes lines from this sonnet, not altogether accurately, in the draft of a letter to Teresa Viviani early on in their friendship in Nbk 17 p. 43b (BSM vi 170–1), introducing them thus: Eccoci dunque, tu e noi, che siamo legati da una amicizia di pochi giorni, e accolti da qualche fortuna strana, dalle estremità della terra, per essere forse un reciproco sollievo. Mio voto per tu e noi sia fatto nelle parole di Dante — oh che — Fossimo presi per incantamento E messi ad un vascel, che ad ogni vento Per mare andasse a voler vostro e mio: Sì che fortuna od e aggungeriei anche questo Che ciascuno di loro fosse contento Siccome io credo che sariammo noi. (‘Here we are then, bound by a few days’ friendship, gathered together by some strange fortune from the ends of the earth to be perhaps a consolation to each other. Let my wish for you and for us be, in the words of Dante, that we “Led by some strong enchantment, might ascend A magic ship, whose charmèd sails should fly With winds at will where’er our thoughts might wend, And that no change, nor any evil chance Should mar our joyous voyage . . .”

51 epipsychidion

390

395

400

405



613

To whatsoe’er of dull mortality Is mine, remain a vestal sister still; To the intense, the deep, the imperishable, Not mine but me, henceforth be thou united Even as a bride, delighting and delighted. The hour is come: — the destined Star has risen Which shall descend upon a vacant prison. The walls are high, the gates are strong, thick set The sentinels — but true love never yet Was thus constrained: it overleaps all fence: Like lightning, with invisible violence Piercing its continents; like Heaven’s free breath, Which he who grasps can hold not; liker Death, Who rides upon a thought, and makes his way Through temple, tower, and palace, and the array Of arms: more strength has Love than he or they; For it can burst his charnel, and make free The limbs in chains, the heart in agony,

and I would add this also. “Would that . . . each were as content and free As I believe that thou and I should be.” ’)

(Trans. from L ii 448; the translation of the verse is from Sonnet. From the Italian of Dante Alighieri to Guido Cavalcanti (Longman i 451, no. 108) ll. 2–6 and 13–14; the text of the MS of S.’s letter differs in some respects from that presented in L ii 448, which derives from Rogers 341–2). 389–93. These lines appear to be expressive of Platonic love; the implication of Not mine but me (l. 392) is that ‘Emily’ is to be united with his soul not whatsoe’er of dull mortality/Is mine (ll. 389–90), i.e. his physical being. Cp. Sperry’s reading of ll. 242–5 cited in the note to those lines. 390. vestal] ‘Resembling a priestess of Vesta in respect of chastity; chaste, pure, virgin’ (OED 3). In Roman mythology, Vesta was the virgin goddess of the hearth. 394. The hour is come] Cp. John xii 23: ‘And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified’. 395–407. vacant prison . . . chaos.] Recalling the imagery of confinement in ll. 5–18. 397–8. true love . . . all fence.] Echoing the epigraph. Cp. True Love in l. 160. 398. it overleaps all fence] Thompson 161 cps Romeo and Juliet II ii 66–7: ‘With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls,/For stony limits cannot hold love out’. Baker, ‘A Note on Shelley and Milton’ 585 cps Paradise Lost iv 180–1: ‘Due entrance he disdained, and in contempt,/At one slight bound high overleaped all bound’. Cp. the passage from On Love cited in the note to l. 238 and also Alastor 207. 400. its continents] ‘The limits which contain it’ (Thompson 161). 401. liker Death] For the analogy between love and death, see Song of Solomon viii 6: ‘for love is strong as death’. 405. it] he 1839, 1840, Rossetti 1870 (his is also italicized in Rossetti 1870). A misunderstanding on the part of Mary and Rossetti. As noted in Forman 1876–7 ii 382 n. 1, it in this line refers to Love in l. 404 (it in l. 398 is also used of love in l. 397), whereas he in l. 404 refers to Death (l. 401).

614

shelley: selected poems The soul in dust and chaos.

410

415

420

425

430

Emily, A ship is floating in the harbour now, A wind is hovering o’er the mountain’s brow; There is a path on the sea’s azure floor, No keel has ever ploughed that path before; The halcyons brood around the foamless isles; The treacherous Ocean has forsworn its wiles; The merry mariners are bold and free: Say, my heart’s sister, wilt thou sail with me? Our bark is as an albatross, whose nest Is a far Eden of the purple East; And we between her wings will sit, while Night And Day, and Storm, and Calm, pursue their flight, Our ministers, along the boundless Sea, Treading each other’s heels, unheededly. It is an isle under Ionian skies, Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise, And, for the harbours are not safe and good, This land would have remained a solitude But for some pastoral people native there, Who from the Elysian, clear, and golden air Draw the last spirit of the age of gold, Simple and spirited; innocent and bold. The blue Aegean girds this chosen home, With ever-changing sound and light and foam,

412. halycons] kingfishers. See Ovid, Met. xi 746: ‘incubat Alcyone pendentibus aequore nidis’ (‘Alcyone broods upon her nest floating upon the surface of the waters’). foamless isles] The mythological halcyon possessed the power to calm the seas (cp. Unused lines for The Fugitives (Longman iv 32, no. 369 Appendix) A ll. 6–10 and note to l. 8). The present phrase is also found in Hellas 167. 421. unheededly] Cp. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV lxiii l. 5: ‘An earthquake reel’d unheededly away!’. 422. isle] Cp. ‘Un queto asilo’ (A quiet refuge) in l. 19 of Dal spiro della tua mente, [è] istinta (Longman iv 195–8, no. 395). Ionian] An area of the west coast of present-day Turkey was known to the ancient Greeks as Ionia. The Ionian coast looked out onto the Aegean Sea; S. is probably using Ionian to refer to the Aegean region generally, rather than the more westerly lying Ionian Sea. ‘Ouida’ (Marie Louise de la Ramée) comments: ‘In that most beautiful and too little known of poems, “Epipsychidion,” the whole scene, though called Greek, is Italian, and might be taken from the woods beside the Lake of Garda, or the Sercchio which he knew so well, or the forest-like parks which lie deep and cool and still in the blue shadows of Appenine or Abruzzi’ (‘Shelley’, in Views and Opinions (1895) 254–80 (267–8)). 424. for] because. 426. pastoral] Either in the sense of ‘caring for flocks or herds’ or ‘rustic’ (as in l. 485); the gloss in Concordance is ‘rustic, rural’. 428. the age of gold] The mythical Golden Age as described in e.g. Hesiod, Works and Days 106ff. and Ovid, Met. i 89ff. In Peacock’s essay The Four Ages of Poetry which S. appears to have read shortly before 20 January 1821 (see L ii 257–8), Peacock described the ‘golden age of poetry’ as one in which (‘Men . . . live[d] . . . more in the light of truth’ (Peacock Works viii 6–7).

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435

440

445

450

615

Kissing the sifted sands, and caverns hoar; And all the winds wandering along the shore Undulate with the undulating tide: There are thick woods where sylvan forms abide; And many a fountain, rivulet, and pond, As clear as elemental diamond, Or serene morning air; and far beyond, The mossy tracks made by the goats and deer (Which the rough shepherd treads but once a year,) Pierce into glades, caverns, and bowers, and halls Built round with ivy, which the waterfalls Illumining, with sound that never fails Accompany the noon-day nightingales; And all the place is peopled with sweet airs; The light clear element which the isle wears Is heavy with the scent of lemon-flowers, Which floats like mist laden with unseen showers, And falls upon the eyelids like faint sleep; And from the moss violets and jonquils peep, And dart their arrowy odour through the brain Till you might faint with that delicious pain. And every motion, odour, beam, and tone, With that deep music is in unison:

434. ‘The sound and movement of this line exactly reproduce the sense which it conveys’ (Thompson 161). Cp. LMG 119–20. 435. sylvan forms] Beings that inhabit woods. Cp. the ‘sylvans’ in Song of Pan l. 18. 437. elemental] pure. 445. Cp. The Tempest III ii 135–6: ‘the isle is full of noises,/Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not’. 446. element] atmosphere. 450–2. jonquils . . . pain.] Jonquils are species of flowers of the genus Narcissus, known for their powerful (and, according to Kent 265, in some cases overwhelming) scent. Thomson writes of ‘Jonquils,/Of potent Fragrance’ (Spring 548–9), and Wordsworth of ‘bright jonquils, their odours lavishing/On the soft westwind’ (‘To a Snow-drop, appearing very early in the Season’, ll. 10–11). Dowden Life ii 215 conjectures that the present lines recall the visit taken by S. and Mary on 30 June 1818 to ‘il prato fiorito — a flowery meadow at the top of one of the high Apenines’ (Mary Jnl i 216; see also L ii 20 and Mary L i 74). S. later told Medwin that during this visit an ‘excess of sweetness’ in the air caused by the presence of jonquils nearly made him faint (see Medwin (1913) 198). In a letter to Claire of 16 January 1821, S. remarked that ‘the smell of a flower affects me with violent emotions’ (L ii 256). See also TL 420. Thompson 161 cps l. 451 with Ode to the West Wind 35–6 and notes the echo of Pope’s An Essay on Man i 199–200: ‘Or quick effluvia darting through the brain,/Die of a rose in aromatic pain?’. 451. arrowy] ‘piercing’ (Concordance). 453–5. tone . . . within the soul] Thompson 161 notes that ‘The combined perfections of the island are likened to music within the soul, controlling and ordering its motions’, and cps Plato, Republic 401d: ‘education in music is most sovereign, because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with them and imparting grace’ (trans. Shorey, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato). 454. unison:] The punctuation is rhetorical and has the effect of isolating the allusion to the title in the following line.

616 455

460

465

470

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shelley: selected poems Which is a soul within the soul — they seem Like echoes of an antenatal dream. — It is an isle’twixt Heaven, Air, Earth, and Sea, Cradled, and hung in clear tranquillity; Bright as that wandering Eden Lucifer, Washed by the soft blue Oceans of young air. It is a favoured place. Famine or Blight, Pestilence, War and Earthquake, never light Upon its mountain-peaks; blind vultures, they Sail onward far upon their fatal way: The wingèd storms, chanting their thunder-psalm To other lands, leave azure chasms of calm Over this isle, or weep themselves in dew, From which its fields and woods ever renew Their green and golden immortality. And from the sea there rise, and from the sky There fall, clear exhalations, soft and bright, Veil after veil, each hiding some delight, Which Sun or Moon or zephyr draw aside, Till the isle’s beauty, like a naked bride Glowing at once with love and loveliness, Blushes and trembles at its own excess: Yet, like a buried lamp, a Soul no less Burns in the heart of this delicious isle, An atom of th’Eternal, whose own smile

455. a soul within the soul] The play upon the word ‘Epipsychidion’ is here as in ll. 477 and 539 focused upon the island. 456. antenatal] See the reference to the Platonic notion of pre-existence in ll. 133–4 and note. This idea is referred to by Wordsworth as a dream in ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ l. 5, which the present line recalls. Cp. SP ii 53 and note. 457. Cp. Ovid, Met. xii 39–40: ‘Orbe locus medio est inter terrasque fretumque/caelestesque plagas’ (‘There is a place in the middle of the world, ‘twixt land and sea and sky’). Locock 1911 ii 457 notes the allusion to Ovid’s lines in Pope, The Dunciad ii 83: ‘A place there is, betwixt earth, air, and seas’. 459. wandering Eden Lucifer] A reworking of Byron, Manfred I i 46: ‘A wandering hell in the eternal space’. Byron’s verse is quoted in On the Devil, and Devils to illustrate the supposition that Hell is ‘distributed among the comets, which constitute, according to this scheme, a number of floating prisons of intense and inextinguishable fire’ (Julian vii 101). Lucifer is both the morning star and the Devil cast out of Eden (hence wandering). 463. blind vultures] ‘Vultures are keen-sighted, but the eyes of these metaphorical vultures [i.e. the personifications of ll. 461–2] are sealed to beauties of the isle’ (Thompson 162). 473. zephyr] The mild, gentle west wind (see note to Come thou Awakener of the spirit’s Ocean (Longman iii 10–11, no. 218) l. 2). 479. An atom of th’Eternal] A portion of the master-soul of the whole universe. Cp. Adonais 340 and the concept of ‘The One’ (see Adonais 460 and note).

51 epipsychidion 480

485

490

495

500

617

Unfolds itself, and may be felt not seen O’er the grey rocks, blue waves, and forests green, Filling their bare and void interstices. — But the chief marvel of the wilderness Is a lone dwelling, built by whom or how None of the rustic island-people know: ’Tis not a tower of strength, though with its height It overtops the woods; but, for delight, Some wise and tender Ocean-King, ere crime Had been invented, in the world’s young prime, Reared it, a wonder of that simple time, An envy of the isles, a pleasure-house Made sacred to his sister and his spouse. It scarce seems now a wreck of human art, But, as it were Titanic; in the heart Of Earth having assumed its form, then grown Out of the mountains, from the living stone, Lifting itself in caverns light and high: For all the antique and learned imagery Has been erased, and in the place of it The ivy and the wild-vine interknit The volumes of their many twining stems; Parasite flowers illume with dewy gems The lampless halls, and when they fade, the sky Peeps through their winter-woof of tracery

480. felt] felt, Forman 1876–7. 491–507. pleasure-house . . . Parian floors] G. Wilson Knight, The Starlit Dome: Studies in the Poetry of Vision (1941) 235–6 identifies parallels in this passage with the description of the ‘pleasure-dome’ in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. 494–5. Cp. L&C 2945–6 and note. 494. Titanic] The work of the ancient race of gods, the Titans, renowned for their great size and strength, as well as ‘colossal’ (as in the reference to Rome in Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV xlvi l. 8: ‘The skeleton of her Titanic form’). 498. imagery] ‘Sculpture’ (Thompson 162). 499–506. in the place of it . . . day’s intense serene] Cp. Alastor 438–46. 500. ivy and the wild-vine] Cp. Mary Tighe, Psyche iv 145–7: In the deep centre of the mazy wood, With matted ivy and wild vine o’ergrown, A Gothic castle solitary stood 501. volumes] ‘Intertwining coils’ (Thompson 162). 502. Parasite] Climbing. See Alastor 439 and SP iii 48 and notes. 503–4. the sky . . . tracery] ‘This phrase may be accounted for by understanding that the season when the flowers fade is the winter, and that then the glinting of the light comes through the tracery of the denuded branches or tendrils’ (Rossetti 1870 ii 551).

618 505

510

515

520

525

530

shelley: selected poems With Moon-light patches, or star atoms keen, Or fragments of the day’s intense serene; — Working mosaic on their Parian floors. And, day and night, aloof, from the high towers And terraces, the Earth and Ocean seem To sleep in one another’s arms, and dream Of waves, flowers, clouds, woods, rocks, and all that we Read in their smiles, and call reality. This isle and house are mine, and I have vowed Thee to be lady of the solitude. — And I have fitted up some chambers there Looking towards the golden Eastern air, And level with the living winds, which flow Like waves above the living waves below. — I have sent books and music there, and all Those instruments with which high spirits call The future from its cradle, and the past Out of its grave, and make the present last In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die, Folded within their own eternity. Our simple life wants little, and true taste Hires not the pale drudge Luxury, to waste The scene it would adorn, and therefore still, Nature, with all her children, haunts the hill. The ring-dove, in the embowering ivy, yet Keeps up her love-lament, and the owls flit Round the evening tower, and the young stars glance Between the quick bats in their twilight dance; The spotted deer bask in the fresh moonlight Before our gate, and the slow, silent night

506. serene] ‘Calm brightness, quiet radiance’ (OED B c). This noun is also found in WA 247, Ode to Naples A l. 36 and L&C 158. The note to the last records its use in Keats, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ l. 7 (‘Yet did I never breathe its pure serene’) and Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage II lxx l. 6 (‘the blue deep’s serene’). 507. Parian] Marble from the Greek island of Paros. Cp. OL 58. 511–12. all that we . . . call reality] According to Plato, true reality lies not in the material world we perceive through the senses; rather, it exists in the transcendent realm of the Forms. Republic 514a — 520a, commonly referred to as the Allegory of the Cave, describes the imperfect, ‘shadow[y]’ (515a) image supposed to be true reality by those uneducated in the Theory of Forms. 519–26. I have sent books . . . drudge Luxury] Cp. the simple life envisaged in LMG 290–321 and also J&M 252–6. 529–30. The ring-dove . . . love-lament] Ring-dove is a generic name commonly applied to the Barbary dove (Streptopelia risoria), but also applied to its close relation, the Eurasian collared dove (S. decaocto). It is associated with love in Endymion i 731–2 and ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ l. 198 and its ‘cooings’ are mentioned in ‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’ l. 64. 530–1. the owls flit/Round the evening tower] Cp. Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard ll. 9–10: ‘Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower/The moping owl does to the moon complain’.

51 epipsychidion 535

540

545

550

555

560

565

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Is measured by the pants of their calm sleep. Be this our home in life, and when years heap Their withered hours, like leaves, on our decay, Let us become the over-hanging day, The living soul of this Elysian isle, Conscious, inseparable, one. Meanwhile We two will rise, and sit, and walk together, Under the roof of blue Ionian weather, And wander in the meadows, or ascend The mossy mountains, where the blue heavens bend With lightest winds, to touch their paramour; Or linger, where the pebble-paven shore, Under the quick, faint kisses of the sea Trembles and sparkles as with ecstasy, — Possessing and possessed by all that is Within that calm circumference of bliss, And by each other, till to love and live Be one: — or, at the noontide hour, arrive Where some old cavern hoar seems yet to keep The moonlight of the expired night asleep, Through which the awakened day can never peep; A veil for our seclusion, close as Night’s, Where secure sleep may kill thine innocent lights; Sleep, the fresh dew of languid love, the rain Whose drops quench kisses till they burn again. And we will talk, until thought’s melody Become too sweet for utterance, and it die In words, to live again in looks, which dart With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart, Harmonizing silence without a sound. Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound, And our veins beat together; and our lips With other eloquence than words, eclipse The soul that burns between them, and the wells Which boil under our being’s inmost cells,

539. living soul] See Genesis ii 7: ‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul’. 540. Conscious] ‘Aware, but also “co-knowing”, knowing as though they were one person’ (Major Works 798). 542. Cp. LMG 147. 557. A. C. Bradley, ‘Notes on Shelley’s “Triumph of Life” ’, MLR ix (1914) 441–56 (456 n. 1) cps Troilus and Cressida IV ii 4: ‘Sleep kill those pretty eyes’. 566. And our veins beat together] Cp. The Fugitives l. 38 and note. 568–72. the wells . . . Sun.] Reiman (2002) 406 n. 8 notes an allusion in these lines to the myth of Alpheus and Arethusa in Ovid, Met. v 577–641, treated by S. in Arethusa arose and Arethusa was a maiden.

620 570

575

580

585

shelley: selected poems The fountains of our deepest life, shall be Confused in passion’s golden purity, As mountain-springs under the morning Sun. We shall become the same, we shall be one Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two? One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew, Till, like two meteors of expanding flame, Those spheres instinct with it become the same, Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still Burning, yet ever inconsumable: In one another’s substance finding food, Like flames too pure and light and unimbued To nourish their bright lives with baser prey, Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away: One hope within two wills, one will beneath Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death, One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality, And one annihilation. Woe is me!

573–4. Lines that invoke the biblical language of marriage even as they critique it. See Genesis ii 24 (‘Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh’) and Matthew xix 5–6 (‘And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder’). Notopoulos notes that S.’s conception of the lover’s soul as ‘not one but two in one’ is indebted to Aristophanes’s speech in Symposium (Notopoulos 280). See 192c: ‘for it is not merely the sensual delights of their intercourse for the sake of which they dedicate themselves to each other with such serious affection; but the soul of each manifestly thirsts for, from the other, something which there are no words to describe, and divines that which it seeks, and traces obscurely the footsteps of its obscure desire.’

(S.’s trans., Julian vii 186)

576–81. The fire imagery recalls S.’s draft letter to Teresa Viviani in Nbk 17 p. 20 (BSM vi 122–3) cited in the headnote to Thy gentle face, [?] dear (Longman iv, no. 373). 581. unimbued] untainted. 584–5. Locock 1911 ii 458 cps Faerie Queene II iv 19: ‘Loue that two harts makes one, makes eke one will’. 587–91. Woe is me! . . . I expire!] Brooke comments of this passage: ‘it is so far beyond that which is possible for man to realise continuously while he is shut in by mere phenomena, that having attained it for a moment, he breaks down, and falls exhausted from the height’ (Epipsychidion: A Type Fac-simile p. xxix). Cp. the second Canzone of Dante’s Il Convivio ll. 1–18: Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona de la mia donna disïosamente, move cose di lei meco sovente, che lo’ntelletto sovr’esse disvia. Lo suo parlar sì dolcemente sona, che l’anima ch’ascolta e che lo sente

51 epipsychidion

590

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The wingèd words on which my soul would pierce Into the height of love’s rare Universe, Are chains of lead around its flight of fire. — I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire! —— Weak Verses, go, kneel at your Sovereign’s feet,

dice: ‘Oh me lassa, ch’io non son possente di dir quel ch’odo de la donna mia!’ E certo e’ mi conven lasciare in pria, s’io vo’ trattar di quel ch’odo di lei, ciò che lo mio intelletto non comprende; e di quel che s’intende gran parte, perché dirlo non savrei. Però, se le mie rime avran difetto ch’entreran ne la loda di costei, di ciò si biasmi il debole intelletto e’l parlar nostro, che non ha valore di ritrar tutto ciò che dice Amore. (‘Love, speaking fervently in my mind of my lady, often utters such things concerning her that my intellect is bewildered by them. His speech sounds so sweetly that the soul, as she attends and hears, says: “Alas that I am unable to express what I hear of my lady!” And certainly, if I wish to treat of what I hear of her, I must first leave aside what my intellect does not grasp; and then, too, much of what it does understand, for I should not be able to express it. If then these words of mine which undertake her praise be found wanting, let the blame fall on the weak intellect, and on our faculty of speech which lacks the power to record all that Love says.’ Trans. F&B) Lines 5–6 are given the following gloss in Convivio III iii 15: ‘And I say that my thoughts (which are the discourse of love) have such sweet sound that my soul (that is my affection) burns to be able to relate this with the tongue. And because I may not tell it, I say that the soul laments thereat, saying: Oh me! that I have not power. And this is the other source of unutterableness, namely that the tongue cannot completely follow that which the intellect perceives. And I say: The soul that heareth him and feeleth, “heareth” as touching the words; and “feeleth” as touching the sweetness of the sound.’ (Philip H. Wicksteed, ed., The Convivio of Dante Alighieri (1903) 151–2) Webb (1995) 424 cps the ‘collapse of poetic inspiration’ in these lines with the final stanza of OL. 588. wingèd words] A common expression in S.’s poems. Cp. A Satire upon Satire (Longman iii, no. 290) l. 25 and note. 591. Cp. OWW 54. 592–604. Cp. Vita Nuova xii 35–40:

622

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shelley: selected poems And say: — ‘We are the masters of thy slave; What wouldest thou with us and ours and thine?’ Then call your sisters from Oblivion’s cave, All singing loud: ‘Love’s very pain is sweet, But its reward is in the world divine Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave.’ So shall ye live when I am there. Then haste Over the hearts of men, until ye meet Marina, Vanna, Primus, and the rest, And bid them love each other and be blessed:

E di’ a colui ch’è d’ogni pietà chiave, avante che sdonnei, che le saprà contar mia ragion bona: ‘Per grazia de la mia nota soave reman tu qui con lei, e del tuo servo ciò che vuoi ragiona[’] (‘And — before taking your leave of my lady — say to him who is key of all compassion, to him who will know how to plead my good cause: “By means of my sweet music, remain here with her and speak as you please of your servant.” ’ Trans. F&B) Cp. also the opening lines of the congedo in Vita Nuova xxxi 71–4: Pietosa mia canzone or va’ piangendo; e ritruova le donne e le donzelle a cui le tue sorelle erano usate di portar letizia (‘My piteous song, go now weeping and find the ladies and girls to whom your sisters used to bring gladness’, trans. F&B) 592–3. your Sovereign’s .  .  . thy slave] Sovereign’s refers to the idealised lady of courtly tradition. The gloss of thy slave provided by Reiman and Fraistat — ‘The poet’ (Reiman (2002) 407 n. 3) — is helpful so long as ‘the poet’ referred to is understood within the context of the Dantean conventions that S. imitates in ll. 592–604. Cp. ‘tuo servo’ (‘your servant’) in Vita Nuova xii 40 cited in the note to ll. 592–604. Cp. also With a Guitar. To Jane l. 3. 601. Two of the three names in this line have overt Dantean connotations. Marina] Mary. ‘Marina’ is the nickname by which Mary was known to Leigh and Marianne Hunt. It was adopted after she told them in a letter of 2 March  1817: ‘you  & Mrs Hunt must leave off calling me Mrs S. for I  do not half like the name’ (Mary L i 29; see also i 30 n. 6). There is a possible allusion to Pericles in the name ‘Marina’. In that play, Thaisa appears to die shortly after giving birth to Marina, her daughter by Pericles. Mary Wollstonecraft died in September  1797 from complications relating to childbirth, leaving behind the 11-day-old Mary. Vanna] A shortened form of Giovanna, the name of the beloved of Dante’s friend Guido Cavalcanti. She is referred to by the name Vanna in Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io l. 9 (Sonnet. From the Italian of Dante Alighieri to Guido Cavalcanti l. 10). Rossetti was the first to suggest that since Giovanna is ‘the Italian synonym of Jane’ (Rossetti 1870 ii 552), the reference is to Jane Williams who S. described in a letter of 16 January 1821 to Claire as ‘an extremely pretty & gentle woman — apparently not very clever. I like her very much’ (L ii 256–7). Primus] The Latin word for ‘first’, ‘foremost’, ‘most distinguished’. A reference to lo mio primo amico (‘my best-loved

52  a lament (‘o world, o life, o time’)

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And leave the troop which errs, and which reproves, And come and be my guest, — for I am Love’s.

52  A Lament (‘O World, O Life, O Time’) This celebrated lyric is drafted roughly in ink in Nbk 17 p. 123 rev. (BSM vi 340–1). The first stanza is entered halfway down the page, below a line of pencilled verse that appears to be connected with the draft of Ginevra (Longman iv, no. 398) on the surrounding pages. A revised draft of the second stanza, inserted above between lines of transcription from Pindar’s Pythian ix 39, reworks a first draft of its opening three lines at the foot of the page. The words I am despair are scrawled in the top right corner. Carlene A. Adamson speculates that the cancelled draft I see the rivulet dance/I see the green leaves glance/I feel the wind, & stand on the seashore on p. 115 rev. may constitute the opening of a third, rejected stanza (BSM vi 39–40, 320–21). For the view of Forman and others that the drafts of O time, O night, O day (Longman iv 191–2, no. 392) in Nbk 12 ff. 9v, *31v and *30v are preliminary to the Nbk 17 draft, see the headnote to that poem. The fair draft of this poem in Nbk 18 p. 164 rev., the first page of that nbk in its present reversed direction, is based on Nbk 17. It is punctuated only lightly, and its second stanza is headed ‘2’. This fair draft is the basis of the transcription in Mary Copybk 1 p. 1 (BSM ii 4–5). The poem is first entitled ‘A Lament’ in 1824 and may have been copied in Mary Copybk 2 since one of two poems under that title — the other being That time is dead forever, child (Longman i 553–6, no. 128) — is listed in the Contents as on a page now missing (see Massey 228–9). Nora Crook collates Nbk 18 with Nbk 17, Mary Copybk 1, 1824 and other edns in BSM xix 310. The statement in Rogers 88 that the earliest draft of the poem ‘seems to belong to 1819’ is mistaken. Placed amongst ‘Poems Written in 1821’ in 1839 friend’), words frequently applied to Cavalcanti in Vita Nuova (see e.g. ch. xxiv). The attribution of the identity of Primus to Edward Williams is challenged by E. B. Murray. Referring to the draft of this line in pencil in Nbk 16 f. 93r rev. (BSM iv, Pt II, 66–7) which includes a cancelled, faded word (before the word Primus) that he acknowledges may be Williams, Murray comments: it may be that ‘Primus’ was originally meant to be someone else — perhaps Byron, a ranking which would then be more a concession to public than to personal regard and make the Cavalcanti allusion more to the poet than to the friend . . .  . The fact that Shelley did not meet Jane and Edward Williams until mid-January 1821 would on the surface of it make it highly unlikely that the consensus view that they are the references for ‘Vanna’ and ‘Primus’ should continue to be unquestioned.

(BSM iv, Pt II, 377)

S. reported to Claire in the letter cited that he had ‘not seen Mr. W.’ (L ii 257). However, the first meeting with Edward Williams must have taken place on or by 19 January 1821 when Mary recorded in her jnl ‘The Williams’s arrive — call on them & they come here’ (Mary Jnl i 349). She described him to Claire in a letter of 21–24 January 1821 as the picture of good humour and obligingness, he is lively and possesses great talent in drawing so that with him one is never at a loss for subjects of conversation — He seems to make all he sees subjects of surprize & pleasure.

(Mary L i 180)

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iv 144, it may be dated with some confidence to the period when Ginevra was composed, between 10 April and mid-May of that year. Adamson concludes that since the ‘distinctive light ink’ of the redrafted second stanza in Nbk 17 is similar to that of the corrections to Ginevra on pp. 130 rev., 129 rev., 126 rev. and 125 rev., work on both poems is likely to have taken place at the same time (BSM vi 341). The 1824 text of this poem fuelled a vigorous editorial debate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In both the revised draft of the second stanza in Nbk 17 and the Nbk 18 fair draft there is a lacuna in the MS after summer in l. 8, indicating the line to be unfinished (see note). Although the space is observed in Mary’s transcription in Mary Copybk 1, it is closed in 1824. On the recommendation of Frederick Gard Fleay, Rossetti chose to emend the line in Rossetti 1870 ii 274: The word ‘Autumn’ had not hitherto appeared in this line. Mr. Fleay pointed out to me that it is required, for the purpose of completing, not only the full conception of the line, but also the metre, in correspondence with the preceding stanza. I regard this as an indisputable emendation, and introduce it accordingly, with thanks to Mr. Fleay. (Rossetti 1870 ii 573) Swinburne’s vehement response to this intervention, which he described as an ‘incredible outrage’ and an ‘atrocity’ against ‘the melodious effect’ of the line’s ‘exquisite inequality’ (‘Notes on the Text of Shelley’, Essays and Studies (1875) 184–237 (229–30)), led to the restoration of the 1824 reading in Rossetti 1878 iii 99 (see Rossetti 1878 iii 410 n.). In his Cambridge Inaugural of 1911, A. E. Housman, believing that an autograph MS  had been discovered with the reading ‘Fresh Spring and Autumn, Summer and Winter hoar’ — although his inability to trace his source led him to refuse to publish the lecture — commented thus of Swinburne’s reaction: ‘The one verse, in Shelley and in English, of more divine and sovereign sweetness than any other is the verse, not of Shelley, but of a compositor. Mr Swinburne’s veins were thrilled, and tears were drawn to Mr Swinburne’s eyes, by a misprint’ (The Confines of Criticism: The Cambridge Inaugural, 1911, ed. John Carter (1969) (CC) 33). In ‘Shelley, Swinburne and Housman’, TLS 3482 (21 November 1968) 1318–19 and CC 47–54, John Carter and John Sparrow present the different MS readings of l. 8 in order to demonstrate, somewhat ingeniously, that ‘Housman . . . was right, even though he could never find the evidence to prove it’ (CC 54). The peculiar condition of feeling that is given voice in the lyric is astutely defined in Chernaik 146–7: As in ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’ the mark of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ lies on the poem, in its vocabulary of loss, its familiar terms for the primary emotions: ‘joy,’ ‘grief,’ ‘delight.’ But the moral drawn by the ‘philosophic mind’ is wanting; the lyric is Wordsworthian nostalgia carried to its furthest expressive extreme. The lines place the speaker (poet or lover) at that point of no return, that outermost verge, which could perhaps be considered Shelley’s peculiar realm of being. Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode may also inform the poem’s mood. And the words I am despair alongside the Nbk 17 draft may be read as S.’s gloss on it. Text from Nbk 18 p. 164 rev. Commas have been supplied in ll. 1, 2, 3 and 7, and full stops in ll. 5 and 10. A number-heading for the first stanza has been added. Indentation follows the MS.

53  ‘when passion’s trance is overpast’

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Published in 1824 190; Chernaik 246; Donald H. Reiman, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams, 5th edn, 2 vols (1986) ii 2496 (transcription of MS); BSM xix 310–11 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

1

5

O World, O Life, O Time, On whose last steps I climb, Trembling at that where I had stood before, When will return the glory of your prime? No more, O never more.

2 Out of the day and night A joy has taken flight, Fresh spring and summer [   ] and winter hoar Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight 10 No more, O never more.

53  ‘When passion’s trance is overpast’ Mary included this lyric in 1824 without date and entitled simply ‘To —— ’. In 1839 she grouped it with the ‘Poems Written in 1821’. No transcription in her hand is known to survive; the only recorded manuscript is the holograph draft in pencil with ink revisions on p. 7 (and a few lines on p. 6) of Nbk 11. The ink revisions appear to have been made at two different times, as BSM xviii 278 points out. Despite minor differences between the draft and the text that appeared in 1824 — for which see the notes to ll. 10 and 15 — there is no sufficient reason to suppose that Mary had access to another MS source than Nbk 11. Below and partly beneath the untidy, and in places unresolved, draft of the third stanza are the pencilled lines: Alas we know not what we do When we speak words — & I to thee I [?that] have been false ¶ 52. 1.World . . . Life . . .Time] The capitals are written over lower case letters in Nbk 18. 4. your] yr is altered to thy in Nbk 17. 8. Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar 1824; Fresh Spring, and Summer, Autumn, and Winter hoar Rossetti 1870. The first draft of this line at the foot of Nbk 17 p. 123 rev. is: [From canc.] Green spring, & summer [     ] & winter hoar. S. then appears to have cancelled summer and written autumn above. A word of three or four letters, of which the first two are gr and the remainder difficult to decipher, is inserted in the space after summer (Adamson conjectures grey in BSM vi 480, Carter and Sparrow gray in CC 50, Donald H. Reiman gre or gra in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams, 5th edn, 2 vols (1986) ii 2495 n. 3). This word was then cancelled and summer underlined in pencil as if for restitution. In the revised draft of the second stanza at the top of the page the line reads: Fresh spring & summer & winter hoar. S. may have left the line incomplete in his drafts because he had not worked out a rhythmically satisfying way to include autumn, or the order in which to include the four seasons. 9. Move] Fill Nbk 17.

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The relation between these lines and the rest of the draft is impossible to determine confidently, but S. evidently left them undeveloped as being out of harmony with the more generalised plangency of the three stanzas. For her part, Mary did not append this fragment, possibly intended for a further stanza, to any of her published texts — so excluding an element of personal conflict, even betrayal, which figured in the original conception of the poem. The unusual stanza of five eight-syllable lines rhyming aabbb is that of Misery. — A Fragment (Longman ii, no. 202), though that poem employs a seven-syllable line varying to eight. Besides the common theme of the cessation of both erotic passion and love, the two poems exhibit a number of verbal similarities; see, for example, the note to ll. 8–9. Indeed, When passion’s trance might seem to take up Misery’s rhetorical supposition ‘If love can live when pleasure dies’ (l. 18) in order to offer a negative response structured on a quasi-logical pattern: If — Then (stanzas 1, 2) — But (stanza 3). The initial and final stanzas work variations on two commonplaces of lyric tradition: in the first the contrast between a desire that is reborn daily and a love that is subject to intervals of torpor, even extinction, as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet lvi: ‘Sweet love, renew thy force; be it not said/Thy edge should blunter be than appetite’. The disparity between a seasonally reviving nature and a persistently sorrowful lover furnishes the tenor of stanza three, as in Petrarch’s sonnets ‘Quando ’l pianeta che distingue l’ore’ and ‘Zefiro torna e’l bel tempo rimena’ (Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, ed. Robert M. Durling (1976) 44–5, 488–9) or the latter’s English equivalent, the Earl of Surrey’s ‘The soote season, that bud and blome furth bringes’ (Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Poems, ed. Emrys Jones (1964) 2). Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido III i 1–12 might also be mentioned, but the trope is frequently encountered. Stanza 2 introduces the tormented struggle between a resigned abstinence and passion recovered in imagination, as in Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard (1717), which is echoed in l. 8 (as Reiman (2002) points out). Most of the material in Nbk 11 was entered between January  1818 and early 1821. When passion’s trance, in common with a number of other drafts in the nbk, is difficult to date on MS evidence alone; its physical details and position in relation to other drafts offer no secure basis for determining a more precise time of composition. Like Misery. — A  Fragment, When passion’s trance was probably drafted after the death of William Shelley on 7 June 1819, as it appears to spring from the estrangement that grew between S. and Mary following William’s death. That probability and the date 1821 that Mary assigns to the poem in 1839 are significant indicators, although the period they define is a long one. It is of course always possible that S. returned to the draft at intervals over two years or more. This uncertainty notwithstanding, the signs of spring invoked in stanza 3 (conventional as they are) and the echo of Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard in l. 8 provide some evidence for a date at the latter end of the 1819–21 range. Mary Jnl i 368 records S.’s reading aloud of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock on 23 May and An Essay on Criticism on 26 May 1821. His attention to Pope in this month was no doubt stimulated by Byron’s letter to him of 26 April (Byron L&J viii 103–4) in which Byron mentions having written the Letter to John Murray (published March  1821), defending Pope’s poetry and character from the strictures of the Reverend W. L. Bowles, and expressing his disapproval both of the style of the recently deceased Keats and of Keats’s negative opinion of Pope. In his reply to Byron of 4 May, S. says that he has sent to Paris for the pamphlet on Pope and Bowles (L ii 290); he had been unable to procure it by 16 July (L ii 308), but eventually read it while visiting Byron in Ravenna in August (L ii 332). In his letter to Mary of 11 August, S. gives no indication that he knew of the Observations upon ‘Observations’,

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Byron’s second letter on Bowles’s treatment of Pope, which was sent to John Murray in April  1821 but not published until 1832 (Byron Prose 161–83, 459–91). In the second letter Byron defends Eloisa to Abelard against the charge of ‘gross licentiousness’, expressing the highest esteem for the poem’s truthful representation of passion and delicacy of style (Byron Prose 177–8). S.’s reading of Pope in May 1821 would also appear to have been part of his preparation for Adonais (see headnote ‘Composition’) which was largely composed between mid-May and mid-June. An Essay on Criticism is recalled in Adonais 101–4 (see note). So the presence of Pope in S.’s reading, correspondence and (no doubt) conversation in the period from early May to August 1821 constitutes circumstantial evidence for dating When passion’s trance within that period, though such evidence does not warrant a decisive conclusion. Text from Nbk 11 pp. 6–7. Published in 1824 205; BSM xviii 8–9 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

‘When passion’s trance is overpast’

5

When passion’s trance is overpast, If tenderness and truth could last Or live, whilst all wild feelings keep Some mortal slumber, dark and deep, I should not weep, I should not weep!

10

It were enough to feel, to see Thy soft eyes gazing tenderly, And dream the rest — and burn and be The secret food of fires unseen, Could thou but be what thou hast been.

15

After the slumber of the year The woodland violets reappear; All things revive in field or grove And sky and sea, but two, which move And form all others — life and love.

¶ 53. 1. trance] Written above storm canc. in Nbk 11. 8–9. Cp. Misery. — A Fragment 3 (Longman iii, no. 202) 5: ‘While my burning heart lies sleeping’. The untidily reworked draft appears to include the cancelled reading: ‘and die/A [?brand] consumed with fires unseen’. 8. And dream the rest] In Eloisa to Abelard, Eloisa urges the now-castrated Abelard to visit her so that she may ‘to thy heart be pressed;/Give all thou canst — and let me dream the rest’ (123–4). 10. Could] Couldst 1824. what] as 1824. The 1824 readings would appear to be Mary’s amendments of the draft. 11–15. It is very difficult to distinguish between cancellation and underlining for restoration or reconsideration in the draft of this stanza, in a mixture of pencil and ink with much overwriting. The text given here satisfies sense and prosody, and may represent S.’s final intention, though he might have revised it further had he made a fair copy. Cp. the fragment beginning ‘When soft winds and sunny skies’ in Unused stanzas for Misery. — A Fragment (Longman ii 707, no. 202 Appendix) C.

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54  Adonais An Elegy On the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion etc. Background. Keats and S. were first linked (together with John Hamilton Reynolds) in Leigh Hunt’s ‘Young Poets’ article published in the Examiner of 1 December  1816. The two poets met for the first time at Hunt’s house in mid-December 1816, and are known to have met thereafter on a number of occasions, without becoming very close. They took part in timed sonnet competitions, quite possibly more than are recorded (see headnote to To the Nile, Longman ii 349–50, no. 163), and exchanged their differing views on poetry, and life, in various contexts through the period from December 1816 to early 1818 when S. left England for Italy. Keats’s Endymion was according to Medwin composed in explicit competition with L&C from April to November 1817 (see headnote to no. 143, Longman ii 10–29). They probably met face-to-face for the last time in February 1818 (Claire Jnl 83). There is a good, detailed account of all known interactions between Keats and S. during this relatively brief period in SC v 401–10, and see also Cameron (1974) 422–7, P. M. S. Dawson’s discussion in Shelley Revalued 89–108, and Cox. Keats and his circle of friends were warily critical of S.’s ideas, work and personality, and Keats maintained a sometimes wry distance perhaps coloured by his sense of the difference in social class. As Hunt later expressed it, ‘Keats did not take to Shelley as kindly as Shelley did to him’; he was inclined ‘to see in every man of birth a sort of natural enemy’ (Hunt Autobiography ii 201–2). S. for his part offered critical advice to Keats from early in his publishing career. Keats recalled in his letter of 16 August 1820 replying to S.’s letter of 27 July 1820 (inviting Keats to stay with S. and his family in Italy for his health), ‘I remember you advising me not to publish my first-blights, on Hampstead heath’. Keats had doubtless not wholly appreciated this advice from his slightly older contemporary and rival, however helpfully meant. Keats’s 16 August letter famously repays S. for his advice of three years earlier: ‘You I am sure will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and “load every rift” of your subject with ore’ (Keats L ii 323). Just as Keats shared with his friends a critical scepticism about S., so several of S.’s most valued friends, including Byron and Peacock, were unconvinced of Keats’s poetic stature and in particular felt that his obvious talent was not well served by the perceived strong influence from Hunt’s practice and theories. Once in Italy, and until learning of Keats’s illness, S. refers to Keats hardly at all, except in a letter of 6 September 1819 to Ollier which expresses reservations concerning Endymion — ‘the Authors intention appearing to be that no person should possibly get to the end of it’ — but still acknowledging the promise of real poetic power in Keats (L ii 117). Keats offers no record of interest in S.’s life and career in Italy until their exchange of letters in the summer of 1820. The significance of Keats for S. was however utterly transformed by the developments which followed news from the Gisbornes (who were in London in the summer of 1820) that Keats was gravely ill. They had heard very bad news of his worsening condition in June, and at Hunt’s on 12 July had seen him, emaciated and silent, ‘under sentence of death from Dr. Lamb’ (Gisborne Jnl 38, 40). S.’s immediate response on learning of Keats’s condition was the generous and tactful letter of 27 July 1820 inviting him to ‘take up . . . residence’ with S. and his family in the neighbourhood of Pisa (L ii 220–1). Keats received this letter in the

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-54

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middle of August — he reported the invitation to Brown on 14 August (Keats L ii 321) — and replied in a letter dated 16 August from Hampstead, which was probably collected by S. from the Gisbornes after their return to Italy in early October (Mary Jnl i 332 notes for 10 October ‘The G’s return’), at which time they almost certainly also brought for S. a copy of Keats’s Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820). Keats did not decline the invitation (a misconception initiated by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (1878) 151), but with composed eloquence expressed a tragically conditional acceptance: I am very much gratified that you, in a foreign country, and with a mind almost over occupied, should write to me in the strain of the Letter beside me. If I do not take advantage of your invitation it will be prevented by a circumstance I have very much at heart to prophesy — There is no doubt that an english winter would put an end to me, and do so in a lingering hateful manner, therefore I must either voyage or journey to Italy as a soldier marches up to a battery. (Keats L ii 322) Mary Jnl records that S. read Hyperion aloud on 18 October. This poem immediately established itself in S.’s judgement as decisive confirmation that Keats’s great promise was entering a new phase, of mature and major achievement. It was probably around this time, i.e. 18 October 1820, that S. drafted a letter to William Gifford, editor of the Quarterly Review. L ii 251 dates this draft letter ‘[Pisa,? November 1820]’ but it seems much more likely to have been composed very soon after S. received Keats’s letter together with the Gisbornes’ account, presumably from Hunt, that Keats’s health had been seriously affected by a politically motivated hostile review of Endymion in the Quarterly. This account forms a central impetus for S.’s draft letter to Gifford. S. remarks in this draft letter that he has ‘just seen’ the Lamia volume (L ii 252). The letter was presumably never sent, but it begins to articulate the convergence of various themes which come together in Adonais. S.’s draft letter makes reference to the Quarterly’s review of Endymion in the issue for April 1818 (xix 204–8; the issue did not actually appear until September 1818). This review has its full share of archly derisive commentary (not all of it wholly unreasonable), but in fact Keats is targeted more as a disciple of Hunt than as an object of ridicule in his own right, and the piece displays little of the class-based destructively offensive sneering and abuse of the infamous reviews in the British Critic n. s. ix (June 1818) 649–54 and, most notoriously, by Lockhart (anonymously) in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine iii (August 1818) 519–24. It is however perfectly clear that S. has principally in mind the Quarterly’s review of L&C and RofI in the issue for April 1819 (xxi 460–71), with its sustained attack, overtly political and religious in motivation, on his own principles, character, and associates (Hunt is singled out for harsh treatment). Although S. makes every effort to characterise himself as personally above the pains of personal slander and critical abuse, there is thus an obvious similarity in the treatment of S. and Keats at the hands of conservative literary journalism, and a muted anger at the lengths to which political and religious opponents were prepared to go in public attack. The draft letter even quotes a line from Paradise Lost, ‘I am there sitting where he durst not soar’, illustrating the distance between himself and his destructive anonymous critic, which reappears transformed as l. 337 of Adonais (see notes). S.’s feelings on this subject were no doubt intensified by the brief but nasty attack on his personal morality and atheism in the Quarterly’s review of Hunt’s Foliage in the January  1818 issue (xviii 324–35), which was published in June 1818.

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It has long been well known that S. associated these attacks in the Quarterly with Robert Southey. S. and Southey had first met in Keswick in December 1811, when the older man, now reactionary in politics and religion after the fiery radicalism of his youth, chose to cast himself in the role of mentor and guide for the impetuous young revolutionary. S., and his attractive young wife Harriet, clearly made a great impression on Southey. He remarked in a subsequent letter to Grosvenor Bedford of 4 January 1812 (Southey Life iii 325–6) that S. ‘acts upon me as my own ghost would do’. S. in turn greatly admired Southey as a poet, and professed respect for the man while disagreeing sharply with his opinions. As Kenneth Neill Cameron has demonstrated (‘Shelley vs. Southey: New Light on an Old Quarrel’, PMLA lvii (1942) 489–512), a relationship of ‘mild friendship and regard’ persisted between the two men until the latter part of 1817, by when the shared attitude had become one of ‘unmixed dislike and mistrust’, which probably understates their mutual animosity. Cameron argues convincingly that S.’s shift into angry and open hostility was prompted by some veiled aspersions on S. in a review by Southey in the Quarterly xvi (January 1817) 538–9 which included S.’s pamphlet A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote, published anonymously in 1817 as by ‘The Hermit of Marlow’, but with S. readily identifiable as the author. Thereafter S.’s correspondence with and comments on Southey are uniformly hostile, and appear to derive from a conviction that Southey was directly or indirectly responsible not only for all of the attacks on his work and morality in the Quarterly, but also for the attack on Keats which S. believed had killed him. S.’s drafts for the Preface to Adonais in Nbk 20 are overtly personal in this respect (see notes). Southey himself later stated publicly that he had ‘been informed’ that the Preface as published was in effect a personal attack on him, although he insists that S. must have known he was not the author of any of the reviews in question (for Southey’s self-righteous and disingenuous letter to the editor of the Courier of 8 December 1824, see Works of Byron: Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero, 6 vols (1901) vi 395–9). It is indeed evident from the extraordinary exchange of letters between S. and Southey from June to September 1820 (see L ii 203–5, 230–3) that Southey came to hold the lowest possible estimation of S.’s character and behaviour, and that he was perfectly prepared, in the face of S.’s admittedly very provocative letter of 26 June 1820 and its follow-up of 17 August, to admonish S. directly and bluntly in extremely offensive and sanctimonious terms (his later severity of judgement on S. was perhaps intensified by his admiration of the young Harriet, for whose suicide he obviously held S. directly responsible). Although Southey denied involvement in any of the published attacks in question, and is known not actually to have been the author of any of the reviews of S. or Keats for which S. held him responsible (see notes), he was nevertheless palpably a principal source for the substance of the Quarterly’s various accusations against S. of reckless immorality and atheism. S.’s abiding conviction that Keats and himself shared a public reactionary critical aggressor evidently contributed to the identification between the two poets which informs the rhetoric of Adonais, and which may have prompted the choice of a formal model in the Greek pastoral elegy (see note to l. 300). For further discussion of S.’s sustained hostile dialogue with the Quarterly and its reviewers, see headnote to PB3 (Longman iii 70–152, no. 239); and for further material on S. and Southey see headnote to To——[Lines to a Reviewer]. One further significant relationship in S.’s life bears directly on the genesis of Adonais, and has intimate connection with his feelings in relation to both Keats and Southey. S. had become close to Byron during the period of their first time together at Geneva in 1816, had visited him in Venice in late 1818, and was throughout the months leading up to the composition of Adonais in frequent contact with him over the question of the care of Byron’s daughter Allegra by Claire Clairmont. There had been and would continue to be significant

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mutual intellectual and artistic influence between the two poets, and Byron was one of the few figures of public note who recognised the scale of S.’s powers as a poet and appreciated his personal qualities during his lifetime. But it is clear that S.’s frequent reiterated complaints about his own lack of public success, popularity, or recognition as a poet, while serving to align him with Keats’s fate, stood in painful contrast with the widespread public acclaim that Byron had enjoyed, almost from the very outset of his publishing career (see notes to ll. 249–51, 264–6), and certainly from the phenomenal success of the first two Cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812. It would have been a particularly difficult irony for S. that the very issue of the Quarterly which contained the destructive review of Endymion also included an article offering an overview of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the fourth and final Canto of which had appeared in 1818. The article expresses some caveats and reservations, but in general terms there is fulsome and sustained acknowledgement of Byron’s achievement and justified renown (Quarterly Review xix (April 1818) 215–32). This recognition sets in bleak relief the various references by S. in early 1821 to his own lack of success or public esteem, for example in a letter to Peacock of 15 February 1821: ‘nothing is so difficult and unwelcome as to write without a confidence of finding readers; and if my play of “The Cenci” found none or few, I despair of ever producing anything that shall merit them’ (L ii 262). This very letter, however, is S.’s first response to Peacock’s essay The Four Ages of Poetry, published in 1820 in the first and only issue of Olliers Literary Miscellany. Peacock’s essay, with its attack on both the quality and the cultural importance of contemporary poetry, prompted S.’s DP, which argues for and celebrates the function of poetry, broadly defined to encompass human creativity in all of its significant manifestations, as the underlying impulse that drives cultural and social development. This defiantly exalted understanding of the poet’s calling exists in complex counterpoint with the darker strains in S.’s experience in the months leading up to the composition of Adonais. Indeed, S.’s intensely personal and aggressively particularised drafts for the Preface to Adonais (mostly omitted from Adonais (1821) because of their personal nature) are to be found on the recto pages in Nbk 20 facing the verso pages on which DP is drafted, and originally left blank by S. presumably for further annotation and revision of DP; a conjunction which strikingly embodies the contrary impulses at play in Adonais (see BSM vii 132–5, 148–51, 156–77 and 186–207). On 29 October 1820 S. wrote to Marianne Hunt in terms confirming his high estimation of Hyperion, but also sustaining his reserve about Keats’s other work: the fragment called Hyperion promises for him that he is destined to become one of the first writers of the age. — His other things are imperfect enough, & what is worse written in the bad sort of style which is becoming fashionable among those who fancy that they are imitating Hunt & Wordsworth. (L ii 239) S. goes on to attack Barry Cornwall’s latest volume Dramatic Scenes (1819) as an instance of this trend, and to contrast Cornwall’s achievement with that of Byron (the letter can be misunderstood as an attack on Byron, but Cornwall is clearly the target). This develops the growing note of irritation in S.’s correspondence with the success and critical acclaim enjoyed by his manifestly inferior contemporary poets, which finds expression in both the Preface and text of Adonais (see notes). The letter to Marianne Hunt also asks about Keats’s whereabouts:

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shelley: selected poems Where is Keats now? I am anxiously expecting him in Italy where I shall take care to bestow every possible attention on him. I  consider his a most valuable life,  & I  am deeply interested in his safety. I intend to be the physician both of his body & his soul, to keep the one warm & to teach [the] other Greek & Spanish. I am aware indeed in part [tha]t I am nourishing a rival who will far surpass [me] and this is an additional motive & will be an added pleasure. (L ii 240)

In fact, Keats had sailed with Severn from London on 17 September, arriving at Naples on 21 October after a dreadful journey, only to be confined aboard ship in quarantine. His passport was not finally cleared to enable departure for Rome until 7 November, and he at last reached Rome only on 15 November. The first indication that S. knew Keats was in Italy is not until his letter to Claire Clairmont of 18 February 1821, which closes with a note added below the signature: ‘Keats is very ill at Naples — I have written to him to ask him to come to Pisa, without however inviting him to our own house. We are not rich enough for that sort of thing. Poor fellow!’ (L ii 268; the postscript is followed by the cancelled beginning of a letter to Keats). This does not quite accord with the apparent terms of the original invitation of 27 July 1820; perhaps S.’s solicitude was tempered by anxiety for the health of his young child Percy, still only a little over a year old in February 1821. S. apparently did nevertheless write to Keats in Naples urging him to accept his hospitality, though this letter cannot have been delivered to Keats in Naples and he probably never saw it (see L ii 268 n.). Keats and Severn had left Naples for Rome around 9 November, and moved into lodgings in the Piazza di Spagna. As late as 4 April S. wrote to Medwin with the news, probably from Hunt, that ‘Keats is in Rome, & dangerously ill’ (L ii 280), and the following day Mary mentioned in a letter to Maria Gisborne ‘Keats they say is dying at Rome’ (Mary L i 188). But Keats had died in Rome at around 11pm on 23 February 1821. Composition. S. did not learn of Keats’s death until 11 April, when he received a letter from Horace Smith that, as Mary Jnl i 360 notes, ‘overturns us’; but this upset stemmed not from the news of Keats’s death, but from the wholly unexpected revelation that S.’s income had been stopped (Smith’s letter, dated 28 March 1821, is in S Memorials 166–8; see Mary Jnl i 360–2 for discussion of the serious but temporary financial crisis). S.’s first surviving reference to Keats’s death comes in his letter to Byron of 17 April: ‘Young Keats, whose “Hyperion” showed so great a promise, died lately at Rome from the consequences of breaking a blood-vessel, in paroxysms of despair at the contemptuous attack on his book in the Quarterly Review’ (L ii 284). Smith’s letter also contained the further grim news that John Scott, editor of the London Magazine, had been killed in a duel fought over an attack on the writers of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, thus becoming another victim of the political savagery of literary journalism at that time. The absence of any reference to Keats’s death by either S. or Mary in the days immediately following the arrival of Smith’s letter is doubtless explained by their preoccupation with the immediate money problem to which they were alerted in that letter. Mary wrote to Leigh Hunt on 17 April confirming that ‘[w]e have been much shocked to hear of Keats’ death — and sorry that it was in no way permitted us to be of any use to him since his arrival in Italy’ (there is a suggestion here that the antipathy towards S. of members of Keats’s circle may have prompted them to discourage him from accepting S.’s invitation), and she wrote two days later to inform Maria Gisborne of the news (Mary L i 189, 197). It is unlikely that S. made any sustained effort of composition prompted by Keats’s death in the weeks immediately following receipt of

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the news, in spite of his statement to Byron, in the letter of 16 July accompanying a printed copy of Adonais, that it was ‘written .  .  . immediately after the arrival of the news’ (L ii 308). S.’s thoughts would have been clouded by the apparent financial crisis, and there were other distractions, including his continuing worries over the fate of ‘Emilia’ Viviani, his intermediary role in the wranglings between Claire and Byron over their daughter Allegra, and the episode on 16 April in which a small boat, procured for S. by Henry Reveley, was capsized on the Serchio by Williams on its first voyage, leaving S. drenched and requiring an overnight stay in a nearby farmhouse (see Mary Jnl i 362–3 for details). Most tellingly S. wrote to Claire on 29 April, lamenting ‘I do not write any thing at present. I feel incapable of composition. — ’ (L ii 288). There can however be no doubt that S. must have been deeply preoccupied by Keats’s fate through the last three weeks of April, crystallising as it did so many fundamental themes in his own life and artistic development. There is also a possibility that S.’s reaction to Keats’s death was affected by the intensity of his grief for his son William, who had died of malaria in Rome on 7 June 1819 aged 3½. The poem My lost William, thou in whom [To William Shelley] anticipates Adonais in a number of ways (see headnote to no. 254, Longman iii 185–8), and suggests that S. may have transferred the emotion of William’s death to Keats, of whom he was little more than an acquaintance. The second anniversary of William’s death fell in the composition period of Adonais (for further discussion of the possible association of William Shelley’s death and Adonais see BSM xiv p. xix). It is clear that a number of ideas and images in this poem are developed in Adonais, and a quickening towards creative synthesis of these and other themes can be discerned in S.’s important letter to Byron of 4 May. Byron had written on 26 April in response to S.’s letter conveying the news of Keats’s death and blaming the Quarterly’s attack: I am very sorry to hear what you say of Keats—is it actually true? I did not think criticism had been so killing. Though I differ from you essentially in your estimate of his performances, I so much abhor all unnecessary pain, that I would rather he had been seated on the highest peak of Parnassus than have perished in such a manner. Poor fellow! though with such inordinate self-love he would probably have not been very happy. I  read the review of ‘Endymion’ in the Quarterly. It was severe,—but surely not so severe as many reviews in that and other journals upon others. I recollect the effect on me of the Edinburgh on my first poem; it was rage, and resistance, and redress — but not despondency nor despair . . . Had I known that Keats was dead — or that he was alive and so sensitive — I should have omitted some remarks upon his poetry [in Byron’s Letter to John Murray (1821); see Byron Prose 157], to which I was provoked by his attack upon Pope, and my disapprobation of his own style of writing. (Byron L&J viii 103–4) S.’s reply of 4 May picks up Byron’s reactions and develops them. He identifies Hunt as the source of the story that Keats’s final illness had been brought on by the Quarterly’s review. It has been argued (see James A. W. Heffernan, ‘Adonais: Shelley’s Consumption of Keats’, SiR xxiii (1984) 295–315) that S. himself ‘invented’ the story that Keats died partly as a result of his reaction to reviews of his work, and that this ‘insult’ was offered in order to project S.’s self-­ image of vulnerability onto Keats, in the service of S.’s own psychological and poetic purposes. There are discrepancies in S.’s successive accounts of what he understood as the causes of Keats’s death, and as explained earlier, his understanding is obviously coloured by his personal

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experience. The draft letter to Gifford of November 1820 shows that S. had by then already received an account of the effect on Keats’s health of the reviews, but the phrasing is not intemperate and acknowledges other factors (see L ii 252). As the news of Keats’s death and its circumstances sinks in through April and May S.’s accounts of it, especially to Byron, do grow more telescoped and highly coloured, as his indignation grows, and the account in the Preface to Adonais is shaped to underpin the prevailing tone of angry indignation and outrage. But Heffernan’s argument attributes a manipulative and calculatedly self-serving motivation to S. which seems at odds with the overall effect and spirit of Adonais, and which is not otherwise corroborated by, for example, Hunt. S.’s letter to Byron also articulates a deepening anger with the contemptuously destructive tone and terms of the attacks on Keats, and particularly with the injustice of such an attack on a young and immature talent: ‘Some plants, which require delicacy in rearing, might bring forth beautiful flowers if ever they should arrive at maturity’. And this position is explicitly linked in contrast with Byron’s own powerful ability to withstand such criticism, and his ‘strength to soar beyond the arrows’. S. himself is now ‘morbidly indifferent to this sort of praise or blame; and this, perhaps, deprives me of an incitement to do what now I never shall do, i.e., write anything worth calling a poem’. However, one striking feature of S.’s letter is its plain implication that in early May 1821 he was not familiar with Keats’s ‘Sleep and Poetry’, the final poem in Poems (1817), which (although it does not name him) clearly has Pope and his followers in mind in castigating the ‘schism/Nurtured by foppery and barbarism’ caused by the dominance of the heroic couplet in the early part of the eighteenth century. S.’s letter explains that I did not know that Keats had attacked Pope; I had heard that Bowles had done so, and that you had most severely chastised him therefor. Pope, it seems, has been selected as the pivot of a dispute in taste, on which, until I understand it, I must profess myself neuter. I certainly do not think Pope, or any writer, a fit model for any succeeding writer; if he, or they should be determined to be so, it would all come to a question as to under what forms mediocrity should perpetually reproduce itself; for true genius vindicates to itself an exemption from all regard to whatever has gone before — and in this question I feel no interest. (L ii 290) Given the profusion and detail of S.’s Keatsian allusions in Adonais a further implication of S.’s 4 May letter is that he must have studied Keats’s poetry with sustained attention in the week or so following, as detailed work on the composition of Adonais would have begun by the middle of May. It is also evident that Byron’s letter of 26 April prompted S. to reread some of Byron’s early poetry in the light of Byron’s remarks about his own response to public criticism (see note to ll. 244–52), and must also have prompted a period of reading Pope. Pope is not a poet who features prominently in the records of S.’s reading, but S. clearly knew his work well and returned to it on occasion; OL (Longman iii 378–418, no. 322), composed May–June 1820, is informed by Pope’s The Dunciad and An Essay on Man, and the former is a major presence in the tone and conception of PB3 (see headnotes and notes to OL and PB3). Mary’s jnl shows that over a few days in the latter part of May S. read aloud the whole of The Rape of the Lock, and that on 26 May he also read aloud An Essay on Criticism (Mary Jnl i 368). This latter evidence of reading in Pope is particularly interesting. An Essay on Criticism offers a sanely balanced analysis of the proper relation, and mutual responsibilities, of the poet and the critic, which clearly helps to shape S.’s own perspective on poetry

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and criticism in Adonais. Pope’s poem is echoed a number of times in Adonais (see notes), and lies behind a passage which engages obliquely with Keats’s fate at the hands of the Tory critics (see note to ll. 101–4). S. must in fact consciously have prepared for the composition of Adonais with a brief but intense programme of reading, comprising Keats, Byron, and Pope, and also presumably Spenser, Milton, Bion, and Moschus. This possibility seems to be confirmed in S.’s letter of 13 July 1821 to the Gisbornes: I will only remind you of Faust — my impatience for the conclusion of which is only exceeded by my desire to welcome you. — Do you observe any traces of him in the Poem [Adonais] I send you. — Poets, the best of them — are a very camaeleonic race: they take the colour not only of what they feed on, but of the very leaves under which they pass. — (L ii 308) This implies a distinction between two kinds of literary allusion at play in Adonais: one kind consisting in glancing allusion to some presence in the general literary culture, or in the present incidental reading of Shelley and his close circle, such as the reminiscence of Goethe’s Faust in stanza xliii (see note to ll. 379–87); and another kind consisting in patterns of systematic allusion in Adonais, which are integral with the entirety of the poem’s imaginative conception and detailed realisation. This probability accords with S.’s remark that Adonais was ‘a highly wrought piece of art’ (L ii 294), with a relatively slow-moving and densely textured style in compliment to Keats’s advice to S. to ‘be more of an artist, and “load every rift” of your subject with ore’. There is, however, an interesting question as to whether S.’s preparatory reading in Keats included ready access not just to the Lamia volume of 1820, which he certainly had to hand, but also to Keats’s Poems (1817); possible allusions or compliments to poems in the earlier volume are few and debatable in Adonais (see notes), and it is possible that S. had no access to it during the composition period of his poem. Byron had included some reserved judgements on The Cenci (Longman ii, no. 209) in his 26 April letter, while also brushing aside S.’s urging in his letter to Byron of 17 April that his career had arrived at the moment for the ‘great task’ of a ‘supreme’ poem (L ii 284). In bitter contrast, S.’s own apparent failure as a poet now aligned him implicitly with Keats, and aligned both Keats and S. in implicit contrast with Byron’s success and increasing poetic stature and audience. S.’s letter also introduces a sense of outrage that such serious artists as Keats and himself should be critically vilified in contrast with the popular and critical approbation accorded to such self-evidently lightweight and inferior contemporaries as Henry Hart Milman and Barry Cornwall (L ii 289–90; see notes to Preface). These aspects of S.’s gathering thoughts and ideas for an elegy on Keats would of course have coincided with other recent contexts: DP, with its high and abstract claims for the permanent power and significance of poetry in the widest sense, had been written in February, in response to Peacock’s argument that poetry had lost its importance for modern society; the quarrel with Southey, and growing evidence of a concerted politically motivated public campaign to destroy S.’s reputation; the decision to publish his most recent major poem, Epipsychidion, anonymously in order to ‘avoid the malignity of those who turn sweet food into poison’ (L ii 263); and the apparent conjunction of seriously failing health with personal unhappiness and artistic failure. Practical circumstances would have made a serious start on Adonais difficult before midMay. S. and Mary moved back to Bagni di San Giuliano from Pisa on 8 May, and around this time S. made trips to Leghorn, as well as back and forth to Pisa (Mary Jnl i 365). It is,

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however, reasonable to conjecture that work began in earnest on rough drafts around the middle of May. On 5 June S. wrote to the Gisbornes, ‘I have been engaged these last days in composing a poem on the death of Keats, which will shortly be finished’ (L ii 293–4), and then three days later on 8 June he wrote to Claire: Any thing that prevents me from thinking does me good. Reading does not occupy me enough: the only relief I find springs from the composition of poetry, which necessitates contemplations that lift me above the stormy mist of sensations which are my habitual place of abode. I have lately been composing a poem on Keats. (L ii 296) On this same day S. wrote to inform Ollier that ‘You may announce for publication a poem entitled “Adonais” . . . My poem is finished, and consists of about forty Spenser stanzas’ (L ii 297). The finished poem however consists of fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, and that was presumably its length (but see S.’s possible late additions in proof) when he took the MS to Pisa to be printed, eight days after his letter to Ollier, on 16 June, when he wrote to John Gisborne, ‘I have finished my Elegy, & this day I send it to the press at Pisa’ (L ii 300; Mary Jnl i 370 confirms that S. travelled to Pisa himself on that day). If S. did indeed add around fifteen further stanzas to the poem in the week following 8 June, that would imply a composition rate of two or three stanzas a day, which seems a reasonable estimate, and which if then read back from the forty stanzas said to be finished by 8 June (together with the several unused stanzas that were drafted) implies that S. started work in the period between 19 and 22 May, just after his visit to his physician Vaccà in Pisa (Mary Jnl i 367). The documentary record for the composition of Adonais is very incomplete. Various stages of composition can be inferred from the surviving evidence. Individual stanzas, or very short sequences of stanzas, were drafted roughly in various nbks — at least some of which were already in use — that S. had to hand. From these scattered drafts, S. must have assembled intermediate connected drafts, or perhaps a single integrated intermediate draft at least of the forty-odd stanzas completed by 8 June. This intermediate MS must then have been copied fair for the printer, by S. himself or possibly by Mary or Edward Williams. There may also have been a second fair copy for S.’s own reference and safe keeping, as was his custom with other substantial works sent for printing. The printer’s proofs were checked by S. himself, as seems evident from his letter to Ollier of 8 June: I shall send it [Adonais] you, either printed at Pisa, or transcribed in such a manner as it shall be difficult for the reviser to leave such errors as assist the obscurity of the ‘Prometheus.’ But, in case I send it printed, it will be merely that mistakes may be avoided; [so] that I shall only have a few copies struck off in the cheapest manner. (L ii 297) The letter of late July to Ollier enclosing a sketch for a frontispiece to the poem confirms that S. was pleased by the outcome of this approach: ‘The poem [Adonais] is beautifully printed, & what is of more consequence, correctly: indeed it was to obtain this last point that I sent it to the press at Pisa’ (L ii 311). It is almost certain that S. made alterations to the proofs. He wrote to John Taaffe on 4 July, almost three weeks after delivering his copy to the printer, thanking him for his advice to drop from the Preface some version of the highly personal remarks on S.’s own treatment by contemporary critics that survive in draft in Nbk 20: Accept also my thanks for your strictures on Adonais. The first I have adopted, by cancelling in the preface the whole passage relating to my private wrongs.–You are right:

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I ought not to shew my teeth before I can bite, or when I cannot bite . . . As soon as I get a copy I will send it you . . . I consider myself to have been essentially benefited by the adoption of the cancel in the preface.  (L ii 306) This last remark seems to confirm that S. had actually altered printed text, but it is possible that Taaffe’s comments were made in respect of a MS that had not yet been given over to the printer. But S.’s letter also explains why he declined Taaffe’s further advice to cut as too provocative the references to Cain and Christ in l. 306 of the printed poem, and also to retain the word priest in l. 32, lines very probably already in proof by early July. There is the further possibility that S. continued to supply the printer with additional stanzas after his delivery of the printer’s copy on 16 June. The draft for stanza xlv is immediately followed in Nbk 15 pp. 205–6 by a draft of S. ’s statement in response to a pirated edition of Q Mab which appeared in the Examiner 706 (15 July 1821) 443; the draft statement in Nbk 15 is then followed on p. 213 by a draft for stanza xlvi, suggesting that work on Adonais was actually interrupted by S.’s draft statement on Q Mab at least as late as the middle of June. Adonais (1821) displays some features which could be explained by the surmise that S. provided material after 16 June, in his own hand. Stanza xliii of the printed poem has at ll. 384–6 four occurrences of the possessive its, all of which are printed as it’s in Adonais (1821). This is a frequent error in S.’s own orthography, as is the spelling thier for their, which also occurs within the last fifteen stanzas of the printed poem at l. 398. These circumstances possibly support the surmise that S. supplied holograph copy during the course of printing; other details, however, might suggest that the original printer’s copy was in some other hand, possibly Mary’s: its occurs correctly in thirteen places before the stanza in which there are four successive erroneous spellings (ll. 77, 90, 105, 108, 153, 167, 242, 258, 260, 261, 274, 369 and 376); and the spelling of gulf at l. 35 is extremely unusual for S. (who invariably spells the word gulph), but normal for Mary. It is also interesting that it’s for its occurs throughout the Preface in Adonais (1821), suggesting that it too was provided to the printer in S.’s own handwriting. Unfortunately, a very significant proportion of the various MS  source materials for Adonais appear not to have survived. There is no known intermediate draft, and no fair copy; and no proofs are known to exist. A  considerable number of rough drafts do however survive, most of them in Nbk 20, fewer in Nbk 15, and one in Nbk 17. Of the ­fifty-five stanzas, complete or partial drafts survive for stanzas iv–v, xiv–xxi, xxiii–xxv, xxix–xxxiv, lx–lxiii and lxv–lxvi. There is thus existing draft material for ­twenty-five of the poem’s fifty-five stanzas, with the missing thirty stanzas concentrated in the poem’s opening thirteen and closing nine stanzas. Nbk 20 is commonly assumed to have been seriously damaged when it went down with the Don Juan in the accident in which S. drowned in July 1822 (as Donald H. Reiman cogently notes in BSM vii 83–4, the suggestion in Rogers (1967) 12–13 that Nbk 20 could have been damaged in the course of S.’s accident on the Serchio on 16 April  1821 is patently impossible, as it would imply that S. had completed substantial drafts of Adonais within two or three days of hearing of Keats’s death). Nbk 20 was repaired after its retrieval from the wreck of the Don Juan, a process which at some point must have involved complete disassembly, and subsequent erroneous reassembly, leading to complex confusion in interpreting its evidence. BSM vii offers a brilliant effort of scholarly reconstruction by Reiman and Bruce Barker-Benfield, which establishes with compelling authority the true order of the nbk, and lends very persuasive support to Reiman’s hypotheses concerning the order of composition of its contents. Reiman argues (BSM vii 97–103) that the surviving

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drafts in Nbk 20 represent a middle stage of composition, mainly comprising the sequence in stanzas xiv–xxi in which the poem develops its contrast between the rebirth of nature in the spring and the absoluteness of an individual human death. The nbk also contains drafts for stanzas xxiii–xxv recounting Urania’s journey to the dead Adonais, stanzas xxx and xxxv describing Byron, Moore, and Hunt as mourners, and stanzas lx–lxiii celebrating Adonais’s escape from death into immortality. Reiman proposes that these sections were possibly composed in the order: stanzas xxiii–xxv, then xxx and xxxv, then xviii–xix, then xl–xliii, and finally, in uncertain order, stanzas between xv and xx. From its position in the nbk it is likely that stanza v was a late addition. Nbk 20 also contains S. ’s rough drafts towards the Preface, on the recto sides left blank facing the draft of DP, presumably to accommodate later additions and annotations for that essay. This positioning may suggest that the Preface was written towards the end of the composition period of Adonais, using space that S. had tried to preserve. The other nbk with significant draft material, Nbk 15, mainly contains work towards the portrait of S. himself as a mourner, stanzas xxxi–xxxiv; this passage clearly gave S. a great deal of trouble as the drafts are, even by S.’s standards, extraordinarily dense and multi-layered. Nbk 15 also contains fairly substantial unused stanzas which in thematic terms clearly relate to the conception of Keats’s fellow English poets as mourners (see Unused stanzas for Adonais (Longman iv 331–45, no. 403 Appendix)). It seems likely that S. began work on Adonais with the opening stanzas, in their heavily classical style, and the sequence of stanzas vi–xii describing the various Dreams, Splendours, and Echoes who come to mourn Adonais in his twilight chamber (see notes). These passages must have been drafted in a nbk or nbks, or loose sheets, now lost. It is a reasonable inference that the last part of the poem to be composed was the long sequence following stanza xli, perhaps using the now-missing final quire of the correctly reassembled Nbk 20 (see BSM vii 100). It may be that S. first considered the poem finished at the end of stanza xli, and that this stage of composition was the one he refers to in his letter to Ollier of 8 June which speaks of ‘about forty Spenser stanzas’ (quoted earlier). There is a curious mark, plausibly transcribed in BSM vii 289 as a star-shaped pattern, in the centre of the page in Nbk 20 on which stanza xli is drafted, and immediately below the final line of that stanza. The draft of stanza xlii does however follow on this same page, so if S.’s mark does signify a point of completion, this was obviously a point soon superseded. S.’s method of composition can be inferred from features of the surviving rough drafts. He appears to have worked on one or two stanzas at a time, allowing all or most of a page to sketch out the shape and ideas for each stanza or pair of stanzas — one senses the literal space to be taken up by the Spenserian stanza as an outline shaping principle — and then worked through numerous cancellations and interlinear adjustments towards an overall conception for the stanzas. Each stanza, or group of stanzas, must then have been worked up relatively neatly, before incorporation into an inclusive sequence. Amongst the surviving drafts are some numbered stanzas, with the numbering moving between Nbk 15 and Nbk 20, in such a way as to make it clear that S. must have been pulling together disparately drafted stanzas or short sequences of stanzas into an intermediate copy, or at least a record. This numbering does not include a number of draft stanzas included in the printed poem, perhaps implying that these stanzas had been worked up to readiness in other MSS, now lost. The numbering also does not quite correspond to the numbering of the printed poem: printed stanza xiv is numbered ‘13’ in Nbk 20, whereas printed stanza xv is numbered as ‘15’; printed stanzas xxiii and xxiv are numbered ‘22’ and’23’; printed stanzas xxxi to xxxiv in Nbk 15 are numbered ‘30’ to’33’; and printed stanzas xl and xli are numbered ‘39’ and ‘40’ (i.e. the possible original final stanza xli as conjectured was at first numbered ‘40’).

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This would seem to indicate that at some point subsequent to his initial numbering, S. added at least one stanza before printed stanza xv (a stanza or stanzas may also have been omitted from the initial numbered sequence), possibly including printed stanza v; and that one stanza was added between printed stanzas xv–xxiii. Whether these changes were part of the further work on the poem that transformed its length from ‘about forty’ to fifty-five stanzas between 8 June and 12 July, when Mary recorded that she ‘read S’s Adonais’ (Mary Jnl i 374), is impossible to say. Publication. The first edition of Adonais was published on or around 12 July 1821, in Pisa ‘with the types of Didot’, as its title-page proclaims. ‘Didot’ refers to the famous Parisian family of printers responsible for the design of type used by the Pisan printer, identified in SC v 421 as Niccolò Capurro. As SC v also notes, the actual type used for Adonais (1821) is almost certainly the same as had been used for a parallel English–Italian edition of Byron’s Lament of Tasso (1817), though the font had sustained noticeable damage in the intervening three years, which may have a bearing on the textual crux at l. 423 (see note). S. wrote to the Gisbornes on 13 July enclosing ‘the only copy of Adonais the printer has yet delivered’ (L ii 307), and sent a copy to Byron on 16 July (L ii 308). A box containing copies of the Pisan edition for sale in England was sent to Ollier at the end of July (L ii 310–12); the size of the print run is not known but was small, perhaps as few as one hundred copies (see SC v 422). The fact that S. had such close personal involvement in the printing of Adonais could be understood to imply that Adonais (1821) offers almost unique insight into his preferred forms of punctuation, spelling, and presentation on the page. There are, however, respects in which this assumption is misleading. S. remarked to John Gisborne of the poem that ‘the style is calm & solemn’ (L ii 300), and Adonais has an unusually slow-moving and stately metrical texture, strikingly untypical in S.’s output; this stylistic quality is complemented in a correspondingly heavy and frequent punctuation in Adonais (1821). S.’s supervision of the printing did indeed produce a first edition relatively free of textual difficulties, but the poem’s transmission history beyond its first edition nevertheless offers some editorial puzzles, albeit never remotely approaching the scale and complexity of other of S.’s major works, such as PU or TL. S. clearly intended that there should be a second, English edition of the poem, for he wrote to Ollier in late July with ‘a sketch for a frontispiece to the poem “Adonais” ’ (L ii 310); this small sepia sketch, apparently in illustration of the last stanza, was by Edward Williams, and was accompanied by detailed instructions for the manner in which it was to be engraved (Peck ii 222–3: the current location of the drawing is unknown; it was sold by Sotheby, Williamson, Hodge, catalogue 25, July 1918, p. 131, item 1165). Thereafter, S. complained to Ollier in a letter of 11 January 1822 ‘I do not know even, whether it [Adonais] has been published, and still less whether it has been republished with the alterations I sent’ (L ii 372). Ollier had neither published nor ‘republished’, but had simply endeavoured to sell the copies sent from Pisa, and no ‘alterations’ sent from Italy could be incorporated. What these alterations may have comprised is an intriguing question, particularly as S. wrote two months later to John Gisborne: Hunt tells me Adonais has not been published. I hear from another quarter that it has been reviewed; I should very much like it to be published, & if any decent number are sold, I should be glad that another edition were prepared with the omission I sent to Ollier—(L ii 396)

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If the ‘alterations’ of the 11 January 1822 letter were in fact one and the same with the ‘omission’ of this letter of 7 March 1822, then these comments may have some bearing on the mysterious circumstances in which Adonais did find its first appearance in England. A version of the poem was published in the Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review cxxxiii (1 December 1821) 751–4, with a supportive introduction (reprinted in Unextinguished Hearth 285–6) explaining, ‘As the copy [of Adonais] now before us is, perhaps, the only one that has reached England, and the subject is one that will excite much interest, we shall print the whole of it’. The poem is however not printed complete, but with stanzas xix–xxiv omitted. It is not known who communicated a copy of Adonais to the Literary Chronicle (which states merely that it has received the poem ‘Through the kindness of a friend’). Knerr 13 unaccountably asserts that it was Richard Monckton Milnes and Arthur Henry Hallam, ‘together with several friends’, who arranged for the Literary Chronicle publication, confusing the December 1821 circumstances with those surrounding the Cambridge edition of 1829, which was the work of Milnes and Hallam (who would have been 12 and 10 years old respectively in December 1821). John Gisborne had carried copies of Adonais to England for Ollier and Peacock (L ii 312, 330) travelling ahead of the box of copies, and either of these could have been the source for the Literary Chronicle. Peacock, though, was not an admirer of Keats, whereas Ollier may have had reason to promote interest in Keats’s work, as well as S.’s, as he still had titles by both to sell; and if the ‘alterations’ sent to him by S. in October were in fact the ‘omission’ mentioned by S. in March 1822, then it is conceivable that the stanzas omitted in the Literary Chronicle were at S.’s own instruction. However, the omission of stanzas xix–xxiv makes no sense, cutting across the introduction of the spring theme developed from stanza xviii onwards, and resuming in the middle of Urania’s journey. It is perhaps possible that the omission in the Literary Chronicle was an error, caused by the use of roman numerals, for stanzas xxix–xxxiv. This possibility would go some way to account for Medwin’s assertion in Conversations of Lord Byron, quoting Adonais stanzas xxxi–xxxiii, that he cannot give a fairer specimen of [S.’s] style and manner, or a better portrait of Shelley, than the one he drew of himself in this poem, and afterwards expunged from it.  (Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr. (1966) 249) The poem maintains coherent continuity in the absence of stanzas xxix–xxxiv, and given S.’s obvious difficulty in drafting the self-portrait, together with his acknowledgement to Taaffe (discussed earlier) that the Preface was better for cancelling its overtly personal elements, and his concern to preserve a reciprocal artistic relationship with Byron (whose fame is lauded in stanza xxx), it is a credible speculation. There was no second edition sanctioned by S. in his lifetime, so his intentions in respect of alterations and omissions cannot be certainly determined. However, Mary’s failure to omit any stanzas of the poem, when she is known to have included other changes sanctioned by S. himself in her later editorial work, argues against the possibility. Adonais was first published in a separate English edition in 1829, seven years after S.’s death. The Cambridge undergraduates and members of the ‘Apostles’ group Arthur Henry Hallam and Richard Monckton Milnes arranged for a copy of the Pisan edition brought back from Italy to be published in Cambridge (see Forman 1876–7 iii 5). This edition has a prefatory note stating that ‘The present Edition is an exact reprint (a few typographical errors only being corrected,) of the first edition’ (Adonais (1829) p. iii). Apart from various very minor alterations (see notes), however, Adonais (1829) actually makes three ‘corrections’ which are in fact substantive changes: hand for hands (l. 82), stream for steam (l. 167),

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and sang for sung (l. 302); true love is also altered to true-love (l. 49). In the absence of any evidence that Mary was involved in the preparation of Adonais (1829), it must be assumed that these changes were surmises on the part of the young editors. They do, however, become more interesting in the light of the subsequent publication history of Adonais. The Galignanis’ collected edition appeared late in 1829, and definitely did benefit from direct assistance from Mary, who wrote to her intermediary Cyrus Redding on 3 September 1829 with various amendments to S.’s text, including ‘Some changes Mr Shelley wished made in the Adonais’ (Mary L ii 86). But these plural ‘changes’ in 1829 from Adonais (1821) turn out to comprise only one substantive change not deriving from Adonais (1829), namely the new l. 72 (see note). All of the changes introduced in Adonais (1829) reappear in 1829, presumably because 1829 used Adonais (1829) as copy text. This leaves open the question of whether any of the changes introduced in Adonais (1829) fortuitously happened to correspond, by lucky guesswork, lucky accident, or some unknown communication between Mary and Milnes and Hallam, with changes intended by S. himself, or whether the changes in Adonais (1829) are simply carried over unnoticed and unsanctioned into 1829. When Mary came to produce her collected edition of 1839, she introduced further substantive changes to the text of Adonais, notably the emphatic verbal alterations at l. 143 and l. 252, which must derive from S. himself. As well as retaining the readings first altered in Adonais (1829) and carried into 1829, 1839 also introduces further small verbal changes, one of which (Has for Had in l. 203) has clear endorsement from the surviving draft (see notes), but others of which prove, as Taylor (75–6) convincingly demonstrates, that the copy text for Adonais in 1839 was not 1829, but Ascham’s unauthorised edition of 1834, itself based on 1829 but introducing new errors of its own, which are carried over uncorrected into 1839. From a modern editorial point of view, these circumstances mean that decisions have to be made in respect of the competing authority of a small number of variant possibilities, including hand or hands in l. 82 (where prosody seems to argue in favour of Adonais (1829)) and sang for sung in l. 302 (which change, perplexingly, is an alteration in Adonais (1829) which is confirmed in S.’s draft). There is also one further and more important crux, steam or stream in l. 167, for which see the discussion in the note to that line. Sources and Influences. Adonais differs from other English elegies in celebrating its subject throughout as a more important poet than the author (although Ben Jonson’s ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he hath left us’ (1623) is an exception); which, indeed, is what S. really judged Keats to be. Thus, the poem is a courteously elaborated compliment to its subject as a poet who, it is anticipated, is about to take his place among the major English poets of the past and present, whose tradition he has embodied and sustained. Its formal Greek dress and densely allusive classicism is in civilised rebuke of the Reviews that had sneered at Keats as a Cockney guttersnipe. Keats’s longest published poem, Endymion, with its sustained immersion in material from Greek myth, had been singled out for ridicule; and S. particularly admired the equally Grecian Hyperion, which he considered a work of genius. The predominant classical element in S.’s elegy derives from its carefully subtle pattern of allusion to the Greek pastoral elegies of Bion and Moschus, the Lament for Adonis, and the Lament for Bion. S. had translated part of both of these poems (see nos 162 and 201, Longman ii 348–9, 697–700), and as the headnote to no. 201 argues S.’s translation from Bion has an emotional intensity which suggests that it may already have carried for him a special association with the death of his son William; S. and Mary’s grief for their son, and his place of burial, in the same cemetery with Keats, are referred to in Adonais (see stanzas xlix and

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li and notes). S.’s elegy has numerous echoes of Bion and Moschus, in terms of diction, phrases, and phrasing, but also in relation to the various formulaic elements of pastoral elegy and poetic conventions of mourning. The dominant presence of Bion and Moschus is underpinned by more glancing or implicit evocations of other major presences in the classical tradition of pastoral elegy, including Theocritus and Virgil. The classical idiom of Adonais is, however, still more pervasive in its turn to Platonic language and ideas, its use of graceful classical puns which may embrace the title itself (see note to ll. 147–8), its ease of frequent reference to myth and legend, and its constant recourse to classical formulae and habits of mind and phrasing. The effect extends to the very appearance, paratexts, and incidentals of the poem’s first printing in Pisa, closely supervised by Shelley himself: the title-page offers an untranslated Greek epigraph from Plato; when the page is turned the Preface is again headed by four lines of untranslated Greek with the scholarly attribution ‘Moschus, Epitaph. Bion’; and the poem itself then proceeds at a stately and heavily punctuated slow pace, highly unusual for Shelley, with each carefully and beautifully printed stanza numbered in Roman capitals. Adonais also bases its central narrative situation, the mourning of Urania for Adonais, on Bion’s source-story, the grief of Venus for Adonis. The mythical Adonis is a vegetation spirit whose association with the cycle of death and rebirth in nature offers S.’s poem a powerful charge of resonance and implication. In the fertility-myth Venus loves a young boy, Adonis, who is killed by a boar. Her tears revive him; but he returns to life only in summer, sleeping on flowers the rest of the year, with Proserpine in the underworld. For directly relevant English poetic treatments of the story see Faerie Queene III vi 29–49, and Endymion ii 387–533. This fertility myth of a boy loved by a goddess, done to death by a savage beast, and sleeping or waking with the seasonal life of Nature, parallels the fate of Keats, a young poet loved by the Muse and killed by a Tory reviewer; whose body is reabsorbed into the vitality of Nature and whose spirit lives on with the enduring dead. This narrative connects in Adonais with the theme of Moschus’s Lament for Bion, which articulates the classical formula of a shepherd-poet grieving for the loss of a fellow shepherd and superior poet. S.’s adaptation of these sources in Adonais is given a strong literary inflection; Urania, who takes the place of Venus in the source myth, is the presiding goddess of the English poetic tradition, her name replacing at one point in the draft what was originally the phrase ‘great Poesy’ (see stanza iv and notes). S.’s Urania is the widow of Milton and bereaved mother of Adonais/Keats, and it is she in her status as the spirit of English poetry who is the principal mourner in the poem, and the focal point of the other mourners who are other English poets, living and dead, and also Keats’s own poems, written or unwritten (see stanzas ix–xiv and notes). In the first half of the poem, Urania’s identity as the mother of English poets is central to the coherence of the ‘action’, and is particularly significant in the poem’s powerful effect of reflexivity; Keats’s permanent presence within that tradition is partly dependent on the success of S.’s own poem in establishing his subject’s claims to be so regarded, and that success in turn offers a guarantee of S.’s own status. Urania is, of course, Milton’s muse in Paradise Lost (vii 1–39), and S. wrote to Peacock in February 1821, before he had heard of Keats’s death, describing himself as composing DP ‘in honour of my mistress Urania’ (see note to l. 12). Urania in Adonais has been understood by some commentators to embrace a wider philosophical connotation which carries her significance well beyond the strictly literary. In particular, a number of studies have sought to demonstrate a pervasive and central Platonism in the poem’s intellectual framework, structure, and style, which can be

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construed as in accord with the Platonic associations of the figure of Urania. Peacock speaks in a note to his Rhododaphne, a poem S. knew well, of the significance of Urania in Neoplatonic commentary: The Egyptians, as Plutarch informs us in his Erotic dialogue, recognised three distinct powers of Love: the Uranian, or Heavenly; the Pandemian, Vulgar or Earthly; and the Sun .  .  . Uranian Love, in the mythological philosophy of Plato, is the deity or genius of pure mental passion for the good and the beautiful; and Pandemian Love, of ordinary sexual attachment.  (Peacock Works vii 91; Peacock’s reference is to Plutarch’s ‘Dialogue on Love’, Moralia 764) The Platonic identification of Aphrodite Urania with heavenly love, in contrast with the common, earthly, and sexual love embodied in Aphrodite Pandemia, originates in Plato’s Symposium, which S. translated at Bagni di Lucca in the summer of 1818: For assuredly are there two Venuses; one, the eldest, the daughter of Uranus, born without a mother, whom we call the Uranian; the other younger, the daughter of Jupiter and Dione, whom we call the Pandemian . . . The Love . . . which attends upon Venus Pandemos is, in truth, common to the vulgar, and presides over transient and fortuitous connexions, and is worshipped by the least excellent of mankind: the votaries of this deity regard women as equally objects of love with men; they seek the body rather than the soul, and the ignorant rather than the wise, disdaining all that is honourable and lovely, and considering how they shall best satisfy their sensual necessities. This Love is derived from the younger Goddess, who partakes in her nature both of male and female. But the attendant on the other, the Uranian, whose nature is entirely masculine, is the Love who inspires us with affection towards men, and exempts us from all wantonness and libertinism. Those who are inspired by this divinity seek the affections of that sex which is endowed by nature with greater excellence and vigour both of body and mind. And it is easy to distinguish those who especially exist under the influence of this power, by their choosing in early youth as the objects of their love those in whom the intellectual faculties have begun to develop.  (Julian vii 174–5) S.’s Urania in Adonais might reasonably be assumed to pose a significant contrast with the lower Cyprian Aphrodite of the source-myth in Bion’s handling, where the goddess is distinctly earthly and sexual, and thus not ideally fitted to S.’s adaptation to Keats’s situation; hence the change in Urania’s identity in Adonais from lover to mother. The Symposium itself goes on to explore the identity of the Uranian love with both music, and poetry: Music is then the knowledge of that which relates to love in harmony and rhythm. In the very system of harmony and rhythm, it is easy to distinguish love. The double love is not distinguishable in music itself; but it is required to apply it to the service of mankind by system and harmony, which is called poetry, or the composition of melody; or by the correct use of songs and measures already composed, which is called discipline; then one can be distinguished from the other, by the aid of an extremely skilful artist. And the better love ought to be honoured and preserved for the sake of those who are virtuous, and that the nature of the vicious may be changed through the inspiration of its spirit. This is that beautiful Uranian love, the attendant on the Uranian muse. (Julian vii 181)

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The figure of Urania can in this light serve to embody a specific conception of English poetic tradition, particularly in a context where Milton plays a central role; but in the context of her Platonic associations Urania can also, in the latter part of Adonais, personify a wider conception of the enduring character of human creativity, which in its memorials and productions offers a mode of immortality through its continual successive reincarnations in the mental life of human generations. Her status as the Muse of astronomy provides a further motivation, especially given the complex pattern of star imagery which is initiated in the poem’s Platonic motto, and which culminates in the closing lines of the final stanza. S.’s Urania also suggests the character of Asia in PU, another female embodiment of the ideal whose ultimate mode of existence is as pure love, an absolute too bright ever to be approached directly, but, typically throughout S.’s writings, to be inferred through the effects of her presence. In fact, Urania does not appear in Adonais after stanza xxxiv, beyond which point her role is subsumed into the more inclusive Power of l. 375, and one Spirit of l. 381 (see notes). S.’s language in the second half of Adonais is evidently very strongly coloured by the imagery of Platonic and Neoplatonic discourse, and its climactic closing sequence deploys the central Platonic tenets of the immortality of the soul, and the underlying unity of things (see notes). But these powerful Platonic elements are not present in terms which suggest any systematic exposition of or formal commitment to Platonism or Neoplatonism, however understood. This is in keeping with S.’s general stance towards Plato, who is consistently honoured as a great poet in the inclusive sense of DP, but not as a thinker whose specific doctrines are to be adhered to as a guiding body of thought. S.’s fragmentary ‘Preface’ to his translation of the Symposium puts it succinctly: [Plato’s] views into the nature of mind and existence are often obscure, only because they are profound; and though his theories respecting the government of the world, and the elementary laws of moral action, are not always correct, yet there is scarcely any of his treatises which do not, however stained by puerile sophisms, contain the most remarkable intuitions into all that can be the subject of the human mind. (Julian vii 161–2) As Michael Henry Scrivener cogently notes, in the final stanzas of Adonais ‘the Neoplatonic One to which the postmortal spirit returns is a metaphor, a symbol, and must be understood as a poetically useful fiction’ (Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1982) 273). The rich diversity of Platonic ideas and metaphors in Adonais is best understood not as a poetic expression of a developed philosophical position, but as a dimension of the deliberate classicism of the poem’s rhetoric. Keats is represented in Adonais as the heir of Milton because of the powerful impression made on S. by the heavily Miltonic Hyperion, which S. first read in October 1820. Lycidas is thus a palpable presence in the poem’s allusive texture, together with a range of evocations embracing Paradise Lost and a number of other poems. However, Keats’s favourite poet in the period when S. knew him personally was not Milton, or even Shakespeare, but Spenser, and as various commentators have noted, Adonais is coloured by a graceful patterning of allusions which acknowledge the Spenserian influence on Keats. Thus, Adonais is in Spenserian stanzas, and offers a profusion of Spenserian echoes which are unusual in being concentrated on a range of less familiar shorter works, including Spenser’s own elegy for Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel, with its associated ‘Dolefull Lay of Clorinda’, the Fowre Hymnes, Daphnaïda, the Epithalamion, and other poems. Although the Faerie Queene is also a presence from time to time, S. may have wished to avoid too obvious a homage to that poem

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because of its association with Hunt’s enthusiasms and stylistic influence on Keats. A specific notable feature of the Spenserian presence in Adonais is the significance of Spenser’s relationship with Sir Philip Sidney. S. and Mary had been reading Sidney’s Defence of Poesy in March 1821 in connection with his work on DP (Mary Jnl i 354), and Spenser’s carefully poised elegy Astrophel thus offered an apposite model for S.’s own version of the Greek pastoral lament by one poet for another, and explains Sidney’s own presence in S.’s poem in stanza xlv (additionally resonant given that S. was a distant relative of Sir Philip Sidney on his mother’s side; see White i 9 and 562). This background merges with the origin of Lycidas in the death of Milton’s friend Edward King to set the literary context for S.’s self-positioning relative to Keats and to English poetry in stanzas xxx–xxxiv of Adonais. The dominating literary presence that pervades the rhetoric of Adonais is, however, not Milton or Spenser, but Keats himself. A  number of commentators have discussed this aspect of the poem, including Stuart Curran in a fine essay (‘Adonais in Context’, in Shelley Revalued 165–82), and there have been various exercises in scholarly source hunting and the identification of references (e.g. Margaret de G. Verrall, ‘Allusions in Adonais to the Poems of Keats’, MLR vi (1911) 354–9). The full extent of S.’s indebtedness to Keats in Adonais has nevertheless not been fully appreciated or understood. S.’s elegy comprises a critique of Keats’s poetic career and its context in the party-dominated culture of the Reviews. It repeatedly evokes a wide range of Keats’s published poetry, particularly Endymion and the poems of the Lamia volume, notably Hyperion but also, in one form or another, all of the major Odes and narrative poems. These allusions range in manner from almost direct quotation, through frequent complimentary references by word, phrasing, or pun, to implicit celebratory rehearsals of major passages in Keats, which inform some of the best-known stanzas of Adonais. The poem’s central purpose is to celebrate Keats so as to establish him as a fixed star in the constellation of the great poets, and its brilliantly original approach is to weave the products of Keats’s poetic imagination into the texture of the elegy. The presence of Keats in the English poetic tradition is consequently no matter of mere assertion in Adonais, nor simply a demonstration of his claims to be the inheritor — or indeed more literally the literary offspring — of Spenser and Milton. Keats’s stature alongside these poets is everywhere implicit in the poem’s echoing of Keats’s living poetic voice, alongside the voices of his peers. This centrality of Keats’s poetry in the design and verbal texture of Adonais is reflected in the title itself. The simultaneous identification with and difference from a classical model, so characteristic of S.’s use of classical sources throughout his poetry, finds its defining instance in the name Adonais. Various suggestions have been offered by commentators about the possible significances implied in S.’s invented name, the most influential probably being the argument in Wasserman 464–5 that it is a telescoping of the Greek ‘Adonis’ with Hebrew ‘Adonai’, thus underpinning a grand syncretic design in the poem’s philosophical argument as Wasserman understands it. But this derivation of Adonais is awkward, partly from syllabic incompatibility, and partly from the strain of trying to see Keats as Jehovah. Adonais as a title, and as a classical name for Keats, is probably best understood as an aspect of S.’s determination in his elegy to sustain a sophisticated and learned classicism in honour of Keats’s right to absolute canonical status. The name thus offers a Platonic pun on the Greek word for ‘nightingale’, ἀηδών, in the manner of Socrates’s etymologies in Plato’s Cratylus. Compare for example Socrates’s discussion of the derivation of the name of the goddess Hera (Ἥρη): Hera is the lovely one (ἐρατή), for Zeus, according to tradition, loved and married her; possibly also the name may have been given when the legislator was thinking of the heav-

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S.’s title uses this seriously playful type of etymology, ‘putting the end in the place of the beginning’, in an elegant merging of the classical name in the source myth with the singing bird most associated with poetry, not least by Keats himself. Within the poem Keats as a nightingale is gently iterated at ll. 145–6: Thy spirit’s sister, the lorn nightingale/Mourns not her mate with such melodious pain (see the notes to these lines). And the poem’s opening stanzas, with their machinery of listening Echoes which are to perform precisely an echoing of Keats throughout the poem, invoke all the fading melodies, With which, like flowers that mock the corse beneath, He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of death. (ll. 16–18) Indeed these fading melodies themselves echo the closing lines of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades   Past the near meadows, over the still stream,    Up the hill-side; and now’tis buried deep     In the next valley-glades:   Was it a vision, or a waking dream?    Fled is that music — Do I wake or sleep? (ll. 75–80) Critical Reception. S. considered Adonais one of his best poems, perhaps the best. He wrote to the Gisbornes on 5 June 1821: I have been engaged these last days in composing a poem on the death of Keats, which will shortly be finished; and I anticipate the pleasure of reading it to you, as some of the very few persons who will be interested in it and understand it. — It is a highly wrought piece of art, perhaps better in point of composition than any thing I  have written. — (L ii 293–4) And he repeated this evaluation in a letter to Claire Clairmont dated three days later: ‘I have lately been composing a poem on Keats: it is better than any thing that I have yet written, & worthy both of him & of me’ (L ii 296). S. was more self-deprecating in sending the poem to Byron — ‘I fear it is worth little’ (L ii 309) — and Byron himself made no response. S.’s concern for the critical fate of Adonais is underlined by his continuing interest in revisions for a possible London edition, but after receiving no news of the poem from Ollier for several months he wrote on 11 November 1821 ‘I am especially curious to hear the fate of Adonais. — I confess I should be surprised if that Poem were born to an immortality of oblivion. — ’ (L ii 365). He was still waiting in January, writing to Ollier on 11 January 1822 ‘I cannot but express my surprise at the silence you have thought proper to observe’ and going on to reiterate that he remains ‘more than commonly interested in the success of “Adonais”; — I do not

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mean the sale, but the effect produced —’ (L ii 371–2). S. despondently asks Hunt in a letter of 25 January to find time to establish ‘what effect was produced by Adonais’, and goes on to explain ‘I can write nothing, & if Adonais had no success & excited no interest what incentive can I have to write? — ’ (L ii 382). By 7 March, however, S. had heard that the poem had been reviewed (L ii 396), and by 10 April he writes to John Gisborne in terms which make it clear that he has learned of at least one of the early critical attacks: ‘I know what to think of Adonais, but what to think of those who confound it with the many bad poems of the day, I know not. — ’ (L ii 406). On 18 June 1822, just three weeks before his death, S. reflected bitterly on what appeared as the complete failure of his elegy: ‘The “Adonais” I wished to have had a fair chance, both because it is a favourite with me and on account of the memory of Keats, who was a poet of great genius, let the classic party say what it will’ (L ii 434). Adonais did indeed receive predictable critical broadsides from the Tory critics it directly addressed. Blackwood’s x (1821) 696–700 jeered and scoffed, in an article by George Croly, whose own work is singled out as amongst the ‘illustrious obscure’ in the Preface to Adonais (see notes). The Literary Gazette more solemnly denounced the ‘atrocities’ in the poem, while dwelling mainly on what it takes to be its nonsensical character (255 (8 December 1821) 772–3). But the version of the poem published in the Literary Chronicle on 1 December 1821 was accompanied by a supportive introduction, and in the months and years following S.’s death Adonais did not attract hostility. Sustained critical accounts of the poem are, however, virtually non-existent right up to the end of the nineteenth century, although the marginal comments by S.’s friend Taaffe on his copy show that, amongst S.’s own circle at least, the idiom and sophistication of the poem were well understood (Taaffe’s marginalia were not published until 1968; see Richard Harter Fogle, ‘John Taaffe’s Annotated Copy of Adonais’, K–SJ xvii (1968) 31–52). Thereafter the first seriously detailed commentary was in Rossetti’s edition (1891), which after some public controversy about the condition of classical scholarship amongst the undergraduate audience, was published as Adonais (1903) with revisions and the assistance of the classical scholar A. O. Prickard. This edition remains extremely useful and has been drawn on in the present edition. Adonais is of course included in all of the subsequent major editions, and from a textual point of view has not been controversial. Detailed annotation, however, has proved heavily dependent on Adonais (1903), up to and including Knerr, the only other scholarly work devoted exclusively to Adonais and its text. Knerr does draw as well on the extensive body of critical commentary published since the Second World War, and offers a transcription of ‘rejected stanzas associated with Adonais’ as well as most of the other surviving draft material. This work has however been entirely superseded by BSM xiv and BSM xx. In general terms Knerr is somewhat limited by an inclusive unjudgemental approach, a derivative thinness in annotation, and various inaccuracies and errors of fact (see the review by Neil Fraistat, SiR xxvi (1987) 600–6). Its overview of the development of critical commentary on Adonais is however valuable and should be consulted, especially on the beginnings of modern critical attention in the 1930s (Knerr 119–35). Text from Adonais (1821), with one verbal amendment from 1829 and two from 1839; other minor amendments are recorded in the notes. The layout of stanzas in Adonais (1821) is followed here. Published in Adonais (1821)

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ADONAIS An Elegy On the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion etc. By

Percy. B. Shelley Αστήρ πρὶν μὲν ἐλαμπες ενι ζῶοισιν εῶος.     Νυν δε θανῶν, λαμπεις ἔσπερος εν φθίμενοις.             plato.

PISA WITH THE TYPES OF DIDOT MDCCCXXI

¶ 54. Motto. A Platonic epigram from the Greek Anthology vii 670. The text is given thus in the Loeb edition: Ἀστὴρ πρὶν μὲν ἔλαμπες ἐνί ζωοῖσιν Ἑῷος˙

νῦν δὲ θανὼν λάμπεις Ἕσπερος ἐν φθιμένοις.

S. had translated the epigram as follows under the title To Stella (Longman iii 721–2, no. 352): Thou wert the morning-star among the living   Ere thy fair light had fled — Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving   New splendour to the dead. — Adonais recalls this motto at l. 414 and in its closing lines, and more generally in its pervasive complex of light and star imagery.

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PREFACE

Φάρμακον ἧλθε, Βίων, ποτι σον στομα, φάρμακον ἐĭίδες˙ Πῶς τευ τοῖς χέιλεσσι ποτεδραμε, κοὐκ εγλυκανθη; Τις δὲ βροτος τοσσοῦτον ἀνάμερος, ἢ κερασαι τοι, Ἤ δοῦναι λαλέοντι το φάρμακον; ἔκφυγεν ὠδαν.

moschus, epitaph. bion.

5

It is my intention to subjoin to the London edition of this poem, a criticism upon the claims of its lamented object to be classed among the writers of the highest genius who have adorned our age. My known repugnance to the narrow principles of taste on which several of his earlier compositions were modelled, prove, at least that I  am an impartial judge. I consider the fragment of Hyperion, as second to nothing that was ever produced by a writer of the same years.

Epigraph. Moschus, Lament for Bion ll. 109–12. A. S. F. Gow gives the text (and translation) thus: φάρμακον ἦλθε, Βίων, ποτὶ σὸν στόμα, φάρμακον ἦδες. τοιούτοις χείλεσσι ποτέδραμε, κοὐκ ἐγλυκάνθη; τίς δὲ βροτὸς τοσσοῦτον ἀνάμερος, ἢ κεράσαι τοι ἢ δοῦναι λαλέοντι τὸ φάρμακον; ἦ φύγεν ῷδάν. ‘Poison came to thy lips, Bion: poison didst thou eat. To such lips could it approach and not be sweetened? What human was so brutal as to mix the drug for thee, or give it at thy bidding? He escapes my song.’ Adonais stanza xxxvi is modelled on this passage. Pref. 1–3. It is my intention . . . adorned our age.] S.’s letter to Severn of 29 November 1821 explains why this plan was not followed up: I have little hope . . . that [Adonais] will excite any attention nor do I feel assured that a critical notice of [Keats’s] writings would find a single reader. But for these considerations it had been my intention to have collected the remnants of his compositions & to have published them with a life & criticism. (L ii 366) The project envisaged here by S. was not realised until 1848 with the publication of Richard Monckton Milnes’s highly influential two-volume Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. Pref. 1. the London edition of this poem] No ‘London edition’ of Adonais was published in S.’s lifetime (see headnote). Pref. 3–5. My known repugnance . . . impartial judge] S. shared with Byron, Peacock, and others a marked scepticism about influence from Leigh Hunt on Keats’s early published work (see headnote); cp. his draft letter to William Gifford, editor of the Quarterly Review: ‘the canons of taste to which Keats has conformed in his other compositions are the very reverse of my own’ (L ii 253). Pref. 5–6. I consider the fragment of Hyperion . . . writer of the same years] Cp. S.’s draft letter to William Gifford: ‘allow me to solicit your especial attention to the fragment of a poem entitled Hyperion . . . this piece is surely in the very highest style of poetry’ (L ii 252–3); this passage also demonstrates that S. believed that Keats had left Hyperion unfinished because of the effect of the Quarterly’s review:

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John Keats died at Rome of a consumption, in his twenty-fourth year, on the — of — 1821; and was buried in the romantic and lonely cemetery of the protestants in that city, under the pyramid which is the tomb of Cestius, and the massy walls and towers, now mouldering and desolate, which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place. The genius of the lamented person to whose memory I  have dedicated these unworthy verses, was not less delicate and fragile than it was beautiful; and where canker-worms abound, what wonder, if its young flower was blighted in the bud? The savage criticism on his Endymion, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced the most violent effect on his susceptible ‘the composition of [Hyperion] was checked by the Review in question’ (L ii 252). See headnote for S.’s high opinion of Hyperion, which he first read in October 1820; there are frequent allusions to the poem in Adonais (see notes). Pref. 7. John Keats died . . . in his twenty-fourth year] Keats was born on 31 October 1795, and was in his twenty-sixth year when he died on 23 February 1821. As Adonais (1903) notes, S.’s mistake in assuming Keats to be two years younger than he was may explain his statement in the preceding paragraph that Hyperion was ‘second to nothing that was ever produced by a writer of the same years’. Keats’s letter to S. of August 1820 had explained that some of his poems had been written ‘above two years’ earlier (Keats L ii 323), and S. may consequently have inferred that if Hyperion was one such earlier poem, then Keats would have written it at about the age of twenty. S.’s friend John Gisborne apparently believed that all Keats’s poetry had been written before he was twenty; see Elizabeth Nitchie, The Reverend Colonel Finch (1940) 86. Keats] 1829, 1839; Keats, Adonais (1821), Adonais (1829). Rome] Rome, 1839. Pref. 7. on the — of — 1821] S. was probably unaware of the precise details of Keats’s death when he wrote the Preface. In 1840 Mary for some reason mistakenly replaced these words and dashes with ‘on the 27th of December, 1820’. Pref. 8. the romantic and lonely cemetery of the protestants] See note to l. 439. Pref. 8–9. the pyramid which is the tomb of Cestius] See note to ll. 444–6. Pref. 11. ruins,] Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839; ruins Adonais (1821). Pref. 11–12. It might make one in love with death] A compliment to ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ ll. 51–4: Darkling I listen; and, for many a time   I have been half in love with easeful Death, Called him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,   To take into the air my quiet breath Pref. 15. its young flower was blighted in the bud] Cp. S.’s letter to Byron of 4 May 1821, speaking of Keats’s vulnerability to criticism: ‘Some plants, which require delicacy in rearing, might bring forth beautiful flowers if ever they should arrive at maturity’ (L ii 289). its] it’s Adonais (1821); cp. stanza xliii and notes, and see headnote. Pref. 15–16. The savage criticism on his Endymion, which appeared in the Quarterly Review] Keats’s Endymion was reviewed in the Quarterly Review xix (April 1818; this issue did not actually appear until October) 204–8; the review was by John Wilson Croker, although S. was evidently convinced that Robert Southey was the author; see headnote. It is important to note that neither in the Preface nor the poem itself does S. directly invoke the specifically political motivation for the attacks on Keats. His drafts for the Preface show that he at first considered a more focused and targeted engagement with the party-dominated character of the literary culture: Mr Keats was the known intimate of [Hunt canc.] Leigh Hunt & Mr Hazl[?] and other enemies of despotism & — superstition. The Quarterly Review has     , The multitude of them are indeed a sorry [?born] [?sort] of people pandering to the passions & prejudices either of the public or of a party. (Nbk 20 f. 1r; see BSM vii 134–5)

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mind; the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgements from more candid critics, of the true greatness of his powers, were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wantonly inflicted. It may be well said, that these wretched men know not what they do. They scatter their insults and their slanders without heed as to whether the poisoned shaft lights on a heart made callous by many blows, or one, like Keats’s composed of more penetrable stuff. One of their associates, is, to my knowledge, a most base and unprincipled calumniator. As to “Endymion”; was it a poem, whatever might be its defects, to be treated contemptuously by those who had celebrated with various degrees of complacency and panegyric, “Paris”,

The Preface in its published form scrupulously avoids personal names in referring to Keats’s reviewers, and deals in abstract ideas of malice and slander rather than any specific local political or religious context for the attacks on Keats. S. is intent on establishing the timeless stature of Keats as a poet. Pref. 18–19. the agitation thus originated . . . a rapid consumption ensued] See S.’s letter to Byron of 17 April 1821: ‘Young Keats, whose “Hyperion” showed so great a promise, died lately at Rome from the consequences of breaking a blood-vessel, in paroxysms of despair at the contemptuous attack on his book in the Quarterly Review’ (L ii 284). S.’s further letter to Byron of 4 May confirms that Hunt was his source for this story (L ii 289); see headnote. Pref. 19. succeeding acknowledgements from more candid critics] S. presumably refers here to the much more favourable review of Endymion and the Lamia volume by Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review xxxiv (August 1820) 203–13. candid] In the sense of ‘free from malice; not desirous to find faults’ (Johnson) — see OED 4. Pref. 21. said,] said 1829. Pref. 21. these wretched men know not what they do] Cp. Luke xxiii 34: ‘Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do’. S.’s exchange of letters with Southey in the summer of 1820 lies behind the marked New Testament tone and allusions of the Preface. S.’s letter of 17 August 1820 speaks to Southey of ‘the wretched hireling who has so closely imitated your style as to deceive all but those who knew you into a belief that he was you’, and goes on: I confess your recommendation to adopt the system of ideas you call Christianity has little weight with me, whether you mean the popular superstition in all its articles, or some more refined theory with respect to those events and opinions which put an end to the graceful religion of the Greeks. To judge of the doctrines by their effects, one would think that this religion were called the religion of Christ and Charity, ut lucus a non lucendo [‘as the grove is so named from its not shining’, i.e. by a paradoxical derivation], when I consider the manner in which they seem to have transformed the disposition and understanding of you and men of the most amiable manners and the highest accomplishments, so that even when recommending Christianity you cannot forbear breathing out defiance, against the express words of Christ.  (L ii 230) Pref. 22. the poisoned shaft] See note to ll. 11–12. Pref. 22–3. a heart made callous by many blows] S. is probably thinking of himself here; cp. the draft letter to Gifford: ‘I am not in the habit of permitting myself to be disturbed by what is said or written of me’ (L ii 251). S.’s draft for the Preface in Nbk 20 f. 7r seems to confirm a personal reference in the heart made callous by many blows: [The shaft directed against canc.] [aimed, canc.] discharged The shaft which this Parthian shot [shot is written above directed canc.] landed [written above fell upon canc.] a [heart eased in canc] made callous by many blows: but poor Keats’s was composed of more penetrable stuff. —(See BSM vii 158–9)

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and “Woman”, and a “Syrian Tale”, and Mrs. Lefanu, and Mr. Barrett, and Mr. Howard Payne, and a long list of the illustrious obscure? Are these the men, who in their venal good nature, presumed to draw a parallel between the Rev. Mr. Milman and Lord Byron? What gnat did they strain at here, after having swallowed all those camels? Against what woman taken in adultery, dares the foremost of these literary prostitutes to cast his opprobrious stone? Miserable man! you, one of the meanest, have wantonly defaced one of the noblest specimens of the workmanship of God. Nor shall it be your excuse, that, murderer as you are, you have spoken daggers, but used none.

S.’s image of the critic as a Parthian implies the cowardly guile of the anonymous reviewing culture; Parthian archers were famed for their ability to fire arrows backwards while in real or feigned flight from the enemy. Keats’s] Keats’s, 1829, 1839. Pref. 23. more penetrable stuff] Cp. Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers 1049–50: ‘Our men in buckram shall have blows enough,/And feel they too are “penetrable stuff” ’. Byron’s reference is to Hamlet III iv 35–6: ‘And let me wring your heart, for so I shall/If it be made of penetrable stuff’. For discussion of S.’s reading in Byron in preparation for writing Adonais, see headnote, and note to ll. 244–52. Pref. 23–4. One of their associates . . . base and unprincipled calumniator] S. was initially convinced that Southey was responsible for the attacks on both himself and Keats in the Quarterly (see headnote); but the reference here, as also at the end of this paragraph in reference to the Miserable man . . . one of the meanest [to have] wantonly defaced one of the noblest specimens of the workmanship of God, is presumably to the Reverend Henry Hart Milman, as S. wrote to Ollier on 11 June  1821 ‘I have discovered that my calumniator in the Quarterly Review [i.e. in its review of L&C] was the Revd. Mr. Milman. — Priests & Eunuchs have their priviledge. — ’ (L ii 298–9). S. was still working on the Preface in early June. Neither Milman nor Southey is named at any point in the published poem or its Preface: in part perhaps because of S.’s late decision, prompted by John Taaffe, to omit some particularly personal passages from the Preface (see headnote, and L ii 306); but also because it is part of the poem’s purpose to immortalise Keats while condemning his critical aggressor to oblivion as the noteless blot on a remembered name (l. 327). Milman’s son Archibald wrote to Lady Shelley on 1 August 1876 to reveal John Taylor Coleridge as the real author of the review (see L ii 299). Pref. 24. associates,] associates 1839. Pref. 24–8. As to “Endymion” . . . the illustrious obscure?] Cp. S.’s draft for this passage in Nbk 20 ff. 7r — 8r: Could the reviewers who found The Revd. Mr. Somebody’s ‘Paris’ sublime, because it flattered their masters, & who [?wrote/?spoke] with complacence of Mr. Gally Knight’s Syrian Tale — because it was published at Murray’s, who almost equaled Mr. Milman’s drama of Jerusalem, a mere well-written imitation of Southey, to the everlasting poetry of Lord Byron could they — who talk with patience of such drivelling as ‘Brutus’ & ‘Evadne’, find nothing to commend in the Endymion?  (Lightly edited; cp. BSM vii 158–63) For ‘Brutus’ see note later; ‘Evadne’ is Richard Shiel, Evadne, published by Murray (4th edn 1819) and reviewed in the Quarterly xxii (January 1820) together with Payne’s Brutus. Croly’s Paris and Milman’s Fall of Jerusalem (see notes) were both also published by Murray, who had refused S.’s own Alastor.

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The circumstances of the closing scene of poor Keats’s life were not made known to me until the Elegy was ready for the press. I am given to understand that the wound which his sensitive spirit had received from the criticism of Endymion, was exasperated by the bitter sense of unrequited benefits; the poor fellow seems to have been hooted from the stage of life, no less by those on whom he had wasted the promise of his genius, than those on whom

Pref. 25. “Endymion”;] “Endymion” Adonais (1821), 1829, 1839; “Endymion;” Adonais (1829). Pref. 25. its] Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839; it’s Adonais (1821). Pref. 26. complacency] pleasure. “Paris”] Paris in 1815: A Poem, by George Croly, was published anonymously in 1817 and reviewed favourably in the Quarterly Review xvii (April 1817) 218–29 as ‘the work of a powerful and poetic imagination’; the review stresses throughout the impeccable reactionary credentials of the author — ‘The bias of the author’s mind, both in religion and politics, is strongly adverse to the revolution and the revolutionists’ (218) — and is at pains to excuse all of the numerous faults identified in the poem. Croly was the author of the vitriolic review of Adonais in the Literary Gazette December 1821; see headnote. Pref. 27. “Woman”] Woman: A Poem, by Eaton Stannard Barrett, was published in 1810, and reviewed in a later edition in the Quarterly Review xix (April 1818) 246–50, soon after Croker’s review of Endymion in the same number. The review enters some reservations, but concludes ‘On the whole, however, Mr. Barrett has evinced both talent and genius in his little poem, and sustained a flight far above the common level’ (250). a “Syrian Tale”] Ilderim: A Syrian Tale by Henry Gally Knight was published in 1816 and announced as a ‘New Publication’ in the Quarterly Review xv (April 1816) 296; S. may have noticed this as his time at Eton overlapped for one year with Knight, who left in 1805. Knight’s Syrian Tale was included in the second edn of his Eastern Sketches in Verse published by Murray (cp. S.’s draft for the Preface quoted earlier) in 1819, and reviewed supportively in the Quarterly xxii (July 1819) 149–58. Knight was well known to Byron who frequently ridiculed his attempts in verse; see e.g. Byron L&J vi 3, 27–8, vii 132–3, 168–9 and 183; but, strangely enough, it was Byron who originally recommended to Knight that he approach Murray as a publisher (Byron L&J xi 183). Pref. 27–8. and Mrs. Lefanu, and Mr. Barrett, and Mr. Howard Payne] Omitted in 1829 (and 1834) presumably because in 1825 Payne had conceived an (unrequited) passion for Mary; see Emily W. Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (1989) 266–8. The passage is reinstated in 1839. Mrs. Lefanu] Presumably Alicia Lefanu (1791 — c. 1844), who was a member of a leading Irish literary family and a relative of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She published novels such as Helen Monteagle (1818), announced as a ‘New Publication’ in the Quarterly xviii (October 1817) 256, and Leoline Abbey (1819), announced in the same issue of the Quarterly xxi (April 1819) that included the destructive review of L&C and RofI. Mr. Barrett] The author of Woman;. Mr. Howard Payne] John Howard Payne was an American actor and debt-laden literary and dramatic hack, now chiefly remembered as the composer of the song ‘Home, Sweet Home’. His Brutus, or the Fall of Tarquin, an Historical Tragedy (1818) enjoyed a successful run in London beginning in December  1818 (launching the career of Edmund Kean) and was thereafter well-established in the theatrical repertoire for some fifty years. The play was reviewed (harshly) together with Shiel’s Evadne in the Quarterly xxii (January 1820) 402–15. Pref. 28. the illustrious obscure] S.’s phrase seems to have been a commonplace expression at the time; e.g. Hazlitt uses it in his review of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria in the Edinburgh Review in 1817, and elsewhere (see Hazlitt Works vii 116, xvi 123). S. here perhaps specifically echoes Leigh Hunt’s note to his defence of L&C (Examiner 613 (26 September 1819) 620–1) against the Quarterly’s attack: ‘We recommend this to the criticism of that illustrious obscure, Dean Ireland, whom Mr. Gifford, in the very midst of his rage against “pretensions” of all sorts, is continually thrusting before the public, and nobody will attend to’. Pref. 28. men, who] men who, 1839.

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40 he had lavished his fortune and his care. He was accompanied to Rome, and attended in his last illness by Mr. Severn, a young artist of the highest promise, who, I have been informed “almost risked his own life, and sacrificed every prospect to unwearied attendance upon his dying friend.” Had I known these circumstances before the completion of my poem, Pref. 29. a parallel between the Rev. Mr. Milman and Lord Byron] Milman’s Fall of Jerusalem: A Dramatic Poem was published in 1820, and was reviewed in the Quarterly xxiii (May 1820) 198–225 (this issue was not published until August) by Reginald Heber. His review includes a brief gratuitous swipe at ‘Mr. Shelley’, who, alone amongst poets ‘since the days of Titus Andronicus .  .  . has expected to afford mankind delight by a fac-simile of unmingled wickedness and horror’ (201–2). The Quarterly xv (April 1816) 69–85 had allowed generous space to praise the promise of Milman’s Fazio, and much more space in discussing in startling detail his Samor (Quarterly xix (July  1818) 328–47; this issue was published in February  1819). Heber’s review of The Fall of Jerusalem concludes with a passage that, after recalling the Quarterly’s previous championing of these works, asserts that Remarkably as Britain is now distinguished by its living poetical talent, our time has room for him [Milman]; and has need of him. For sacred poetry, (a walk which Milton alone has hitherto successfully trodden,) his taste, his peculiar talents, his education, and his profession appear alike to designate him; and while, by a strange predilection for the worser half of manicheism, one of the mightiest spirits of the age [an obvious reference to Byron] has, apparently, devoted himself and his genius to the adornment and extension of evil, we may be well exhilarated by the accession of a new and potent ally to the cause of human virtue and happiness, whose example may furnish an additional evidence that purity and weakness are not synonymous, and that the torch of genius never burns so bright as when duly kindled at the Altar. (225) Byron refers to this attack on himself in his Letter to John Murray (1821); see Byron Prose 153. Milman was a contemporary of S. at both Eton (like Knight) and Oxford (where his brilliant academic career, in sharp contrast with S.’s expulsion, had already won him a Fellowship at Brasenose); his presence in the Preface is perhaps further explained by S.’s letter to Ollier of 11 June 1821 (quoted earlier) which characterises him as a ‘Eunuch’, i.e. presumably one incapable of producing true poetry. Pref. 29–30. What gnat did they strain at here, after having swallowed all those camels?] Cp. Matthew xxiii 24: ‘Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel’. Pref. 30–32. Against what woman taken in adultery, dares the foremost of these literary prostitutes to cast his opprobrious stone?] Cp. John viii 3–7: And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. Pref. 31. adultery,] adultery 1839. Pref. 33–4. you have spoken daggers, but used none] Cp. Hamlet III ii 396: ‘I will speak daggers to her, but use none’. Pref. 35–6. The circumstances . . . ready for the press] ‘[Adonais] was written before I could obtain any particular account of his last moments; all that I still know was communicated to me by a friend who had derived his information from Colonel Finch’ (S. to Severn, 29 November 1821; L ii 366). On 16 June 1821 S. and Mary received ‘the heart rending account of the closing scene of the great genius whom envy & ingratitude scourged out of the world’ in a letter from John Gisborne of 13 June, enclosing a letter to Gisborne from his friend Colonel Robert Finch (who had been in Rome at the time of

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I should have been tempted to add my feeble tribute of applause to the more solid recompense which the virtuous man finds in the recollection of his own motives. Mr. Severn can dispense with a reward from “such stuff as dreams are made of.” His conduct is a golden augury of the success of his future career — may the unextinguished Spirit of his illustrious friend animate the creations of his pencil, and plead against Oblivion for his name!

Keats’s death, and whose information is presumably directly from Severn; see Nitchie, The Reverend Colonel Finch 12–13, 51) which gives an account of Keats’s last journey and final weeks in Rome, including the role played by Joseph Severn in caring for the dying poet (L ii 299–300, where the whole of Finch’s letter is given in a footnote). Pref. 39–40. those on whom he had lavished his fortune and his care] Finch’s letter says that Keats had been ‘infamously treated by the very persons whom his generosity had rescued from want and woe’ (L ii 300); Finch perhaps heard from Severn of the belief of some of Keats’s friends, such as Charles Brown, that his sufferings had been increased by the failure of Benjamin Robert Haydon to repay loans, and by what were considered George Keats’s mercenary dealings with his brother. Pref. 41. Mr. Severn] Joseph Severn (1793–1879) was the young artist and friend of Keats who accompanied him on his last journey to Italy, and nursed him through his final weeks in Rome. He subsequently pursued a moderately successful career as a painter, and was also British Consul in Rome in later life. He is buried next to Keats in the Protestant Cemetery. The few months of his close association with Keats brought him lasting fame, not least because of S.’s tribute in the Preface, but some of Keats’s friends felt that Severn traded too overtly on his role in Keats’s life and death; see e.g. the acerbic letter from Isabella Jones to John Taylor, Joseph Severn: Letters and Memoirs, ed. Grant F. Scott (2005) 10, 149–51. Pref. 41. informed] informed, 1839. Pref. 42–3. “almost risked his own life . . . dying friend.”] S. quotes from Finch’s letter; see L ii 300. Pref. 42. prospect] prospect, 1839. Pref. 43. Had I known these circumstances] See note to l. 307. Pref. 46. “such stuff as dreams are made of.”] Cp. The Tempest IV i 156–8: We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

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ADONAIS I. I weep for Adonais — he is dead! O, weep for Adonais! though our tears Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head! And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years 5 To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,

1–2. Cp. the formulaic opening of Bion, Lament for Adonis ll. 1–2: Αἰάζω τὸν Ἄδωνιν, ‘ἀπώλετο καλὸς Ἄδωνις’˙ ‘ὤλετο καλὸς Ἄδωνις’, ἐπαιά­ζουσιν Ἔρωτες. (‘ “Woe for Adonis”, I cry; “the fair Adonis is dead.” “Woe”, in answer cry the Loves; “the fair Adonis is dead.” ’) and Moschus, Lament for Bion ll. 1–2: Αἴλινά μοι στοναχεῖτε νάπαι καὶ Δώριον ὕδωρ, καὶ ποταμοὶ κλαίοιτε τὸν ἱμερόεντα Βίωνα. (‘Wail sorrowfully, ye glades and waters of the Dorians; weep, rivers, for our beloved Bion.’) S.’s adaptation is repeated with variants in stanzas iii, iv, v, vi and ix. S.’s opening and its recurring refrain also recalls Virgil, Eclogues x 1–3: Extremum hunc, Arethusa, mihi concede laborem: pauca meo Gallo, sed quae legat ipsa Lycoris, carmina sunt dicenda: neget quis carmina Gallo? (‘My last task is this — vouchsafe me it, Arethusa! A few verses I must sing for my Gallus, yet such as Lycoris herself may read! Who would refuse verses to Gallus?’) and Milton’s echo of this in Lycidas ll. 8–14: For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer: Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme. He must not float upon his watery bier Unwept, and welter to the parching wind, Without the meed of some melodious tear. 3. so dear a head] A classical formulation; cp. e.g. Horace, Odes I xxiv 2: ‘tam cari capitis’, and also Lycidas 102: ‘that sacred head of thine’. 4–9. The poem’s speaker urges the specific temporal moment of Keats’s death (sad Hour) to communicate with the rest of time (thy obscure compeers: ‘fellow-Hours not honoured by selection’ (GM)) so that Adonais may become immortal as a presence in all time. For S.’s use of Hour in the conventional sense of ‘specific moment in time’ (rather than in the Gk sense as one of the Spirits of the Seasons), see e.g. PU III iii 69, Hellas 902–3.

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And teach them thine own sorrow, say: with me Died Adonais; till the Future dares Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity!

II. 10 Where wert thou, mighty Mother, when he lay, When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies In darkness? where was lorn Urania

6. sorrow, say:] sorrow; say — Adonais (1829), 1829; sorrow; say: 1839. 7. Adonais;] Adonais; — Adonais (1829), 1839; Adonais! — 1829. 10. Cp. Lycidas 50–1: ‘Where were ye nymphs when the remorseless deep/Closed o’er the head of your loved Lycidas?’. The formula goes back to Theocritus, Idyll i 66ff.; cp. also Virgil, Eclogues x 9–10: ‘Quae nemora aut qui uos saltus habuere, puellae/Naïdes, indigno cum Gallus amore peribat?’ (‘What groves, what glades were your abode, you virgin Naiads, when Gallus was pining with unrequited love?’), and Spenser, Astrophel 127–32: Ah where were ye this while his shepheard peares, To whom aliue was nought so deare as hee: And ye faire Mayds the matches of his yeares, Which in his grace did boast you most to bee? Ah where were ye, when he of you had need, To stop his wound that wondrously did bleed? thou,] 1839; thou Adonais (1821), Adonais (1829), 1829. mighty Mother] Urania; see headnote. 11–12. the shaft which flies/In darkness] I.e. the anonymous criticism in the Quarterly Review (see headnote); cp. Psalms xci 5–6: ‘Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday’, and Bacon, Essays iv ‘Of Revenge’: ‘Base and Crafty Cowards, are like the Arrow, that flyeth in the Darke’. See also Ginevra (Longman iv 203–20, no. 398) 214–15. Adonais offers various causes of the death of its hero: here it is a wound inflicted by an arrow, a fate apparently borne out by ll. 151–2, the curse of Cain/Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast, and by the mention of a wound at l. 193; in stanza xxvii, however, the hero seems to have been killed in his unwary confrontation with the unpastured dragon; but at l. 316 we learn that Adonais has drunk poison. But the passage in which that phrase occurs is a direct borrowing from the lines in Moschus which supply the epigraph to the Preface, and S. throughout the poem is clearly drawing variously on his principal classical models, and deploying their material in metaphorical terms. 12. lorn] ‘Abandoned, left alone’ OED 2. Urania] See headnote. Milton invokes Urania as his muse (Paradise Lost vii 1–12; cp. Purgatorio xxix 40–2). Cp S.’s letter to Peacock of 15 February 1821, confirming receipt of The Four Ages of Poetry, and indicating his intention to compose a reply (DP): ‘I had the greatest possible desire to break a lance with you, within the lists of a magazine, in honour of my mistress Urania’ (L ii 261).

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When Adonais died? With veiled eyes, ’Mid listening Echoes, in her Paradise 15 She sate, while one, with soft enamoured breath, Rekindled all the fading melodies, With which, like flowers that mock the corse beneath, He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of death.

III. O, weep for Adonais — he is dead! 20 Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep! Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep Like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep; For he is gone, where all things wise and fair 25 Descend; — oh, dream not that the amorous Deep 13. veiled eyes] I.e. ‘downward-lidded’ (GM). 14. Paradise] In the sense of ‘park’ or ‘pleasure-garden’; cp. ‘E. K.”s gloss on ‘Ivne’ in Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender: ‘A Paradise in Greeke signifieth a Garden of pleasure, or place of delights’. 15–18. Urania and the Echoes listen entranced as one Echo (the one of l. 15) recites Keats’s poems (the fading melodies). Cp. Moschus, Lament for Bion ll. 52–4: τίς δ’ ἐπὶ σοῖς καλάμοις θήσει στόμα; τίς θρασὺς οὕτως; εἰσέτι γὰρ πνείει τὰ σὰ χείλεα καί τὸ σὸν ἄσθμα, ἀχὼ δ’ ἐν δονάκεσσι τεᾶς ἔτι βόσκετ’ ἀοιδᾶς. (‘Who will set his mouth to thy flutes? Who be so bold? Thy lips, thy breath, live in them yet; those reeds still cherish the echo of thy minstrelsy.’) 16. fading melodies] Cp. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ l. 75: ‘thy plaintive anthem fades’ (see headnote, discussion of Adonais as title). 20–3. Cp. Hyperion i 52–69: Saturn, look up! — though wherefore, poor old King? . . . Saturn, sleep on — O thoughtless, why did I Thus violate thy slumbrous solitude? 21. Yet wherefore?] I.e. ‘but what is the point?’. 22. Cp. Bion, Lament for Adonis ll. 3–5: μηκέτι πορφυρέοις ἐνὶ φάρεσι Κύπρι κάθευδε˙ ἔγρεο, δειλαία, κυανόστολα καὶ πλατάγησον στήθεα καὶ λέγε πᾶσιν, ‘ἀπώλετο καλὸς Ἄδωνις’. (‘Sleep no more in thy purple coverlets, O Cyprian. Rouse thee, unhappy one; don sable robes, and beat thy breasts, and say to all men, “The fair Adonis is dead.” ’) keep] keep, 1829, 1839. 24–5. Cp. Venus’s complaint in Bion, Lament for Adonis 54–5: λάμβανε, Περσεφόνα, τὸν ἐμὸν πόσιν˙ ἐσσὶ γὰρ αὐτά πολλὸν έμεῦ κρέσσων, τὸ δὲ πᾶν καλὸν ἐς σὲ καταρρεῖ. (‘Take thou my husband, Persephone, for thou art mightier far than I, and all that is fair comes down to thee.’) 25–6. ‘As fertility god Adonis returns to the upper air in summer, and during winter sleeps in the underworld with Persephone, who, falling in love with him, at first refused to let him go. But Adonais is not going to be revived’ (Butter (1970)).

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Will yet restore him to the vital air; Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair.

IV. Most musical of mourners, weep again! Lament anew, Urania! — He died,

25. Descend; —] Descend: — 1829, 1839. the amorous Deep] I.e. it too is in love with Adonais. Cp. Romeo and Juliet V iii 102–5: Shall I believe That unsubstantial Death is amorous, And that the lean abhorred monster keeps Thee here in dark to be his paramour? 28–54. These three stanzas, which adumbrate victims of reaction and mortality, are modelled on Moschus, Lament for Bion ll. 70–84: τοῦτό τοι, ὦ ποταμῶν λιγυρώτατε, δεύτερον ἄλγος, τοῦτο, Μέλη, νέον ἄλγος, ἀπώλετο πρᾶν τοι Ὅμηρος, τῆνο τὸ Καλλιόπας γλυκερὸν στόμα, καί σε λέγοντι μύρασθαι καλὸν υἷα πολυκλαύτοισι ῥεέθροις, πᾶσαν δ’ ἔπλησας φωνᾶς ἅλα˙ νῦν πάλιν ἄλλον υἱέα δακρύεις καινῷ δ’ ἐπὶ πένθεϊ τάκῃ. ἀμφότεροι παγαῖς πεφιλημένοι˙ ὃς μὲν ἔπινε ΙΙαγασίδος κράνας, ὃ δ’ ἔχεν πόμα τᾶς Ἀρεθοίσας. χὢ μὲν Τυνδαρέοιο καλὰν ἄεισε θύγατρα καὶ Θέτιδος μέγαν υἷα καὶ Ἀτρεΐδαν Μενέλαον, κεῖνος δ’ οὐ πολέμους, οὐ δάκρυα, Πᾶνα δ’ ἔμελπε καὶ βούτας ἐλίγαινε καὶ ἀείδων ἐνόμευε καὶ σύριγγας ἔτευχε καὶ ἁδέα πόρτιν ἄμελγε καὶ παίδων ἐδίδασκε φιλήματα καὶ τὸν Ἔρωτα ἔτρεφεν ἐν κόλποισι καὶ ἤρεθε τὰν Ἀφροδίταν. (‘Here is for thee, most musical of rivers, a second sorrow, here a new sorrow, Meles. Of old died Homer, that sweet mouthpiece of Calliope, and with tear-filled streams didst thou, men say, lament thy fair son, and with thy voice didst fill the whole sea. Now for another son again thou weepest, and wastest with a new grief. Both to the springs were dear, he who drank from the fount of Pegasus and he whose draught was from Arethusa. One sang the fair daughter of Tyndareüs, Thetis’ great son, and Menelaus, son of Atreus. The other’s strains were not of wars or tears but of Pan; as a neatherd he made music, and tended his cattle as he sang. Panpipes he fashioned, and milked the sweet heifer, taught the kisses of boys, fostered love in his bosom, and challenged Aphrodite.’) Stanza iv is headed ‘1 Spirit of the 18 Cent.’ in Nbk 15 p. 25 (see BSM xiv 30–1), with the following partly drafted stanza (not used in the published poem) headed ‘2d. Spirit of ’; presumably these two stanzas were originally conceived as part of the sequence of stanzas, mostly not used in the final poem but adapted to stanzas xxx–xxxiv, in which Adonais is mourned by a range of past and present poets from the English tradition. See notes to stanza v, and Unused stanzas for Adonais (Longman iv 331–45, 403 Appendix). 28–9. Urania is urged to grieve not just for Keats but for Milton (the He of He died . . . Blind, old, and lonely) before him. 28. Cp. Milton, Il Penseroso ll. 61–2: ‘Sweet bird that shunn’st the noise of folly,/Most musical, most melancholy!’. 29. Urania] great Poesy Nbk 15 (twice; BSM xiv 30–1); see headnote.

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30 Who was the Sire of an immortal strain, Blind, old, and lonely, when his country’s pride The priest, the slave, and the liberticide Trampled and mocked with many a loathed rite Of lust and blood; he went, unterrified, 35 Into the gulf of death; but his clear Sprite Yet reigns o’er earth; the third among the sons of light.

30. strain] A pun: both ‘song’ and ‘progeny’; i.e. Milton fathered both his own poetry, and also his successors in the poetic tradition, including Keats and his Miltonic Hyperion. 31–4. A grammatical inversion: ‘priest, slave and liberticide . . . trampled and mocked . . . his country’s pride’. ‘Milton died in 1674 amid the triumphs of all [King and State religion] he had fought against’ (GM). S.’s phrasing suggests a parallel between the reign of Charles II and his view of England under the Regency (cp. England in 1819, and OL 147–50 and note). 31. pride] 1839; pride, Adonais (1821), Adonais (1829), 1829, Knerr. 32. priest] S. resisted John Taaffe’s suggestion that it would be prudent to omit this word (L ii 306); see headnote. liberticide] liberticide, Adonais (1821), Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839, Knerr (the commas in ll. 31–2 in Adonais (1821) allow an ambiguity clearly contrary to the sense, and are not present in the draft, admittedly itself hardly punctuated, in Nbk 15). Liberticide, in the sense of ‘destroyer of liberty’, is also found in Mazenghi (Longman ii 352–60, no. 166) 30. This word was adopted from the French in the 1780s (see OED). 35. gulf] Spelt thus in Adonais (1821), and only Adonais (1829) of the early eds reads gulph, although this is odd as S. virtually always uses that spelling, including in the draft for this line in Nbk 15 (see BSM xiv 30–1); a possible indication that the press copy was transcribed by Mary (or at least not by S.; see headnote). his clear Sprite] The phrasing is Miltonic (Lycidas 70: ‘Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise’), the diction Spenserian (e.g. Hymne of Heavenly Beavtie l. 8: ‘most almightie Spright’). Sprite] sprite Adonais (1829), 1829. 36. the third] I.e. Milton is the third epic poet, after Homer and Dante; cp. DP: Homer was the first, and Dante the second epic poet: that is, the second poet the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge, and sentiment, and religion, and political conditions of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it, developing itself in correspondence with their development . . . Milton was the third Epic Poet.  (Reiman (2002) para. 28) In Nbk 15 S. first wrote tenth, which is canc. with third, also canc., written above. There is a note presumably referring to this line written across the bottom of pp. 24–5 of Nbk 15 (BSM xiv 30–1), on which this stanza is drafted, which reads: ‘It were difficult to assign any order of precedence except that founded on Time — Thence why, the S. [presumably short for Spirit, as noted in BSM xiv 31 n.] excludes [Ana] Virgil Petrarch Hom. [Sop.] Aesch. Dant. [Pet.] [Virgil] Lucretius, Shaks. Calderon Milton’.

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V. Most musical of mourners, weep anew! Not all to that bright station dared to climb; And happier they their happiness who knew, 40 Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time In which suns perished; others more sublime,

37–45. The position of this stanza in Nbk 20 suggests that it may have been composed as a relatively late addition, and it was perhaps its inclusion that throws out S.’s numbering in Nbk 15 (see headnote, and BSM vii 99). 37–8. Urania is now urged to mourn other dead poets, whose achievement falls short of Milton’s. 38. station] position. 39–43. ‘Minor poets whose work survives might well have counted themselves lucky compared with major poets whose writings have been destroyed’ (GM). Cp. Keats, ‘To George Felton Mathew’ ll. 59–65: With reverence would we speak of all the sages Who have left streaks of light athwart their ages: And thou shouldst moralize on Milton’s blindness, And mourn the fearful dearth of human kindness To those who strove with the bright golden wing Of genius, to flap away each sting Thrown by the pitiless world. 39. This line adapts a classical formula ubiquitous in the English poetic tradition. Cp. Virgil, Georgics ii 458–9: ‘O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint,/agricolas!’ (‘O farmers, happy beyond measure, could they but know their blessings!’), and e.g. Milton, Paradise Lost vii 631–2: ‘thrice happy if they know/Their happiness’; Dryden’s translation: ‘O happy, if he knew his happy state,/The swain who, free from business and debate/Receives his easy food from nature’s hand’; Thomson, Autumn 1235–6: ‘knew he but his happiness, of men/The happiest he’. 40. Bearing in mind the MS reference to spirits of the eighteenth century (see note to ll. 28–54) S.’s tapers perhaps refers here to such writers as Cowper, Goldsmith, and Beattie. 41–3. others more sublime . . . Have sunk] Poets struck down by man (e.g. Chatterton) or God (e.g. Collins, Smart, Kirke White). 41. suns perished] Major writers whose works are entirely or mainly lost; cp. DP: ‘Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius, all great poets, have been lost’ (Reiman (2002) para. 21). Cp. Ecclesiasticus xliv 9: ‘And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them’.

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Struck by the envious wrath of man or God, Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime; And some yet live, treading the thorny road, 45 Which leads, through toil and hate, to Fame’s serene abode.

VI. But now, thy youngest, dearest one, has perished, The nursling of thy widowhood, who grew, Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished, And fed with true love tears, instead of dew;

43. refulgent prime] ‘Full powers’ (GM). 44. some yet live] S.’s living contemporary poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and perhaps S. himself. 46–9. ‘Urania, widowed after Milton’s death, wept over the head of Keats [thy youngest, dearest one] who even during his life had been martyred by the reviewers’ (GM). I.e. Milton is the father, and Urania as the English poetic tradition is the mother of Keats, most recent and best-loved offspring of that tradition. 46. perished,] Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839; perished Adonais (1821). 48–9. A reference to Venus in the source-myth, who grieved over the anemones that sprang from the fallen blood of Adonis; but also ‘a precise compliment to Keats: Urania’s grief over Adonais is like Isabella’s over her “pot of basil” ’ (GM); cp. ‘Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil’ ll. 409–32: Then in a silken scarf — sweet with the dews   Of precious flowers plucked in Araby, And divine liquids come with odorous ooze   Through the cold serpent-pipe refreshfully — She wrapped it up; and for its tomb did choose   A garden-pot, wherein she laid it by, And covered it with mould, and o’er it set Sweet basil, which her tears kept ever wet. And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,   And she forgot the blue above the trees, And she forgot the dells where waters run,   And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze; She had no knowledge when the day was done,   And the new morn she saw not, but in peace Hung over her sweet basil evermore, And moistened it with tears unto the core. And so she ever fed it with thin tears,   Whence thick, and green, and beautiful it grew, So that it smelt more balmy than its peers   Of basil-tufts in Florence; for it drew Nurture besides, and life, from human fears,   From the fast mouldering head there shut from view: So that the jewel, safely casketed, Came forth, and in perfumèd leafits spread.

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50 Most musical of mourners, weep anew! Thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last, The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste; The broken lily lies — the storm is overpast.

Cp. also Richard II V i 7–10: But soft, but see, or rather do not see, My fair rose wither; yet look up, behold, That you in pity may dissolve to dew And wash him fresh again with true-love tears. 49. true love] true-love Adonais (1829), 1829. 51–3. Cp. Spenser, ‘Dolefull Lay of Clorinda’ ll. 31–4: What cruell hand of cursed foe vnknowne, Hath cropt the stalke which bore so faire a flowre? Vntimely cropt, before it well were growne, And cleane defaced in vntimely howre. Also Daphnaïda ll. 237–45: O that so faire a flowre so soone should fade, And through vntimely tempest fall away. She fell away in her first ages spring, Whil’st yet her leafe was greene, and fresh her rinde, And whil’st her braunch faire blossomes foorth did bring, She fell away against all course of kinde: For age to dye is right, but youth is wrong; She fell away like fruit blowne downe with winde: Weepe Shepheard weepe to make my vndersong. There may also be a reminiscence of the opening line of Milton’s ‘On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough’: ‘O fairest flower no sooner blown but blasted’; and cp. Pope, An Essay on Criticism 498–9: ‘Like some fair flower the early spring supplies,/That gaily blooms, but even in blooming dies’. 51. extreme] ‘Latest of all’ (GM). 52. blew] I.e. bloomed. 54. ‘The storm has now passed, but the flower is dead’ (GM).

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55 To that high Capital, where kingly Death Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay, He came; and bought, with price of purest breath, A grave among the eternal. — Come away! Haste, while the vault of blue Italian day 60 Is yet his fitting charnel-roof! while still He lies, as if in dewy sleep he lay; Awake him not! surely he takes his fill Of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill.

VIII. 65 He will awake no more, oh, never more! — Within the twilight chamber spreads apace The shadow of white Death, and at the door 55–126. Adonais (1903) 106 points out that in stanzas vii–xiv ‘a progression of time is indicated by successive epithets and phrases: —blue Italian day — the twilight chamber — her moonlight wings — starry dew — the image at the end of stanza 12 — Morning sought her eastern watch-tower’. The poem’s time-scheme is however more complex and sustained: it is blue Italian day at l. 59, but the shadow of white Death . . . spreads apace . . . Within the twilight chamber at ll. 65–6, and throughout this evening of the first day the dead Adonais is mourned by his own poems and imaginings, to l. 120. At this point Morning sought/Her eastern watchtower, heralding the rainy dawn of a second day (stanza xiv). In the course of this morning of the second day, Adonais is mourned by Echo, and then the young Spring, before Urania is urged by Misery to journey to Adonais (stanzas xxiii–xxiv) in his death chamber (l. 217). Her words to the dead poet (ll. 222–61) are followed by the procession of mourning English poets (stanzas xxx–xxxv). The poem then moves to a second young Dawn at l. 362, in a stanza (xli) which formally counters previous signs of dispirited mourning. For an interesting discussion of the poem’s time-scheme, see Christopher R. Miller, The Invention of Evening (2006) 130–44. 55–6. Cp. Richard II III ii 160–2:         within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps Death his court 55. that high Capital] Rome; the poem does not return to address the Roman setting specifically until stanzas xlviii–lii. 58. A  grave among the eternal] Cp. S.’s letter to Peacock of 17 or 18 December  1818 describing his first impressions of Rome: ‘Rome is a city as it were of the dead, or rather of those who cannot die,  & who survive the puny generations which inhabit  & pass over the spot which they have made sacred to eternity’ (L ii 59). Come away!] Addressed to imagined mourners, not to Urania. 59–60. Haste, . . . his fitting charnel-roof!] I.e. ‘Hurry, before he has to be buried’ (yet is in the sense ‘even yet; still’). 61. Cp. Bion, Lament for Adonis 71: καὶ νέκυς ὢν καλός ἐστι, καλὸς νέκυς, οἷα καθεύδων (‘Fair even in death is he, in death still fair, as though asleep’). as if in dewy sleep] I.e. his body is not yet beginning to corrupt; he still looks as if only asleep. 63. liquid] Lat. liquidus, ‘clear, transparent’, i.e. his rest is undisturbed; the metaphor is ‘he drinks deeply of liquid rest’. The Lat. also bears the senses ‘flowing’ and ‘peaceful’, possibly suggesting the relief provided by liquid opiates. 65. apace] Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839; apace, Adonais (1821), Knerr. 67. trace] I.e. ‘mark out the way for’.

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Invisible Corruption waits to trace His extreme way to her dim dwelling-place; The eternal Hunger sits, but pity and awe 70 Soothe her pale rage, nor dares she to deface So fair a prey, till darkness, and the law Of change, shall o’er his sleep the mortal curtain draw.

IX. O, weep for Adonais! — The quick Dreams, The passion-winged Ministers of thought,

68. His . . . her] The shadow of white Death is male, Invisible Corruption female. extreme way] Keats’s last journey. 69. The eternal Hunger] Decomposition (i.e. Invisible Corruption). 70–2. Invisible Corruption dares not touch his ‘sleep’ and begin the process of decomposition until time starts to pass within the darkness of the grave. 72. This line was evidently supplied to the Galignanis by Mary through her intermediary Cyrus Redding (see Mary L ii 86, and Taylor 19–22), as Adonais (1821) and Adonais (1829) read Of mortal change, shall fill the grave which is her maw. This major substantive change, together with those at l. 143 and l. 252 first introduced in 1839, must derive from clear evidence in Mary’s possession of changes made by S. himself (see headnote). 73–120. Stanzas ix–xiv characterise Keats’s poems (The quick Dreams) as mourners for the poetic intelligence which created them. The sequence as a whole recalls Keats’s description of the Cupids attendant upon Adonis in Endymion ii 418–27. Cp. Bion, Lament for Adonis 80–5: ἀμφὶ δέ νιν κλαίοντες ἀναστενάχουσιν Ἔρωτες κειράμενοι χαίτας ἐπ’ Ἀδώνιδι˙ χὢ μὲν ὀιστώς, ὃς δ’ ἐπὶ τόξον ἔβαλλεν, ὃ δὲ πτερόν, ὃς δὲ φαρέτραν˙ χὢ μὲν ἔλυσε πέδιλον Ἀδώνιδος, οἳ δὲ λέβητι χρυσείῳ φορέοισιν ὕδωρ, ὃ δὲ μηρία λούει, ὃς δ’ ὄπιθεν πτερύγεσσιν ἀναψύχει τὸν Ἄδωνιν. (‘and weeping Loves make moan about him, their locks shorn for Adonis. One cast on him his arrows, one his bow, one a feather from his wing, one his quiver. Here one has loosed Adonis’ sandal; these bring water in a golden ewer; another bathes his thighs; another from behind fans Adonis with his wings.’) Cp. also Moschus, Lament for Bion ll. 20–4: κεῖνος ὁ ταῖς ἀγέλαισιν ἐράσμιος οὐκέτι μέλπει, οὐκέτ’ ὲρημαίαισιν ὑπὸ δρυσὶν ἥμενος ᾄδει, ἀλλὰ παρὰ Πλουχῆι μέλος Ληθαῖον ἀείδει. ὤρεα δ’ ἐστίν ἄφωνα, καὶ αἱ βόες αἱ ποτὶ ταύροις πλαζόμεναι γοάοντι καὶ οὐκ ἐθέλοντι νέμεσθαι. (‘He whom the herds loved makes music no more: no more sits singing beneath solitary oaks, but chants in Pluteus’s halls the song of Lethe. No voice is there on the hills; the cows that wander by the bulls lament and will not graze.’) 74. Keats’s poems are vehicles of thought impelled by passion rather than cold reason; S. is perhaps thinking of the attack on Augustan formalism in ‘Sleep and Poetry’ ll. 181–206; cp. e.g. ll. 192–6:           beauty was awake! Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead

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75 Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught The love which was its music, wander not, Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain, But droop there, whence they sprung; and mourn their lot 80 Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain, They ne’er will gather strength, or find a home again.

X. And one with trembling hands clasps his cold head, And fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries; “Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead;

To things ye knew not of — were closely wed To musty laws lined out with wretched rule And compass vile 78–81. Keats’s poems are figured as withdrawing from circulation in a readership (from kindling brain to brain) to mourn their own and their creator’s fading condition. 80. sweet pain] A Keatsian oxymoron; cp. ‘Ode to Psyche’ l. 52: ‘branchèd thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain’. 81. or] nor 1839; as Taylor 36 demonstrates, this change derives from Mary’s use of 1834 as printer’s copy (see headnote). 82–90. The sense of the stanza is that this Dream (i.e. poem) actually turned into a tear, i.e. was never embodied in verse, but remains, following Keats’s death, an unrealised poem. 82. And one] For this formula cp. Endymion ii 420ff. hands] hand Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839. This is one of the three substantive changes in Adonais (1829) that carry right through to 1839 (see headnote). GM preferred hand, which avoids the clumsy repetition with clasps of the terminal s. Forman 1876–7, Rossetti 1878, Dowden 1891, Hutchinson, Webb (1995), Knerr, Reiman (2002) and Major Works read hands; Rossetti 1870, Woodberry 1893, and Butter (1970) read hand. 83. cries;] cries, 1829, 1839. 84–7. Cp. Spenser, Astrophel 187–92: And in the midst thereof a star appeares, As fairly formd as any star in skyes: Resembling Stella in her freshest yeares, Forth darting beames of beautie from her eyes, And all the day it standeth full of deow, Which is the teares, that from her eyes did flow. 84. Cp. Lycidas l. 166: ‘For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead’.

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85 See, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes, Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain.” Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise! She knew not ’twas her own; as with no stain 90 She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain.

XI. One from a lucid urn of starry dew Washed his light limbs as if embalming them; Another clipped her profuse locks, and threw The wreath upon him, like an anadem, 95 Which frozen tears instead of pearls begem; Another in her wilful grief would break

88–90. The She of l. 89 is the Lost Angel of l. 88 (i.e. the one with trembling hands of l. 82); the ruined Paradise is Adonais’s brain. Cp. Keats, ‘To one who has been long in city pent’ ll. 13–14: ‘E’en like the passage of an angel’s tear/That falls through the clear ether silently’. 88. Paradise!] Paradise 1829. See note to l. 14, and cp. Ode to Naples (Longman ii 625–48, no. 343) A l. 57. 89. not ’twas] not’t was 1829. as with no stain] I.e. leaving no trace; ‘she disappeared in the act of weeping’. 91–9. The details in this stanza are modelled closely on Bion, Lament for Adonis 78–85 (see note to ll. 73–120). The grieving lovelorn female figure may also be a veiled reference to Keats’s relationship with Fanny Brawne; there is no evidence that S. knew of the circumstances of the relationship, but he may well have had some information, perhaps from Hunt. 91. A compliment to Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. 92. limbs] limbs, Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839. 93–4. Cp. Spenser, Astrophel ll. 157–60: Her yellow locks that shone so bright and long, As Sunny beames in fairest somers day: She fiersly tore, and with outragious wrong From her red cheeks the roses rent away. Cp. also Euripides, Hippolytus ll. 1425–6:   κόραι γὰρ ἄζυγες γάμων πάρος κόμας κεροῦνταί σοι

(‘Unmarried girls before their marriage will cut their hair for you’) 94. The wreath] I.e. of hair. anadem] Gk. ἀνάδεμα, a headband. 95. begem] Decorate with gems. 96–9. ‘Another was ready to break her bow and arrows, as if to check the pain of a great loss by incurring a small loss; and was even ready to deaden the fire of love’s arrows against his cold face’ (GM). 96–7. S. may have seen pictures uncovered in the ruins of Pompeii which show Cupids breaking arrows and bows for grief at Venus and Adonis. S. and Mary could have seen such pictures in the Royal Museum in Naples, and they visited Pompeii on 22 December 1818 (Mary Jnl i 245); see S.’s letter to Peacock of 23–24 January 1819 describing the Pompeii visit (L ii 71–5). 96. would] ‘wished to’.

668

shelley: selected poems Her bow and winged reeds, as if to stem A greater loss with one which was more weak; And dull the barbed fire against his frozen cheek.

XII. 100 Another Splendour on his mouth alit, That mouth, whence it was wont to draw the breath Which gave it strength to pierce the guarded wit, And pass into the panting heart beneath With lightning and with music: the damp death

97. winged reeds] I.e. arrows; cp. Lat. harundo, ‘arrow’ but by transference from literal meaning ‘reed’; see e.g. Ovid, Met. v 384, hamata . . . harundine (‘barbed arrow’). 98. Cp. Sonnets xc ll. 13–14: ‘And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,/Compar’d with loss of thee will not seem so’, and Cymbeline IV ii 243: ‘Great griefs, I see, med’cine the less’. 99. The intention may be to understand ‘would’ before dull; cp. l. 96 and note. barbed fire] I.e. tip of the Cupid’s arrow; cp. Hyperion i 344–5: ‘seize the arrow’s barb/Before the tense string murmur’. 100–8. ‘Another thought alighted on his mouth, where it would once have changed from a thought into an utterance; but, Keats being dead, instead of drawing life from his lips, it died of the contact’ (GM). 100. Splendour] ‘Dream, poetic imagining’ (GM); a Dantean word, especially in the Paradiso (e.g. ix 13–15, xxi 32, xxiii 82–3). Cp. Taaffe ‘Annotations’: ‘This term Splendour for any immaterial substance is borrowed from Dante’ (Fogle 39). 101–4. Cp. Pope, An Essay on Criticism i 150–7: Thus Pegasus, a nearer way to take, May boldly deviate from the common track. Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend, And rise to faults true critics dare not mend; From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part, And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art, Which without passing through the judgment, gains The heart, and all its end at once attains. S.’s deployment of the allusion in ll. 101–4 turns Pope’s famous lines to Keats’s advantage, and implicitly rebukes the anonymous critic who had attacked Keats for his idiosyncratic stylistic mannerisms. S. read Pope’s poem aloud on 26 May 1821, and over the preceding few days had also read aloud the whole of The Rape of the Lock (Mary Jnl i 368). S.’s reading in Pope was, as the editors of Mary Jnl note, probably prompted by S.’s recent correspondence with Byron touching on the Pope controversy, which was itself the context for part of Byron’s hostility to Keats for his attack on Pope in ‘Sleep and Poetry’ (see headnote). 101–3. That mouth . . . beneath] ‘The mouth that could put the Dream into words, enabling it to reach the hearer’s emotions through his rational consciousness’ (GM).

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105 Quenched its caress upon his icy lips; And, as a dying meteor stains a wreath Of moonlight vapour, which the cold night clips, It flushed through his pale limbs, and passed to its eclipse.

XIII. And others came . . . Desires and Adorations, 110 Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies, Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations Of hopes and fears, and twilight Fantasies; And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs, And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam 115 Of her own dying smile instead of eyes, Came in slow pomp; — the moving pomp might seem Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.

XIV. All he had loved, and moulded into thought, From shape, and hue, and odour, and sweet sound,

105. his] its 1839. 107. An inversion: ‘vapour which clips (i.e. embraces) the cold night’. 108. It] I.e. the Splendour (not the kiss). 109–16. Cp. Moschus, Lament for Bion ll. 27–9: καὶ Σάτυροι μύροντο μελάγχλαινοί τε Πρίηποι˙ καὶ Πᾶνες στοναχεῦντο τὸ σὸν μέλος, αἵ τε καθ’ ὕλαν Κρανίδες ὠδύραντο, καὶ ὕδατα δάκρυα γέντο (‘Satyrs and Priapi, sable-cloaked, lamented; Pans bewailed thy minstrelsy; in woods Nymphs of the springs made moan, and the waters turned to tears’) The variety of personified moods, tones, and epithets in this stanza, still figuring poems mourning their creator, suggests the broad range of Keats’s poetic achievement as a whole. This stanza may have been a late addition to the poem; the following stanza xiv is numbered ‘13’ in Nbk 15 (see headnote). 109. came . . . ] came, — Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839. 110. Winged Persuasions] Perhaps suggesting the Homeric phrase ἔπεα πτερόεντα (‘winged words’). 116. The repetition of pomp seems untypical and oddly awkward, especially in a poem so carefully wrought. GM conjectured that the second pomp might have been written as ‘troop’, which it would resemble in S.’s handwriting (the conjecture implies that someone other than S. transcribed for the press). 117. A compliment to Keats’s ‘To Autumn’. stream.] stream 1829. 118–20. Cp. Bion, Lament for Adonis ll. 31–8: ‘τὰν Κύπριν αἀαῖ’ ὤρεα πάντα λέγοντι, καὶ αἱ δρύες ‘αἲ τὸν Ἄδωνιν’˙ καὶ ποταμοὶ κλαίοντι τὰ πένθεα τᾶς Ἀφροδίτας, καὶ παγαὶ τὸν Ἄδωνιν ἐν ὤρεσι δακρύοντι, ἄνθεα δ’ ἐξ ὀδύνας ἐρυθαίνεται, ἁ δὲ Κυθήρα

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120 Lamented Adonais. Morning sought Her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound, Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground, Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day; Afar the melancholy thunder moaned, 125 Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay, And the wild winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay.

πάντας ἀνὰ κναμώς, ἀνὰ πᾶν νάπος οἰκτρὸν ἀείδει. ‘αἰαῖ τὰν Κυθέρειαν˙ ἀπώλετο καλὸς Ἄδωνις’˙ Ἄχὼ δ’ ἀντεβόασεν, ‘ἀπώλετο καλὸς Ἄδωνις’. (‘ “Alack for the Cyprian”, cry all the hills, and the oak-trees, “Alas for Adonis”. The rivers wail for Aphrodite’s sorrows; the springs weep for Adonis on the hills. The flowers turn brown for grief. Cythera through all her mountain spurs and glades sang piteously, “Alack for Cytherea; the fair Adonis is dead”, and Echo cried in answer, “The fair Adonis is dead” ’). 120–3. The lines describe a rainy dawn. ‘Dawn’s unbound hair (a mark of mourning), forming rainclouds instead of dew (the tears which should adorn the ground), hid the last stars of night (the aerial eyes that kindle day)’ (GM). Cp. Ovid, Met. xiii 621–2: ‘Luctibus est Aurora suis intenta piasque/Nunc quoque dat lacrimas et toto rorat in orbe’ (‘Aurora is absorbed in her own grief, and even now she sheds pious tears and bedews the whole world’). 121. watch-tower,] 1829, 1839 (the draft in Nbk 20 has watch tower; cp. BSM vii 298–9); watchtower, Adonais (1821), Adonais (1829), Knerr. Cp. Milton, L’Allegro ll. 41–4: To hear the lark begin his flight, And singing startle the dull night, From his watch-tower in the skies, Till the dappled dawn doth rise. Also Ovid, Met. ii 114–15: ‘diffugiunt stellae, quarum agmina cogit/Lucifer et caeli statione novissimus exit’ (‘The stars all flee away, and the morning star closes their ranks as, last of all, he departs from his watch-tower in the sky’). unbound] An adjective; Cp. Bion, Lament for Adonis ll. 19–21:                ἁ δ’ Ἀφροδίτα λυσαμένα πλοκαμῖδας ἀνὰ δρυμὼς ἀλάληται πενθαλέα νήπλεκτος ἀσάνδαλος (‘and Aphrodite, her tresses loosed, has gone roaming in the thickets, sorrowful, unkempt, and bare of foot’) 125–6. These lines perhaps invert Milton, ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ ll. 61–8: But peaceful was the night Wherein the Prince of Light   His reign of peace upon the earth began: The winds with wonder whist, Smoothly the waters kissed,   Whispering new joys to the mild ocean, Who now hath quite forgot to rave, While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave. 126. round,] around, 1834, 1839; evidence for 1834 as printer’s copy for 1839 (see headnote). The draft in Nbk 20 also reads round (cp. BSM vii 296–7).

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XV. Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains, And feeds her grief with his remembered lay, And will no more reply to winds or fountains, 130 Or amorous birds perched on the young green spray, Or herdsman’s horn, or bell at closing day, Since she can mimic not his lips, more dear Than those for whose disdain she pined away Into a shadow of all sounds: — a drear 135 Murmur, between their songs, is all the woodmen hear.

127. Echo] The mourner is now the single nymph Echo herself, rather than the Echo who has earlier recited Keats’s poems (see notes to ll. 15–18 and 195). She appears in ‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’, where the whole passage ll. 163–80 and Endymion i 947–69 may be in S.’s mind for this and the following stanza. Cp. Bion, Lament for Adonis ll. 35–8, quoted in the note to ll. 118–20, and Moschus, Lament for Bion ll. 30–1: Ἀχὼ δ’ ἐν πέτραισιν ὀδύρεται ὅττι σιωπῆ κοὐκέτι μιμεῖται τὰ σὰ χείλεα (‘Echo amid the rocks mourns that she is silent and can copy thy voice no more’) Also ll. 53–4: εἰσέτι γὰρ πνείει τὰ σὰ χείλεα και τὸ σὸν ἄσθμα, ἀχὼ δ’ ἐν δονάκεσσι τεᾶς ἔτι βόσκετ’ ἀοιδᾶς. (‘Thy lips, thy breath, live in them yet; those reeds still cherish the echo of thy minstrelsy.’) Cp. also Lycidas ll. 37–41:   But O the heavy change, now thou art gone, Now thou art gone, and never must return! Thee shepherd, thee the woods, and desert caves, With wild thyme and the gadding vine o’ergrown, And all their echoes mourn. 131. This line recalls the opening stanza of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (cp. Unused stanzas for Adonais L, Longman iv 338–9, ll. 2–4 and note): The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. day,] day; Adonais (1821), Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839, and subsequent eds. The draft in Nbk 20 has no punctuation after day, and a cancelled draft of the following l. 132 reading For she can mimic not, showing that the Since clause goes with the preceding and not the following lines (see BSM vii 310–11). 132–4. more dear . . . all sounds] Echo, who pined for unrequited love of Narcissus, loved Adonais’s poetry more even than she loved the lips of Narcissus. 133. she] they 1834, 1839 (evidence for 1834 as printer’s copy for 1839). 134–5. Echo has ceased to echo sounds, and now only echoes (by repeating his remembered lay (l. 128)) Keats’s poems. shadow of all sounds] I.e. echo is to sound as shadow to substance.

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Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down Her kindling buds, as if she Autumn were, Or they dead leaves; since her delight is flown, For whom should she have waked the sullen year? 140 To Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear Nor to himself Narcissus, as to both

136–8. Cp. Moschus, Lament for Bion ll. 31–2: σῷ δ’ ἐπ’ ὀλέθρῳ δένδρεα καρπὸν ἔριψε τὰ δ’ ἄνθεα πάντ’ ἐμαράνθη (‘For thy death trees dropped their fruit; the flowers all withered’) There may be a reminiscence here of Botticelli’s Primavera, depicted carrying buds in the folds of her robe; S. could have seen the painting in the Uffizi in Florence (see PU II v 20–32 note). 136. young Spring] Keats died on 23 February, though presumably at the time of writing S. did not know the exact date. 138. Or they dead leaves] Rossetti’s conjecture that And would make better sense here (Rossetti 1878 ii 453) is disproved by S.’s draft in Nbk 20 (cp. BSM vii 302–3). Not all dead leaves fall in autumn; the holm-oak (Quercus ilex), ubiquitous in Mediterranean Italy in S.’s time and much mentioned in his descriptions of scenery, sheds many of its old leaves as the new ones come out. flown,] 1839; flown Adonais (1821), Adonais (1829), 1839. 139. The onset of spring is momentarily arrested by its grief. 140–2. Phoebus (Apollo) loved the boy Hyacinth but accidentally killed him; Narcissus was made to love his own reflection as a punishment for scorning Echo (see Ovid, Met. x 162ff., iii 402ff.); Adonais is dearer to the hyacinth and narcissus than was Hyacinth to Phoebus or Narcissus to himself. Keats mentions the story of Phoebus and Hyacinth in Endymion i 327–31, and mentions Narcissus in ‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’ l. 180. Cp. Moschus, Lament for Bion ll. 6–7: νῦν ὑάκινθε λάλει τὰ σὰ γράμματα καὶ πλέον αἰαῖ λάμβανε τοῖς πετάλοισι (‘speak out thy letters, hyacinth, and add more cries of sorrow to thy petals’) 140–1. Cp. Faerie Queene III vi 45: And all about grew euery sort of flowre,   To which sad louers were transformd of yore;  Fresh Hyacinthus, Phoebus paramoure,   And dearest loue,  Foolish Narcisse, that likes the watry shore,  Sad Amaranthus, made a flowre but late,  Sad Amaranthus, in whose purple gore   Me seemes I see Amintas wretched fate, To whom sweet Poets verse hath giuen endlesse date. 140. dear] dear, 1829, 1839.

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Thou, Adonais: wan they stand and sere Amid the faint companions of their youth, With dew all turned to tears; odour, to sighing ruth.

XVII. 145 Thy spirit’s sister, the lorn nightingale Mourns not her mate with such melodious pain;

142–4. The hyacinth and narcissus are now thought of as actual flowers, drooping for grief amidst the other flowers of spring (the faint companions of their youth); their dew serves for tears, and they breathe out melancholy sighs instead of perfume. Cp. Keats, ‘Ode on Melancholy’ ll. 11–14: But when the melancholy fit shall fall   Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,   And hides the green hill in an April shroud 142. Thou,] Thou Adonais (1821), Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839, Knerr; the draft in Nbk 20 is also unpunctuated (cp. BSM vii 302–3), but the movement and sense here are better served by a comma. 143. faint companions] 1839; drooping comrades Adonais (1821), Adonais (1829), 1829. One of the two substantive changes introduced by Mary in 1839 (cp. l. 252) which, together with l. 72, must derive from S. 144. ruth] Perhaps ‘lamentation’, a now obsolete usage (see OED 4), rather than ‘pity’. 145–50. Cp. Moschus, Lament for Bion ll. 37–49: οὐ τόσον εἰναλίαισι παρ’ ᾀόσι μύρατο Σειρήν, οὐδὲ τόσον ποκ’ ἄεισεν ἐνὶ σκοπέλοισιν Ἀηδών, οὐδὲ τόσον θρήνησεν ἀν’ ὤρεα μακρὰ Χελιδών, Ἀλκυόνος δ’ οὐ τόσσον ἐπ’ ἄλγεσιν ἴαχε Κῆυξ, οὐδὲ τόσον γλαυκοῖς ἐνὶ κύμασι Κηρύλος ᾆδεν, οὐ τόσον ἀῴοισιν ἐν ἄγκεσι παῖδα τὸν Ἀοῦς ἱπτάμενος περὶ σᾶμα κινύρατο Μέμνονος ὄρνις, ὅσσον ἀποφθιμένοιο κατωδύραντο Βίωνος —   ἄρχετε Σικελικαί, τῶ πένθεος ἄρχετε, Μοῖσαι — ἀδονίδες πᾶσαί τε χελιδόνες, ἅς ποκ’ ἔτερπεν, ἃς λαλέειν ἐδίδασκε˙ καθεζόμεναι δ’ ἐπὶ πρέμνοις ἀντίον ἀλλάλαισιν ἐκώκυον, αἳ δ’ ὑπεφώνευν˙ ‘ὄρνιθες λυπεῖσθ’ αἱ πενθάδες; ἀλλὰ καὶ ἄμμες’. `(‘Not so did the Siren moan on the sea-beaches, nor so Aëdon once on the cliffs; not so Chelidon on the high hills lamented, or Ceyx cried for Alcyon’s troubles; not so sang Cerylus on the green waves, or in eastern vales Memnon’s bird made plaint for Eos’ son as it fluttered about his tomb, as, when Bion perished, — Begin, Sicilian Muses, begin the dirge — wailed for him nightingales and swallows all, whom once he pleasured, once taught to sing. Perched on the boughs, these facing those sang dirges, and those replied, “Sorrow ye, mournful birds? Nay, so too do we” ’). 145–9. The linked allusions to ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and Hyperion in these lines may recall Leigh Hunt’s review of Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems in the Indicator (2 and 9 August 1820), where these two poems are singled out for sustained attention and quotation; cp. ll. 370–2.

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shelley: selected poems Not so the eagle, who like thee could scale Heaven, and could nourish in the sun’s domain Her mighty youth with morning, doth complain,

145–6. A compliment to Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (see headnote, discussion of Adonais as title). Cp. DP: A Poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness, and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why. (Reiman (2002) para. 12) Keats’s Ode is perhaps itself an influence on this passage. See also Virgil, Georgics iv 511–15 (a passage which is also drawn upon in Orpheus; see headnote to Appendix B, Longman iv 369): qualis populea maerens philomela sub umbra amissos queritur fetus, quos durus arator observans nido implumes detraxit; at illa flet noctem ramoque sedens miserabile carmen integrat, et maestis late loca questibus implet. (‘even as the nightingale, mourning beneath a poplar’s shade, bewails her young ones’ loss, when a heartless ploughman, watching their resting place, has plucked them unfledged from the nest: the mother weeps all night long, as, perched on a branch, she repeats her piteous song and fills all around with plaintive lamentation.’) 145. Cp. Coleridge, ‘To the Nightingale’ l. 1: ‘Sister of love-lorn Poets, Philomel!’. lorn] Cp. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ l. 71: ‘Forlorn! the very word is like a bell’. nightingale] nightingale, 1839. 146. melodious] Cp. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ l. 8: ‘In some melodious plot’; also in Endymion, i 789, iv 80, ‘Isabella’ 491, ‘Lamia’ i 75, and Hyperion iii 49, 81; the word occurs in Lycidas ll. 12–14: He must not float upon his watery bier Unwept, and welter to the parching wind, Without the meed of some melodious tear. 147–51. The syntax is complex: ‘the eagle . . . doth . . . not so . . . complain . . . as Albion wails’. 147–9. As Adonais (1903) 117 first noted, this image recalls a famous passage in Milton’s Areopagitica: Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks: Methinks I see her as an Eagle, muing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazl’d eyes at the full midday beam; purging and u ­ nscaling her long abused sight at the fountain itself of heav’nly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amaz’d at what she means (Complete Prose Works of John Milton (1959) ii 557–8; cp. MA (no. 231) note to l. 151) See also Psalms ciii 5: ‘Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s’. 147–8. scale/Heaven] A  classical pun in compliment to Hyperion; the name literally means ‘going aloft’, Gk. ὑπέρ ἰών, hence ‘scaling Heaven’. 147. eagle] Another favourite bird of Keats’s; see, e.g., Hyperion i 156–7, 182, ii 226, ‘Sleep and Poetry’ l. 22, and ‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’ l. 5.

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150 Soaring and screaming round her empty nest, As Albion wails for thee: the curse of Cain Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast, And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest!

150. Cp. Aeschylus, Agamemnon 48–54: μεγάλ’ ἐκ θυμοῦ κλάζοντες Ἄρη, τρόπον αἰγυπιῶν οἵτ ἐκπατίοις ἄλγεσι παίδων ὕπατοι λεχέων στροφοδινοῦνται πτερύγων ἐρετμοῖσιν ἐρεσσόμενοι, δεμνιοτήρη πόνον ὀρταλίχων ὀλέσσαντες˙ (‘uttering from their hearts a great cry for war, like birds of prey who, crazed by grief for their children, wheel around high above their eyries, rowing with wings for oars, having seen the toil of watching over their nestlings’ beds go for nothing’) and Odyssey xvi 216–18: κλαῖον δὲ λιγέως, ἁδινώτερον ἤ τ’ οἰωνοί, φῆναι ἤ αἰγυπιοἰ γαμψώνυχες, οἷσί τε τέκνα ἀγρόται ἐξείλοντο πάρος πετεηνὰ γενέσθαι (‘And they wailed shrilly, their cries more thick and fast than those of birds, sea eagles, or vultures with crooked talons, whose chicks country folk have taken from their nest before they were fledged’) 151–2. the curse . . . breast] See note to ll. 11–12. Cain, eldest son of Adam and Eve, is ‘cursed from the earth’ for slaying his brother Abel (see Genesis iv 11–12). Taaffe, ‘Annotations’ cps Inferno v 107: ‘Caina attende chi a vita ci spense’ (‘Caina waits/The soul, who spilt our life’). 151. Albion] England. the curse of Cain] See Genesis iv 11–14: And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand; When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth. And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me. 152. his head] I.e. the Quarterly’s reviewer. 153. angel] Angel Adonais (1829).

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Ah woe is me! Winter is come and gone, 155 But grief returns with the revolving year; The airs and streams renew their joyous tone;

154–89. The ironic contrast in stanzas xviii–xxi, between the rebirth of nature in spring and the absoluteness of individual mortality, is a commonplace of pastoral elegy. Cp. Moschus, Lament for Bion ll. 99–104: αἰαῖ ταὶ μαλάχαι μέν, ὲπὰν κατὰ κᾶπον ὄλωνται, ἠδὲ τὰ χλωρὰ σέλινα τό τ’ εὐθαλές οὖλον ἄνηθον ὕστερον αὖ ζώοντι καὶ εἰς ἔτος ἄλλο φύοντι˙ ἄμμες δ’ οἱ μεγάλοι καὶ καρτεροί, οἱ σοφοὶ ἄνδρες, ὁππότε πρᾶτα θάνωμες, ἀνάκοοι ἐν χθονὶ κοίλᾳ εὕδομες εὖ μάλα μακρὸν ἀτέρμονα νήγρετον ὕπνον. (‘Alas, when in the garden wither the mallows, the green celery, and the luxuriant curled anise, they live again thereafter and spring up another year, but we men, we that are tall and strong, we that are wise, when once we die, unhearing sleep in the hollow earth, a long sleep without end or wakening.’) 154–71. The premature and arrested spring of stanza xvi is now supplanted by the emergence of true spring. 154–62. Recalling the archetypal classical statement of this sentiment in the Pervigilium Veneris ll. 2–4: ver novum, ver iam canorum, vere natus orbis est; vere concordant amores, vere nubunt alites, et nemus comam resolvit de maritis imbribus. (‘The Spring, the new, the warb’ling Spring appears, The youthful Season of reviving Years; In Spring the Loves enkindle mutual Heats, The feather’d Nation chuse their tuneful Mates, The Trees grow fruitful with descending Rain And drest in diff ’ring Greens adorn the Plain.’ Trans. Thomas Parnell (1722)) 155. the revolving year] Cp. l. 472. ‘Revolving’ is used in the sense of ‘mov[ing] round its regular course’ (OED 3). 156–60. Cp. Song of Solomon ii 11–13: ‘For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land’.

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The ants, the bees, the swallows reappear; Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead Seasons’ bier; The amorous birds now pair in every brake, 160 And build their mossy homes in field and brere; And the green lizard, and the golden snake, Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake.

XIX. Through wood and stream and field and hill and Ocean A quickening life from the Earth’s heart has burst

157. swallows] swallows, 1839. 158. Seasons’] Season’s Adonais (1829), 1829. 159. brake] thicket. 160. brere;] brere, Adonais (1829), 1829: brere for ‘briar’ is Spenserian, e.g. throughout The Shepheardes Calender; brake and brere also occur together, as in Faerie Queene VI v 17 l. 3: ‘Who through thicke woods and brakes and briers him drew’. 161. Snakes and lizards pass the winter months in a state of torpor until they are stimulated to activity by rising temperatures in spring. S. obviously has Mediterranean reptiles in mind; there are many species of green lizard in Italy, including the large and elegant western Green Lizard (Lacerta bilineata) which is very common in Tuscany. The golden snake is more difficult to identify with any actual species indigenous to Italy, and may have a literary origin, but the Aesculapian snake was and is still common in Italy and its markings can have a yellowish appearance. Cp. E. D. Clarke, Travels in Various Countries of Europe Asia and Africa, 4th edn, 11 vols 1817–24) vi, Greece Egypt and the Holy Land [1818] II ii 414, describing a snake caught in the valley of Hieron in the Peloponnese: It was of a bright yellow colour, shining like burnished gold, about a yard in length . . . The peasants . . . knew it to be a species of harmless serpent, which they had been accustomed to regard with tenderness, and even with superstitious veneration. This is perhaps the same type of snake described in Pausanias, Description of Greece II xxviii 28: ‘The serpents, including a peculiar kind of a yellowish colour, are considered sacred to Asclepius, and are tame with men’. 163–216. These lines were omitted in the version published in the Literary Chronicle in December 1821; see headnote.With stanzas xix–xxi cp. Job xiv 7–10: For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; Yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant. But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? 163–71. The stanza perhaps recalls Spenser’s Hymne of Heavenly Beavtie, discussed in the note to ll. 379–87. 163. stream and] streamand, 1829. Ocean] Ocean, 1829, 1839. 164. burst] burst, 1829, 1839.

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165 As it has ever done, with change and motion, From the great morning of the world when first God dawned on Chaos; in its steam immersed The lamps of Heaven flash with a softer light; All baser things pant with life’s sacred thirst; 170 Diffuse themselves; and spend in love’s delight, The beauty and the joy of their renewed might.

XX. The leprous corpse touched by this spirit tender Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath; 166–7. Cp. Hellas ll. 46–8: In the great Morning of the world The spirit of God with might unfurled The flag of Freedom over chaos 167. steam immersed] stream immersed Adonais (1829); stream immersed, 1829, 1839. A  teasing crux. GM preferred stream, as fitting better with the sense of the stanza, although the image of lamps flashing more softly through steam also seems Shelleyan, and the clumsy repetition of stream within five lines (cp. l. 163) is untypical. See headnote for discussion of the possible significance of this crux in the poem’s textual history. The draft of this stanza in Nbk 20 is exceptionally difficult even by the standards of that MS, but the survival of this particular leaf is itself miraculous (Nbk 20 was retrieved from the wreck of the Don Juan). Nevertheless, the draft is partly legible, but where the BSM transcription confidently gives steam there is room for doubt and the reading could be stream. However, the word is immediately preceded in the draft by a cancelled but perfectly legible word vapour, which evidently serves better as an alternative to steam (see BSM vii 322–3). Forman 1876–7, Rossetti 1870, Rossetti 1878, Butter (1970), Knerr, Reiman (2002) and Major Works read steam; Woodberry 1893, Dowden 1891, Hutchinson, and Webb (1995) read stream. 169. All baser things] I.e. baser than the stars. 170. love’s delight] A Spenserian phrase, e.g. Daphnaïda l. 513, Astrophel l. 54, frequently in Faerie Queene, Hymne of Heavenly Love l. 269, Hymne of Heavenly Beavtie l. 233. 172–80. Cp. Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, ‘Nouember’ ll. 82–9: Whence is it, that the flouret of the field doth fade, And lyeth buryed long in Winters bale: Yet soone as spring his mantle doth displaye, It floureth fresh, as it should neuer fayle? But thing on earth that is of most availe,   As vertues braunch and beauties budde,   Reliuen not for any good. 172. The leprous corpse] I.e. corpses in general. The phrase recalls Keats, ‘Isabella’ stanza xxxv: It was a vision. — In the drowsy gloom,   The dull of midnight, at her couch’s foot Lorenzo stood, and wept: the forest tomb   Had marred his glossy hair which once could shoot Lustre into the sun, and put cold doom   Upon his lips, and taken the soft lute From his lorn voice, and past his loamèd ears   Had made a miry channel for his tears.

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Like incarnations of the stars, when splendour 175 Is changed to fragrance, they illumine death And mock the merry worm that wakes beneath; Nought we know, dies. Shall that alone which knows

Cp. also note to ll. 48–9. corpse touched] corpse, touched 1829, 1839. tender] tender, 1829, 1839. this spirit tender] I.e. the spirit of spring described in the two preceding stanzas. 173–6. Anemones sprang from the tears Aphrodite shed for Adonis (or from his own blood) after he had been killed by the boar; here the star-shaped flowers light up the darkness of death, using perfume instead of radiance. Cp. also ‘Isabella’ stanza liv: And so she ever fed it with thin tears,   Whence thick, and green, and beautiful it grew, So that it smelt more balmy than its peers   Of basil-tufts in Florence; for it drew Nurture besides, and life, from human fears,   From the fast mouldering head there shut from view: So that the jewel, safely casketed,   Came forth, and in perfumèd leafits spread. 174–5. For the perfume of flowers conceived as radiant light, Taaffe ‘Annotations’ cps Paradiso xxx 61–9: e vidi lume in forma di rivera fulvido di   fulgore, intra due rive   dipinte di mirabil primavera. Di tal fiumana uscian faville vive,   e d’ogne parte si mettien ne’ fiori,   quasi rubin che oro circunscrive; poi, come inebrïate da li odori,   riprofondavan sé nel miro gurge,   e s’una intrava, un’altra n’uscia fori. (‘I look’d; And in the likeness of a river saw Light flowing, from whose amber-seeming waves Flash’d up effulgence, as they glided on ’Twixt banks, on either side, painted with spring, Incredible how fair; and, from the tide, There ever and anon, outstarting, flew Sparkles instinct with life; and in the flow’rs Did set them, like to rubies chas’d in gold; Then, as if drunk with odours, plung’d again Into the wondrous flood; from which, as one Re-enter’d, still another rose.’) 174. when] Rossetti 1870 ii 554 and Rossetti 1878 iii 454 conjecture that either where or whose work better, but the draft in Nbk 20 confirms Adonais (1821) (cp. BSM vii 324–5). 175. death] death, 1829, 1839. 177–80. The material objects of consciousness do not die but are perpetually recycled in the processes of nature (like the corpse made up of matter which is translated into the form of flowers on the grave,

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Be as a sword consumed before the sheath By sightless lightning? — th’ intense atom glows 180 A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose.

XXI. Alas! that all we loved of him should be, But for our grief, as if it had not been, And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me! Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene 185 The actors or spectators? Great and mean Meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow.

ll. 172–3); ironically, the one part of nature capable of consciously knowing and reflecting on this (that alone which knows) is itself the one thing that is not made immortal in the cycles of nature, but (apparently) ceases with the death of the person and their unique mind (th’ intense atom). 177. know,] know 1839. 178–9. sword .  .  . lightning?] The image refers to a widely attested phenomenon; cp. e.g. Gowin Knight’s ‘Remarks’ on a letter recounting the effects of a lightning strike in London on 16 July 1758, Philosophical Transactions li (1759) 294–7: lightning is, sometimes at least, attended with heat and ignition . . . The instances, that are most generally given . . . are two . . . that of a sword being melted in its scabbard, and that of money being melted in a bag, both the scabbard and bag remaining unhurt. A great number of authors have mentioned both the facts . . . Thus, according to Pliny (Nat. Hist. ii c. 51), both gold, silver, and brass, have been melted in bags sealed up . . . Seneca (Nat. Quaest. I ii c. 32) speaks . . . of silver being melted in the pocket or purse . . . Later writers seem to have copied from one of these S.’s much-cited assertion in DP that ‘Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it’ (Reiman (2002) para. 18) adapts and transforms the image and indeed inverts its sense, as do Byron’s famous lines in ‘So, we’ll go no more a-roving’ ll. 5–8: For the sword outwears its sheath,   And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe,   And love itself have rest. 179. sightless] ‘Invisibly swift’ (GM). th’ intense atom glows] Cp. Ode to Heaven l. 18: ‘Atoms of intensest light!’. 181–3. It is only in the grief of the mourners that the human consciousness and personality of the dead Adonais (all we loved of him) survives, and that grief will pass. 182. as if it had not been] Cp. Obadiah i 16: ‘For as ye have drunk upon my holy mountain, so shall all the heathen drink continually, yea, they shall drink, and they shall swallow down, and they shall be as though they had not been’. 184–5. A possible reminiscence of Macbeth (which is present in the background throughout the first half of the poem) V v 24–8: Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

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As long as skies are blue, and fields are green, Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.

XXII.

190 He will awake no more, oh, never more! “Wake thou”, cried Misery, “childless Mother, rise

And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. Cp. S.’s essay On Life: ‘For what are we? Whence do we come, and whither do we go? Is birth the commencement, is death the conclusion of our being? What is birth and death?’ (Reiman (2002) 506); also A Vision of the Sea (Longman iii 365–77, no. 321) ll. 82–3: ‘Alas, what is life, what is death, what are we/That when the ship sinks, we no longer may be?’. There are similar tortured questions in Barthélemy iii 124: ‘whence happens it that these beings exist; whence does it happen that they perish? What mean those periodical changes which eternally take place on the theatre of the world? For whom is this dreadful spectacle intended?’. 186. death, who lends what life must borrow] I.e. life is a temporary loan from oblivion. 187–9. ‘Time and change are the price we must pay for the beauty of earth’s colours’ (GM); cp. stanza lii. 188. Cp. Lucretius, De Re. Nat. ii 576–80:         miscetur funere vagor quem pueri tollunt visentes luminis oras; nec nox ulla diem neque noctem aurora secutast quae non audierit mixtos vagitibus aegris ploratus mortis comites et funeris atri. (‘With the funeral dirge is mingled the wail that children raise when they first see the borders of light; and no night ever followed day, or dawn followed night, that has not heard mingled with their sickly wailings the lamentations that attend upon death and the black funeral.’) urge] hurry on. 191–3. Cp. Bion, Lament for Adonis ll. 3–5: μηκέτι πορφυρέοις ἐνὶ φάρεσι Κύπρι κάθευδε˙ ἔγρεο, δειλαία, κυανόστολα καὶ πλατάγησον στήθεα καὶ λέγε πᾶσιν, ‘ἀπώλετο καλὸς Ἄδωνις’. (‘Sleep no more in thy purple coverlets, O Cyprian. Rouse thee, unhappy one; don sable robes, and beat thy breasts, and say to all men, “The fair Adonis is dead.” ’) and ll. 16–17: ἄγριον ἄγριον ἕλκος ἔχει κατὰ μηρὸν Ἄδωνις, μεῖζον δ’ ἁ Κυθέρεια φέρει ποτικάρδιον ἕλκος. (‘Cruel, cruel the wound Adonis bears upon his thigh, but deeper the wound Cytherea bears within her heart.’) 191. childless Mother] Urania. The phrase may also suggest a personal resonance in Mary S.’s recent grief for her own two children who died in Italy; cp. stanzas xlix — li.

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Out of thy sleep, and slake, in thy heart’s core, A wound more fierce than his with tears and sighs.” And all the Dreams that watched Urania’s eyes, 195 And all the Echoes whom their sister’s song Had held in holy silence, cried: “Arise!” Swift as a Thought by the snake Memory stung, From her ambrosial rest the fading Splendour sprung.

XXIII. She rose like an autumnal Night, that springs 200 Out of the East, and follows wild and drear The golden Day, which, on eternal wings, Even as a ghost abandoning a bier, Has left the Earth a corpse. Sorrow and fear So struck, so roused, so rapt Urania; 205 So saddened round her like an atmosphere Of stormy mist; so swept her on her way Even to the mournful place where Adonais lay.

192–3. Grammatical inversion: ‘slake . . . with tears and sighs . . . a wound’. 193. A wound] See note to ll. 11–12. his with tears] his tears 1834, 1839; evidence for 1834 as printer’s copy for 1839 (see headnote). 195. their sister’s song] See l. 15 and note to ll. 15–18. 198. Splendour] Urania, and not the Splendour of l. 100. 199–216. Urania’s journey to the tomb of Adonais in stanzas xxiii and xxiv parallels the flight of Venus to the wounded Adonis in Bion, Lament for Adonis 19ff. 203. Has] 1834, 1839; Had Adonais (1821), Adonais (1829), 1829, Knerr. A  puzzling variant. The obvious inference is that here is further evidence that in using 1834 as the printer’s copy for 1839, Mary inadvertently introduced a series of errors originating in 1834. But Has is clearly the reading in Nbk 20, where indeed it is repeated in each of S.’s three attempts at drafting the line (cp. BSM vii 258–9). See headnote. Forman 1876–7, Rossetti 1870, Rossetti 1878, Woodberry 1893, Dowden 1891, Hutchinson and Reiman (2002) read had; Webb (1995) and Butter (1970) read has. 204–6. So . . . so] ‘In just such a way’ (GM). 204. rapt Urania;] rapt, Urania, 1839. rapt] ‘Carried away’. 205. saddened] Cp. Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp’ (1817 version) ll. 6–7: ‘the clouds, that late were rich with light,/Slow saddening round’. 206. way] way, 1829, 1839.

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XXIV. Out of her secret Paradise she sped, Through camps and cities rough with stone, and steel, 210 And human hearts, which to her aery tread Yielding not, wounded the invisible Palms of her tender feet where’er they fell: And barbed tongues, and thoughts more sharp than they Rent the soft Form they never could repel, 215 Whose sacred blood, like the young tears of May, Paved with eternal flowers that undeserving way.

208–16. Urania’s journey over the pitiless terrain of human society exposes her to its various destructive modes, which hurt but do not daunt her; the lines suggest the passage from S.’s translation of Plato, Symposium 195 from which PU I 772–9 derives (see notes): Homer says, that the goddess Calamity is delicate, and that her feet are tender. ‘Her feet are soft,’ he says, ‘for she treads not upon the ground, but makes her path upon the heads of men.’ He gives as an evidence of her tenderness, that she walks not upon that which is hard, but that which is soft. The same evidence is sufficient to make manifest the tenderness of Love. For Love walks not upon the earth, nor over the heads of men, which are not indeed very soft; but he dwells within, and treads on the softest of existing things, having established his habitation within the souls and inmost nature of Gods and men; not indeed in all souls — for wherever he chances to find a hard and rugged disposition, there he will not inhabit, but only where it is most soft and tender. Of needs must he be the most delicate of all things, who touches lightly with his feet, only the softest parts of those things which are the softest of all. (Julian vii 189–90) 208. secret Paradise] Cp. Lat. secretus, ‘remote, secluded’; for Paradise see note to l. 14. 210–16. Cp. Spenser, Epithalamion ll. 48–50: And let the ground whereas her foot shall tread, For feare the stones her tender foot should wrong Be strewed with fragrant flowers all along 212. S. uses palm for ‘sole of the foot’ in PU IV 123, TL l. 361, but the word in this sense is otherwise very unusual in English. In Italian palme are the webbed feet of waterbirds. 213. they] they. 1829. 215–16. Cp. Bion, Lament for Adonis ll. 64–6: δάκρυον ἁ Παφία τόσσον χέει ὅσσον Ἄδωνις αἷμα χέει, τὰ δὲ πάντα ποτὶ χθονὶ γίνεται ἄνθη˙ αἷμα ῥόδον τίκτει, τὰ δὲ δάκρυα τὰν ἀνεμώναν. (‘As fast from the Paphian flow tears as from Adonis blood, and both on the ground are turned to flowers; of the blood are roses born, and of the tears anemones.’) 215. young tears] I.e. raindrops.

684

shelley: selected poems XXV.

In the death chamber for a moment Death, Shamed by the presence of that living Might, Blushed to annihilation, and the breath 220 Revisited those lips, and life’s pale light Flashed through those limbs, so late her dear delight. “Leave me not wild and drear and comfortless, As silent lightning leaves the starless night! Leave me not!” cried Urania: her distress

217–21. Cp. Hyperion iii 124–30: Soon wild commotions shook him, and made flush All the immortal fairness of his limbs — Most like the struggle at the gate of death; Or liker still to one who should take leave Of pale immortal death, and with a pang As hot as death’s is chill, with fierce convulse Die into life 217. death chamber] death-chamber 1829, 1839. Death,] 1829, 1839; Death Adonais (1821), Adonais (1829), Knerr. 218. Might,] 1829, 1839; Might Adonais (1821), Adonais (1829), Knerr. 219. Blushed to annihilation] ‘white Death [cp. l. 66] contradicts (and so annihilates) himself if he blushes’ (GM). Cp. Romeo and Juliet V iii 92–6: Death, that hath suck’d the honey of thy breath, Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty: Thou art not conquer’d, beauty’s ensign yet Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks, And death’s pale flag is not advanced there. 222–4. Cp. ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ stanza xxxv: “Ah, Porphyro!” said she, “but even now Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear, Made tuneable with every sweetest vow, And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear: How changed thou art! How pallid, chill, and drear! Give me that voice again, my Porphyro, Those looks immortal, those complainings dear! O leave me not in this eternal woe, For if thou diest, my Love, I know not where to go.” 222–3. Cp. Romeo and Juliet II ii 119–20: ‘Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be/Ere one can say it lightens’. 223. A difficult line; S. may intend a grammatical inversion, i.e. ‘as [summer] lightning leaves silent the night’. But starless implies storm conditions and silent lightning is perhaps to be understood as the interval of time between lightning and thunder.

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225 Roused Death: Death rose and smiled, and met her vain caress.

XXVI. “Stay yet awhile! speak to me once again; Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live; And in my heartless breast and burning brain That word, that kiss shall all thoughts else survive, 230 With food of saddest memory kept alive,

226–34. Cp. Bion, Lament for Adonis ll. 42–52:             ‘μεῖνον Ἄδωνι, δύσποτμε μεῖνον Ἄδωνι, πανύστατον ὥς σε κιχείω, ὥς σε περιπτύξω καὶ χείλεα χείλεσι μίξω. ἔγρεο τυτθόν, Ἄδωνι, τὸ δ’ αὖ πύματόν με φίλησον, τοσσοῦτόν με φίλησον ὅσον ζώει τὸ φίλημα, ἄχρις ἀποψύχης ἐς ἐμὸν στόμα, κεἰς ἐμὸν ἧπαρ πνεῦμα τεὸν ῥεύσῃ, τὸ δέ σευ γλυκὺ φίλτρον ἀμέλξω, ἐκ δὲ πίω τὸν ἔρωτα˙ φίλημα δὲ τοῦτο φυλάξω ὡς αὐτὸν τὸν Ἄδωνιν, ἐπεὶ σύ με, δύσμορε, φεύγεις. φεύγεις μακρόν, Ἄδωνι, καὶ ἔρχεαι εἰς Ἀχέροντα πὰρ στυγνὸν βασιλῆα καὶ ἄγριον˙’ (‘ “Stay, Adonis; hapless Adonis, stay, that for the last time I may possess thee, that I may fold thee in my arms and mingle lips with lips. Awake, Adonis, for a little space, and give me one last kiss again. Kiss me so long as life is in the kiss, until thy spirit has passed into my lips, thy breath flowed into my heart, and I have drained thy sweet love-philtre and drunk up thy love; and I shall guard that kiss as though it were Adonis’ self, since thou, hapless one, art flying from me. Far away thou fliest, Adonis, and comest to Acheron, to a grim king and a cruel.” ’) S. clearly recalls his own translation of part of this passage (Longman ii 697–700, no. 201) ll. 40–8: ‘Stay, Adonis, Stay, dearest one, [        ] and mix my lips with thine; Wake yet a while, Adonis — oh, but once That I may kiss thee now for the last time — But for so long as one short kiss may live O let thy breath flow from thy dying soul Even to my mouth and heart, that I may suck That 226. awhile!] a while! Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839. 227. so long but as] ‘Only for as long as’ (GM). 228. heartless] ‘I.e. broken-hearted’ (GM).

686

shelley: selected poems Now thou art dead, as if it were a part Of thee, my Adonais! I would give All that I am to be as thou now art! But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart!

XXVII. 235 “Oh gentle child, beautiful as thou wert, Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart Dare the unpastured dragon in his den?

234. Cp. Bion, Lament for Adonis ll. 52–3:               ἁ δὲ τάλαινα ζώω καὶ θεός ἐμμι καὶ οὐ δύναμαί σε διώκειν. (‘But I, poor soul, live, and am a goddess and cannot follow thee.’) ‘Urania is the mother of mortal poets, so her own immortality only binds her for ever to the world of change’ (GM). The poetic tradition exists as a property of living human consciousness, but the poets whose works constitute that tradition enter immortality when they die, by living in the consciousness of successive readers; see ll. 392–6 and note. 235. Cp. Bion, Lament for Adonis l. 61: καλὸς ἐὼν (‘being so fair’). 236–8. Urania laments that Keats had incautiously aligned himself in public at the outset of his career with radical contemporaries (such as Leigh Hunt), and had attacked in print conventions of eighteenth-century poetic orthodoxy, thus making himself a target of the conservative critical camp. See headnote, on Byron’s criticism of Keats for his attack on Pope and the ‘French School’ in such poems as ‘Sleep and Poetry’ (and cp. ll. 101–4 and note). 236. the trodden paths of men] ‘Conventional ways of thinking and writing’ (GM). 237. Too soon] S. had expressed frankly to Keats his fear that he had published too early (see headnote). With the rest of this line, cp. Henry V II Prologue 16–19: O England! model to thy inward greatness, Like little body with a mighty heart, What mightst thou do, that honour would thee do, Were all thy children kind and natural! 238. the unpastured dragon] ‘The monster of convention, hungry for victims’ (GM); and perhaps specifically the Quarterly’s reviewer, with an insatiable appetite for new victims of his politically motivated and destructive critical aggression. Cp. Lat. impastus, ‘unfed, ravenous’. The line is modelled on Bion, Lament for Adonis ll. 60–1: τί γάρ, τολμηρέ, κυνάγεις; καλὸς ἐὼν τί τοσοῦτον ἐμήναο θηρὶ παλαίειν; (‘Why, rash one, didst thou go hunting? Why, being so fair, wast thou so mad as to pit thyself against the beast?’)

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Defenceless as thou wert, oh where was then 240 Wisdom the mirrored shield, or scorn the spear? Or hadst thou waited the full cycle, when Thy spirit should have filled its crescent sphere, The monsters of life’s waste had fled from thee like deer.

239. Defenceless] S. may have in mind what he considered the faults and mannered excesses of Endymion, which he judged barely readable (see headnote). oh] oh! 1829, 1839. 240. Medusa, the Gorgon, could turn men and beasts to stone by the power of her gaze, but Perseus slew her by using the burnished shield (given to him by Pallas) as a mirror (see Ovid, Met. iv 782–3, Lucan, Pharsalia ix 669–70, and Bacon, De Sapientia Veterum vii). S. uses the image of the mirrored shield in Ode to Naples A ll. 78–80: thy shield is as a mirror To make their blind slaves see, and with fierce gleam To turn his hungry sword upon the Wearer Cp. also John Philpot Curran’s speech in defence of Peter Finnerty: ‘that shield of wisdom and of virtue, behind which the people are invulnerable; in whose pure and polished convex, ere the lifted blow has fallen [the tyrant] beholds his own image, and is turned into stone’ (Speeches of John Philpot Curran, Esq. (1805) 179). Keats lacked the experienced wisdom to anticipate his critic’s attack, and also the scorn to respond in kind (as Byron did respond; see notes to ll. 248–52, and headnote). It is possible that S.’s image has in mind not Perseus, but Ariosto, Orlando Furioso ii 55: D’un bel drappo di seta avea coperto lo scudo in braccio il cavallier celeste. Come avesse, non so, tanto sofferto di tenerlo nascosto in quella veste; ch’immantinente che lo mostra aperto, forza è, chi’l mira, abbarbagliato reste, e cada come corpo morto cade, e venga al negromante in potestade. (‘This heavenly hellish warriour bare a shield On his left arme that had a silken case. I cannot any cause or reason yeelde Why he would keepe it coverd so long space. It had such force that whoso it beheld, Such shining light it striketh in their face That downe they fall with eyes and sences closed And leave their corps of him to be disposed.’ Trans. Sir John Harrington (1591)) The passage is alluded to in DP: ‘as the mirror of intolerable light, though on the arm of one of the weakest of the Paladins, could blind and scatter whole armies of necromancers and pagans’ (Reiman (2002) para. 16). 242. crescent] I.e. ‘waxing, growing’; the image of a crescent moon glancingly compliments Endymion. 243. like deer] Adonis in the source-myth is a hunter.

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shelley: selected poems XXVIII.

“The herded wolves, bold only to pursue; 245 The obscene ravens, clamorous o’er the dead; The vultures to the conqueror’s banner true Who feed where Desolation first has fed, And whose wings rain contagion; — how they fled,

244–52. This stanza invokes Byron’s response to hostile reviewers, which in contrast with that of Keats took the form of successful public retaliation (see Robinson 162–70 for interesting and detailed discussion). As Byron recalled in his letter to S. of 26 April 1821 (Byron L&J viii 103), discussing the story that Keats’s death had been caused by his reaction to adverse criticism, Hours of Idleness had been attacked in the Edinburgh Review (January 1808), and Byron, though stung by the criticism, had responded powerfully in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (see headnote). S.’s stanza draws directly on Byron’s counter-attack: Yet, say! why should the Bard, at once, resign His claim to favour from the sacred Nine? For ever startled by the mingled howl Of Northern wolves that still in darkness prowl; A coward brood, which mangle as they prey, By brutal instinct, all that cross their way: Aged or young, the living or the dead, No mercy find, — these felons must be fed. Why do the injured unresisting yield The calm possession of their native field? Why tamely thus before their fangs retreat, Nor hunt the hell-hounds back to Arthur’s seat? (English Bards and Scotch Reviewers ll. 426–37) Byron followed his success in English Bards with the much more sensationally successful Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and thereafter enjoyed a largely flattering reception in the Reviews. 244–8. The lines recall Lycidas ll. 125–31: The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, But swoll’n with wind, and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread: Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw Daily devours apace, and nothing said, But that two-handed engine at the door, Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more. S.’s lines express his disgust at those responsible for Keats’s critical reception, and imply their cowardice as none of the creatures mentioned ventures to directly attack its living prey. 245. obscene] I.e. in the classical sense of ‘ill-omened’; often specifically applied to birds, e.g. Horace, Odes III xxvii 11, oscinem corvum (‘the obscene raven’). Cp. Also Virgil, Aeneid xii 876, obscenae volucres (‘ill-boding birds’). o’er] Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839; oer Adonais (1821). 246. The] the, 1829. vultures] vultures, 1839. true] true, 1829, 1839. 248. Cp. Marlowe, The Jew of Malta II i 1–4:

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When like Apollo, from his golden bow, 250 The Pythian of the age one arrow sped And smiled! — The spoilers tempt no second blow, They fawn on the proud feet that spurn them lying low.

XXIX. “The sun comes forth, and many reptiles spawn;

Thus like the sad presaging Raven that tolls The sicke mans passeport in her hollow beake, And in the shadow of the silent night Doth shake contagion from her sable wings 249–51. These lines refer to Byron, and recall Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV clxi describing the Apollo Belvedere in Rome: Or view the Lord of the unerring bow, The God of life, and poesy, and light — The Sun in human limbs arrayed, and brow All radiant from his triumph in the fight; The shaft hath just been shot — the arrow bright With an immortal’s vengeance; in his eye And nostril beautiful disdain, and might, And majesty, flash their full lightnings by, Developing in that one glance the Deity. The statue is understood by Byron to represent Apollo in his earliest exploit, as he has just discharged the arrow with which he slew the serpent Python (thus Byron in his defiant routing of his critics is The Pythian of the age). 249. When] When, Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839. 250. Cp. S.’s letter to Byron of 4 May 1821: ‘You felt the strength to soar beyond the arrows; the eagle was soon lost in the light in which it was nourished, and the eyes of the aimers were blinded’ (L ii 289; see headnote). 252. spurn] kick — an archaic usage in S.’s day (see OED ‘spurn’ v.1 2a). lying low.] 1839; as they go. Adonais (1821), Adonais (1829), 1829; the third of Mary’s substantive changes which must derive from S. (cp. ll. 72 and 143). The change is clearly an improvement, as the reading in Adonais (1821) describes the spoilers as simultaneously at rest and in motion. 253–306. See headnote for discussion of the possibility that S. for a period at least may have intended to expunge stanzas xxix–xxxiv from the published poem. 253–61. ‘A great poet is like the sun in generating parasites which derive their life from its light; such a poet gives delight in revealing the truth (Making earth bare), and while alive obscures the presence of great poets of the past, as the sun hides the stars (veiling heaven). When the poet dies, all those who made a living by attacking or imitating him (the swarms that dimmed or shared its light) die off too, leaving the poet to take his place alongside the other immortal poet-suns, now again visible like stars after sunset’. S.’s sustained metaphor suggests John Cleveland’s ‘Elegy on Edward King’: Whiles Phebus shines within our Hemisphere, There are no starres, or at least none appear. Did not the sunne go hence, we should not know Whether there were a night and starres, or no. Till thou ly’dst down upon thy western bed,

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He sets, and each ephemeral insect then 255 Is gathered into death without a dawn, And the immortal stars awake again; So is it in the world of living men: A godlike mind soars forth, in its delight Making earth bare and veiling heaven, and when

Not one Poetick starre durst shew his head; Athenian owls fear’d to come forth in verse, Untill thy fall darkned the Universe. Thy death makes Poets 253. reptiles] Small creeping, crawling creatures rather than lizards. The image of reptiles or insects spawned by the sun is familiar and commonplace; cp. e.g. Faerie Queene III vi 8: Miraculous may seeme to him, that reades So straunge ensample of conception, But reason teacheth that the fruitfull seades Of all things liuing, through impression Of the sunbeames in moyst complexion, Doe life conceiue and quickned are by kynd: So after Nilus inundation, Infinite shapes of creatures men doe fynd, Informed in the mud, on which the Sunne hath shynd. There are cognate passages e.g. in Antony and Cleopatra: ‘Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun’ (II vii 26–7), and in Paradise Lost: ‘And God said, Let the waters generate/Reptile with spawn abundant’ (vii 387–8). The image has an explicitly literary-critical context in Pope, An Essay on Criticism ll. 40–3: Those half-learn’d witlings, numerous in our isle, As half-form’d insects on the banks of Nile; Unfinished things, one knows not what to call, Their generation’s so equivocal. 254. S. mentions ‘the beam-like ephemeris’ in SP ii 49, and see also WA 9, and S.’s note to Q Mab viii 203–7. 257. is it] it is 1834, 1839; evidence for 1834 as printer’s copy for 1839 (see headnote). 258–61. The sense here is neatly given in a passage from S.’s letter to Hogg of 8 May 1817: ‘the splendour of Apuleius eclipses all that I have read for the last year. This light will pass away, & when I am at a sufficient distance from this new planet, the constellations of literature will reappear in their natural groupes’ (L i 542). 259. veiling heaven] Cp. Lucretius, De Re. Nat. iii 1042–4: ipse Epicurus obit decurso lumine vitae, qui genus humanum ingenio superavit et omnis restinxit, stellas exortus ut aetherius sol. (‘Epicurus himself died when the light of life had run its course, he whose intellect surpassed humanity, who quenched the light of all as the risen sun of heaven quenches the stars.’)

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260 It sinks, the swarms that dimmed or shared its light Leave to its kindred lamps the spirit’s awful night.”

XXX. Thus ceased she: and the mountain shepherds came, 260. Cp. Gray, The Bard: A Pindaric Ode II. 2 ll. 68–70: “Thy son is gone. He rests among the dead. The swarm that in thy noon-tide beam were born? Gone to salute the rising morn.” Also Swift, A Tale of a Tub, section iii: ‘the true critics are known by their talent of swarming about the noblest writers, to which they are carried merely by instinct, as a rat to the best cheese, or as wasp to the fairest fruit’. 261. kindred lamps] S. was well aware that the sun was also a star; see e.g. his note to Q Mab i 252–3. Cp. Paradiso xx 1–6: Quando colui che tutto’l mondo alluma de l’emisperio nostro sì discende, che’l giorno d’ogne parte si consuma, lo ciel, che sol di lui prima s’accende, subitamente si rifà parvente per molte luci, in che una risplende (‘When, disappearing from our hemisphere, The world’s enlightener vanishes, and day On all sides wasteth, suddenly the sky, Erewhile irradiate only with his beam, Is yet again unfolded, putting forth Innumerable lights wherein one shines’) awful] awe-inspiring. 262. Urania completes her lament, and is now joined by a new group of mourners comprising some of Keats’s poetic contemporaries. Their description as mountain shepherds is conventional in pastoral, e.g in Theocritus, Idyll i 80–1: ἦνθον τοὶ βοῦται, τοὶ ποιμένες, ᾡπόλοι ἦνθον˙ πάντες ἀνηρώτευν τί πάθοι κακόν.

(‘The neatherds came, the shepherds came, and goatherds, and all asked what ailed him.’) Virgil, Eclogues x 19–30 and Sidney, A Pastorall Elegie ll. 199–210. Cp. also Spenser, Astrophel ll. 199– 210: Hereof when tydings far abroad did passe, The shepheards all which loued him full deare, And sure full deare of all he loued was, Did thether flock to see what they did heare. And when that pitteous spectacle they vewed, The same with bitter teares they all bedewed. And euery one did make exceeding mone, With inward anguish and great griefe opprest:

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Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent; The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame 265 Over his living head like Heaven is bent, An early but enduring monument, Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song In sorrow; from her wilds Ierne sent The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong, 270 And love taught grief to fall like music from his tongue.

XXXI. Midst others of less note, came one frail Form, And euery one did weep and waile, and mone, And meanes deviz’d to shew his sorrow best. That from that houre since first on grassie greene Shepheards kept sheep, was not like mourning seen. But S.’s phrase mountain shepherds is also more pointed in complimenting Keats’s Endymion, who was a mountain shepherd. The successive portraits in stanzas xxx–xxxiv also suggest the succession of inmates described in Thomson’s Castle of Indolence I lvii–lxix. came,] 1829 (Forman 1876–7 iii 20 also adopts a comma); came Adonais (1821), Adonais (1829), 1839, Knerr. For S.’s drafts for further possible stanzas in this section of the poem see Unused stanzas for Adonais (Longman iv 331–45). 263. sere .  .  . mantles] The word ‘sere’ occurs in l. 2 of Lycidas, and ‘mantle’ in ll. 104 and 192 (sere  =  withered); magic mantles perhaps puns on Gk μάντις, ‘prophet, soothsayer’, as in Hellas l. 44, in the phrase ‘prophet’s robe’. The phrase possibly also suggests Shakespeare’s Prospero and his special powers. 264. The Pilgrim of Eternity] Byron. Peacock (Peacock Works viii 80) recalled of S. that, He often repeated to me, as applicable to himself, a . . . passage from Childe Harold: — — On the sea The boldest steer but where their ports invite: But there are wanderers o’er Eternity, Whose bark drives on and on, and anchor’d ne’er shall be. Byron’s lines are from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III lxx, and themselves recall Paradise Lost ii 148: ‘Those thoughts that wander through eternity’. See also lines 488–92 and note. Byron was not in fact an admirer of Keats, and was indeed hostile, though after Keats’s death he came to share S.’s admiration of Hyperion (see headnote). 266. Byron published Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Cantos I and II in 1812 at the age of 24, and the poem’s fame and success were still growing with the publication of the fourth and final Canto in 1818. 268–70. These lines refer to Thomas Moore, whose sweetly lyrical Irish Melodies, many set to Irish tunes and implicitly nationalist in sentiment, were hugely popular in their day. Moore is not known to have had any connection with or interest in Keats, but his presence as a mourner marks S.’s conviction that true poets, and popular poets, have cause to mourn Keats’s passing whether they know it or not, because his death is a serious loss to the whole tradition. For S. and Moore see PB3, notes to the ‘Dedication. To Thomas Brown’ (Longman iii 83–91). 268. Ierne] The ancient Greek name for Ireland, and often used from the eighteenth century in nationalist contexts. 271–4. See Unused stanzas for Adonais S ll. 1–5. 271. Midst]’Midst Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839. one frail Form] S. himself; cp. Taaffe’s ‘Autobiography’: His [S.’s] unquenchable courage contrasted strangely with his feeble frame and girlish voice .  .  . Although thin he was not tall and looked about 30 — having the Spirit of an

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A phantom among men; companionless As the last cloud of an expiring storm Whose thunder is its knell; he, as I guess, 275 Had gazed on Nature’s naked loveliness, Actaeon-like, and now he fled astray With feeble steps o’er the world’s wilderness, And his own thoughts, along that rugged way, Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.

XXXII. 280 A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift — A Love in desolation masked; — a Power Girt round with weakness; — it can scarce uplift The weight of the superincumbent hour; It is a dying lamp, a falling shower, 285 A breaking billow; — even whilst we speak

heroical man in a boyish frame; not but there was something wizened in his freckled face — or if you will withered — something of the faded flower indication of past sufferings or ominous of future ones, or both. So it frequently struck me; which grieved me, for I loved him. (R. H. Fogle, The Imagery of Keats and Shelley, 45) 272. companionless] Perhaps suggesting S.’s alienation from Mary following the death of their children. 273. storm] storm, 1839. 274–9. Actaeon saw Artemis bathing and was punished by being turned to a stag; he was then hunted down and torn apart by his own hounds. See PU I 454–7 and note. S.’s self-description here suggests that he conceives of himself as destroyed by the consequences of his own ideas, or that his vision of the underlying beauty in nature has caused him to be pursued to destruction by his desire for an unattainable ideal (such a fate as befalls the protagonist of Alastor). Cp. Epipsychidion 272–5. 280–1. These lines are similar to the opening two lines of Pantherlike Spirit! beautiful and swift (Longman iii 329–31, no. 307); see headnote to that poem. 280. pardlike] pard-like 1829. Cp. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ l. 32: ‘Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards’. As various commentators have noted, S.’s self-portrait in this and the following stanza represents him in ‘the apparel of a devotee of Bacchus’ (Scrivener 278); pardlike thus recalls the leopards believed to have drawn the chariot of Bacchus, and the panther which was sacred to the god. With this line Taaffe ‘Annotations’ cps Inferno i 32: ‘una lonza leggiera e presta molto’ (‘a panther, nimble, light’). 281–2. a Power/Girt round with weakness] Cp. Leigh Hunt’s letter to S. of 6 September 1819, describing a painting of Christ by Raphael: ‘that self-sustained excess of gentleness, — that extreme of weakness, meeting, on the very strength of it’s extreme, with power, — ’ (SC vi 887). M. H. Abrams (Natural Supernaturalism (1971) 440) notes that this passage ‘like others of Shelley’s self-descriptions . . . is an adaptation of a New Testament paradox, “for my strength is made perfect in weakness” ’. 281. A Love in desolation masked] Cp. Hyperion i 102–3: ‘Who had power/To make me desolate?’. The paradoxical proximity of love and despair is a recurring motif in S.; see ll. 208–16 and note. 283. A metrically odd line. GM suggests it should be ‘stressed The weíght of the súperíncúmbent hóur’. superincumbent] I.e. ‘lying upon’. 285. billow; —] Misprinted in Adonais (1821), where the em dash has dropped to form a low line.

694

shelley: selected poems Is it not broken? On the withering flower The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.

XXXIII. His head was bound with pansies overblown, 288. break.] break 1839. 289–306. Cp. An Ode (‘Arise, arise, arise!’) (Longman iii 162–8, no. 244) ll. 29–35. 289–97. S. appears in this stanza as a Bacchant, carrying the thyrsus, or ivy-wreathed spear tipped with a pine cone, traditionally a fertility symbol but here replaced by a cypress cone for mourning (cp. e.g. Faerie Queene I i 8 l. 9: ‘the Cypresse funerall’). Cp. the passage describing the procession of ‘Bacchus and his crew’ in Endymion iv 188–272, and especially 209–10: ‘Within his car, aloft, young Bacchus stood,/Trifling his ivy-dart’. In classical culture the ivy is a conventional emblem for the poet (e.g. Horace, Odes I i 29–30: ‘Me doctarum hederae praemia frontium/dis miscent superis’ (‘As for me, the ivy crown, the reward of poetic brows, puts me in the company of the gods above’)), and the thyrsus was associated with poets as well as Bacchants (e.g. Lucretius, De Re. Nat. i 922–3: ‘nec me animi fallit quam sint obscura; sed acri/percussit thyrso laudis spes magna meum cor’ (‘Nor do I fail to see in mind how dark are the ways; but a great hope has smitten my heart with the sharp spur of fame’, trans. Cyril Bailey)). Cp. Plato, Ion: For the authors of those great poems which we admire, do not attain to excellence through the rules of any art, but they utter their beautiful melodies of verse in a state of inspiration, and, as it were, possessed by a spirit not their own. Thus the composers of lyrical poetry create those admired songs of theirs in a state of divine insanity, like the Corybantes [dancing followers of Cybele, goddess of nature], who lose all control over their reason in the enthusiasm of the sacred dance; and, during this supernatural possession, are excited to the rhythm and harmony which they communicate to men. Like the Bacchantes, who, when possessed by the God draw honey and milk from the rivers, in which, when they come to their senses, they find nothing but simple water. For the souls of the poets, as poets tell us, have this peculiar ministration in the world. They tell us that these souls, flying like bees from flower to flower, and wandering over the gardens and the meadows and the honey-flowing fountains of the Muses, return to us laden with the sweetness of melody; and arrayed as they are in the plumes of rapid imagination, they speak truth. For a poet is indeed a thing ethereally light, winged, and sacred, nor can he compose anything worth calling poetry until he becomes inspired, and, as it were, mad, or whilst any reason remains in him. (S.’s trans.; Julian vii 238) S. was no doubt aware of the identification in classical culture of Adonis with Dionysus; e.g. Plutarch, Moralia IV v 671. 289–90. pansies overblown,/And faded violets] Pansies (pensées, i.e. thoughts) and violets are associated with memory, here fading in sympathy with the dead Keats and with the mourning of nature and the other mourners in the poem. Cp. Hamlet IV v 176–86: ‘there is pansies, that’s for thoughts . . . I would give you some violets, but they wither’d all when my father died. They say’a made a good end’; also Lycidas ll. 142–8: Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies, The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine, The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet, The glowing violet The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine, With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, And every flower that sad embroidery wears

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290 And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue; And a light spear topped with a cypress cone, Round whose rude shaft dark ivy tresses grew Yet dripping with the forest’s noonday dew, Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart 295 Shook the weak hand that grasped it; of that crew He came the last, neglected and apart; A herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter’s dart.

These lines themselves lie behind ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ ll. 41–50: I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild — White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets covered up in leaves; And mid-May’s eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. 289. His head was bound] The classical convention of poets wearing flowers and foliage in their hair (e.g. Virgil, Eclogues x 19–25) was sometimes imitated by nineteenth-century poets, e.g. as recounted of S. himself at Marlow ‘rather fantastically arrayed . . . on his head . . . a wreath of what in Marlow we call “old man’s beard” and wild flowers intermixed’ (Dowden Life ii 120). Woodhouse recorded a story that ‘As Keats and Leigh Hunt were taking their wine together after dinner at the house of the latter, the whim seized them to crown themselves with laurel after the fashion of the elder Bards’, and Keats wrote at least two sonnets about the episode, including ‘On Receiving a Laurel Crown from Leigh Hunt’; see John Keats, The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard, 3rd edn (1988, rptd 2006) 580, and Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (1963) 137–40. overblown] over-blown, Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839. 291. cone,] cone; Knerr. 292–3. Cp. Endymion iv 209–11: Within his car, aloft, young Bacchus stood, Trifling his ivy-dart, in dancing mood, With sidelong laughing 292. rude] rough. ivy tresses] ivy-tresses Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839; distinctly two words in the draft in Nbk 15 (cp. BSM xiv 196–7). 297. The image recalls Cowper’s famous lines in The Task iii 108–11: I was a stricken deer that left the herd Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt My panting side was charg’d when I withdrew To seek a tranquil death in distant shades. The description in As You Like It II i 33–4 of ‘a poor sequester’d stag,/That from the hunter’s aim had ta’en a hurt’ lies behind Cowper’s image. S.’s own image may have in mind William Hodge’s painting of the scene for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, engraved by Samuel Middiman; a copy of the engraving

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All stood aloof, and at his partial moan Smiled through their tears; well knew that gentle band 300 Who in another’s fate now wept his own — As in the accents of an unknown land He sang new sorrow; sad Urania scanned

hung in Leigh Hunt’s room in Lisson Grove, and is mentioned in Hunt’s first letter from London to S. in Italy, 24 April 1818 (Hunt Correspondence i 118). deer] deer, Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839. 298. partial moan] ‘Biased lament’, i.e. on the side of Keats. 299. Smiled through their tears] Cp. Iliad vi 484: δακρυόεν γελάσασα (‘smiling through tears’). 300. S. affirms that his elegy for Keats also addresses the circumstances of his own case as a vulnerable and unappreciated English poet, but at the same time aligns his elegy with the acknowledged tradition of such self-reference in elegy, as in Bion’s Lament for Adonis, Moschus’s for Bion, Spenser’s for Sidney, and Milton’s for King. Who] ‘Who it was who’ (GM). own —] Nbk 15 (cp. BSM xiv 18–19); own; Adonais (1821), Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839, Knerr. The MS  dash is clear and emphatic, and clarifies the grammar. 301. This line offers a range of possible interpretations: S. may be thinking of the un-English idiom of his poem’s Greek form; he may refer to the circumstance of an English elegy written in the foreign context of Italy; or he may perhaps be implying that his idealism, and also his commitment to poetry as his medium of expression, are alien to the hostile cultural context in which Keats had suffered. Cp. S.’s prose fragment On Love: I know not the internal constitution of other men, or even of thine whom I now address. I see that in some external attributes they resemble me, but when misled by that appearance I have thought to appeal to something in common and unburthen my inmost soul to them I have found my language misunderstood like one in a distant and savage land. (Reiman (2002) 503) S.’s phrasing in the poem seems influenced by 1 Corinthians xiv 2 (the whole chapter is of interest): ‘For he that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men, but unto God: for no man understandeth him; howbeit in the spirit he speaketh mysteries’. GM conjectured that S.’s sense understands As to mean ‘as if ’, and that the line might be glossed ‘As if in a language foreign to Urania’, i.e. she only recognises genuine poets, and S. himself is a failure as a poet and the goddess is consequently deaf to him. land] 1829, 1839; land, Adonais (1821), Adonais (1829), Knerr. 302. He sang new sorrow] Cp. Moschus, Lament for Bion l. 75: υἱέα δακρύεις καινῷ δ’ ἐπὶ πένθεϊ τάκη (‘Now for another son again thou weepest, and wastest with a new grief’). The new sorrow is presumably either the recent sorrow of Keats’s death, or a further sorrow in the series that had afflicted S. including the death of his first wife Harriet late in 1816, the death of his two infant children in Italy, and his subsequent estrangement from Mary. sang] Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839; sung Adonais (1821), Knerr. Another odd crux. On the face of it another presumably unauthorised alteration in Adonais (1829) which carries through to 1839; but sang is clear in the draft in Nbk 15, written above murmured canc. (cp. BSM xiv 18–19; see headnote). Forman 1876–7, Woodberry 1893, Dowden 1891, Hutchinson, Webb (1995), Reiman (2002) and Major Works read sung; Rossetti 1870, Rossetti 1878, and Butter (1970) read sang. Urania] Urania makes no further appearance in the poem after this line.

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The Stranger’s mien, and murmured: “who art thou?” He answered not, but with a sudden hand 305 Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow, Which was like Cain’s or Christ’s — Oh! that it should be so!

XXXV. What softer voice is hushed over the dead? Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown? What form leans sadly o’er the white death-bed, 310 In mockery of monumental stone,

305–6. Made . . . so!] ‘Cain had been branded with the same infamy as Christ — oh, that so little distinction should be made between the worst and the best of men! (S. is not claiming to be either, but is saying that his own infamy is meaningless, because attached without discrimination)’ (GM). Cp. L&C 370–8: The darkness lingering o’er the dawn of things, Was Evil’s breath and life: this made him strong To soar aloft with overshadowing wings; And the great Spirit of Good did creep among The nations of mankind, and every tongue Cursed, and blasphemed him as he passed; for none Knew good from evil, though their names were hung In mockery o’er the fane where many a groan, As King, and Lord, and God, the conquering Fiend did own For Cain’s curse see note to l. 151. S.’s friend John Taaffe had warned him of the possible consequences of including such language in the poem (see headnote), but S. declined to heed the advice: ‘I am afraid that I must allow the obnoxious expressions if such they are, to which you so kindly advert, in the Poem itself, to stand as they are. — The introduction of the name of Christ as an antithesis to Cain is surely any thing but irreverence or sarcasm. — I think when you read the passage again, you will acquit it of any such tendency’ (L ii 306; see headnote). 306. Christ’s —] Christ’s, — Adonais (1829), 1829; Christ’s. 1839. 307. What softer voice] The voice is that of Leigh Hunt; suggestions that S. intends Joseph Severn as the subject of this stanza are clearly mistaken, as S.’s Preface to Adonais is at pains to make clear that Severn does not figure in the poem. 310. Cp. Hyperion i 1–4: ‘Deep in the shady sadness of a vale . . . Sat grey-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone’, and 85–6: ‘And still these two were postured motionless,/Like natural sculpture in cathedral cavern’. There is perhaps also a glancing allusion to ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.

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The heavy heart heaving without a moan? If it be He, who, gentlest of the wise, Taught, soothed, loved, honoured the departed one; Let me not vex, with inharmonious sighs 315 The silence of that heart’s accepted sacrifice.

XXXVI. Our Adonais has drunk poison — oh! What deaf and viperous murderer could crown Life’s early cup with such a draught of woe? The nameless worm would now itself disown: 320 It felt, yet could escape the magic tone Whose prelude held all envy, hate, and wrong, But what was howling in one breast alone, Silent with expectation of the song, Whose master’s hand is cold, whose silver lyre unstrung.

314. sighs] sighs, 1829, 1839, Knerr. 315. Hunt’s sacrifice is in silence perhaps because S. includes him as a mourner not in his guise as poet, but as the friend who had done most to nurture Keats’s career at its outset, and who took responsibility for much of his care in the months of Keats’s last illness leading up to his departure from England. S.’s inclusion of Hunt amongst the mourners is also a defiant gesture towards the critics who had seized on Keats’s association with Hunt as a ground for their hostility to Keats’s poetry (see headnote). 316–24. This stanza is modelled on the passage from Moschus, Lament for Bion 109–12, which forms the epigraph to S.’s Preface to his poem (see note). From this point on S.’s poem offers no further clear allusion to the Greek pastoral poets. 316. On the various causes of the death of Adonais mentioned in the poem, see note to ll. 11–12. Poison, like the draught of woe of l. 318, has Keatsian associations, as in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ ll. 1–2: ‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk’, and ‘Ode on Melancholy’ ll. 1–4: No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf ’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine: Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kissed By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine 317. deaf and viperous murderer] The critic in the Quarterly; deaf to Keats’s verse, and viperous because poisonously hostile. The adder was conventionally supposed to be deaf; cp. Psalms lviii 4–5: ‘Their poison is like the poison of a serpent: they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear; Which will not hearken to the voice of charmers, charming never so wisely’. and] and, Adonais (1821); an obvious misprint corrected in all subsequent eds. 319. nameless worm] The Quarterly’s critic was anonymous. 320–3. Keats’s prelude, Endymion, was so obviously promising as to silence detractors by the expectation of the song that would come with Keats’s artistic maturity. S.’s accusation that the sole exception to this was the Quarterly’s reviewer (what was howling in one breast alone) was in fact unfounded as Keats had attracted fiercer criticism in other journals (see headnote). 321. held] ‘Captivated’ (GM), as by the magic tone of the preceding line. 324. Keats will never now fulfil the promise of his lyric gift. As SC v 422 n. explains, this line is not the source of the design for Keats’s gravestone (see Keats Circle i 242). It is possible that Keats sealed his letter to S. of 16 August 1820 with the Tassie’s gem, in the design of a Greek lyre with four of its eight strings broken, which was perhaps a gift from Fanny Brawne; this gem seems to be the origin

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XXXVII. 325 Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame! Live! fear no heavier chastisement from me, Thou noteless blot on a remembered name! But be thyself, and know thyself to be! And ever at thy season be thou free 330 To spill the venom when thy fangs o’erflow: Remorse and Self-contempt shall cling to thee; Hot Shame shall burn upon thy secret brow, And like a beaten hound tremble thou shalt — as now.

XXXVIII. Nor let us weep that our delight is fled of Keats’s idea for the design he wished to be engraved on his tombstone (see Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art (1967) 101; the gem is illustrated in Plate IX (d)). silver lyre] Cp. Hyperion iii 99–102: Point me out the way To any one particular beauteous star, And I will flit into it with my lyre, And make its silvery splendour pant with bliss. 325–8. S. believed the anonymous Quarterly reviewer to be Robert Southey (see headnote), but he here declines to secure his fame by naming him in the elegy. The critic must live in the knowledge that his attempt to destroy Keats’s stature as a poet will not bring him lasting fame, only anonymous infamy, and that he is therefore destined to be merely a noteless blot on Keats’s contrasting remembered name. The tone here recalls Prometheus’s remembered curse in PU I 262–301, and perhaps also suggests the punishment of Cain in Genesis (see note to l. 151). 328. But be thyself] ‘Simply be what you are’ (GM); i.e. But is in the sense ‘only’. 329. at thy season] The Quarterly was published seasonally. 330. venom] venom, Adonais (1829), 1829. o’erflow:] Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839; o’er flow: Adonais (1821). 331. Self-contempt] Cp. PU II iv 25: ‘self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood’. 332. thy secret brow] ‘Your brow when alone’. 334–6. Cp. Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, ‘Nouember’ ll. 173–7: Why wayle we then? why weary we the Gods with playnts, As if some euill were to her betight? She raignes a goddesse now emong the saintes, That whilome was the saynt of shepheards light: And is enstalled nowe in heauens hight. Also Lycidas ll. 165–71: Weep no more, woeful shepherds weep no more, For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead, Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor, So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed, And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore, Flames in the forehead of the morning sky And ll. 182–3: ‘Now Lycidas the shepherds weep no more;/Henceforth thou art the genius of the shore’. 334. our delight] I.e. Keats.

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335 Far from these carrion kites that scream below; He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead; Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now. — Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow

335. carrion kites] carrion-kites 1829, 1839. Cp. 2 Henry VI V ii 10–12: match to match I have encount’red him, And made a prey for carrion kites and crows Even of the bonny beast he lov’d so well. 336. wakes or sleeps] S. is characteristically sceptical about the mode of Keats’s survival, leaving possibilities open. Cp. Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ ll. 79–80: ‘Was it a vision, or a waking dream?/Fled is that music — Do I wake or sleep?’. enduring] I.e. famous. 337. The line echoes Paradise Lost iv 828–9: ‘Ye knew me once no mate/For you, there sitting where ye durst not soar’. S. quotes the latter line in his draft and unsent letter to William Gifford, editor of the Quarterly, in which he urges Keats’s case for fair treatment from the Review, and declares his indifference to the attack on his own life and work in the Quarterly’s April 1819 review of L&C and RofI (see headnote): ‘I feel in respect to the writer in question, that “I am there sitting where he durst not soar — ” ’. The line is also quoted in DP (Reiman (2002) para. 43). Thou] The murderous reviewer of the preceding stanza. now. —] now. 1839. 338–42. the pure spirit . . . hearth of shame] From this point, Adonais develops a somewhat different idiom which draws on the vocabulary and imagery of Plato and Neoplatonic writers, and invokes the central Platonic ideas of the immortality of the soul, and the unity underlying the multiplicity of gross matter. See e.g. Notopoulos and Rogers for arguments that the thought of the poem is strictly and sustainedly Platonic; it is however difficult to demonstrate any formal rehearsal of Platonic arguments in Adonais, though the heightening tone and intensity of rhetoric certainly relies in part on Platonic sources. Plato’s Phaedo recounts the story of the death of Socrates, and concludes with his dying words after he had drunk poison to commit suicide, to the effect that he confidently believed himself to be about to recover life, rather than to die. Phaedo 80–1 considers the relation of soul to body, and argues that while the body in death persists materially for a period, before decaying, the pure soul ‘goes away to a place that is, like itself, glorious, pure, and invisible . . . it departs to a place which is, like itself, invisible, divine, immortal, and wise, where, on its arrival, happiness awaits it, and release from uncertainty and folly, from fears and uncontrolled desires, and all other human evils, and where, as they say of the initiates in the Mysteries, it really spends the rest of time with God’ (trans. Hugh Tredennick). Parallels have also been proposed in general terms with Timaeus, which talks of the soul as compounded partly of eternal substance and partly of bodily material. Some commentators have cited Plato’s Gorgias 492–3 in relation to stanzas xxxviii–xxxix, which quotes Euripides on the possibility of inverting the categories of Life and Death: ‘Who knows, if life be death, and death be life’ (trans. W. D. Woodhead); but the wider context of argument in the Platonic text is not germane to Adonais. S.’s image in ll. 338–42 may perhaps have in mind a passage in Plotinus, Ennead IV iii 9–10, which deals with ‘how soul comes to inhabit the body’, and speaks of ‘the entry . . . of a soul leaving an aerial or fiery body for one of earth’ (trans. Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page). The imagery of effluence from and return to a pure fiery origin also occurs in DP (Reiman (2002) para. 39). However, the precise terms of S.’s image suggest a reference to metallurgy; the embers of the Quarterly’s shame have refined a metal which has thus returned to its pure original state. 338. Dust to the dust!] Recalling the Anglican service for the Burial of the Dead (‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’); cp. Ecclesiastes xii 7: ‘Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it’.

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Back to the burning fountain whence it came, 340 A portion of the Eternal, which must glow Through time and change, unquenchably the same, Whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame.

XXXIX. Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep — He hath awakened from the dream of life —

339. Cp. Byron, The Prophecy of Dante iii 189–93: the scorch’d mountain, from whose burning breast A temporary torturing flame is wrung,   Shines for a night of terror, then repels   Its fire back to the hell from whence it sprung, The hell which in its entrails ever dwells. Cp. also Southey, The Curse of Kehama x 159: ‘From Heaven it came, to Heaven returneth’, quoted by S. in L i 195. 343–51. The whole of stanza xxxix recalls Spenser, ‘Dolefull Lay of Clorinda’ ll. 85–90: There liueth he in euerlasting blis, Sweet spirit neuer fearing more to die: Ne dreading harme from any foes of his, Ne fearing saluage beasts more crueltie.   Whilest we here wretches waile his priuate lack,   And with vain vowes do often call him back. This and following stanzas also suggest The Ruines of Time ll. 330–6 (of the dead Sidney): But now more happie thou, and wretched wee, Which want the wonted sweetnes of thy voice, Whiles thou now in Elisian fields so free, With Orpheus, and with Linus, and the choice Of all that euer did in rimes reioyce, Conuersest, and doost heare their heauenlie layes, And they heare thine, and thine doo better praise. 343. Again recalling lines from Lycidas (see note to ll. 334–6). Cp. also ‘Dolefull Lay of Clorinda’ ll. 67–8: ‘Ah no: it is not dead, ne can it die,/But liues for aie, in blisfull Paradise’; and Luke viii 52: ‘And all wept, and bewailed her: but he said, Weep not; she is not dead, but sleepeth’. 344–8. The idea that life is an illusion created by the gross earthly distortion of ideal forms here suggests (in vague rather than specific terms) Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in Republic. 344. This line suggests S.’s reading in Calderón, recalling Segismundo’s last speech in Act II of La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream). S. may have contributed to a translation — in what appears to be Medwin’s hand — of part of this speech in Nbk 18 p. 60 rev. (see Longman vi Appendix E, and BSM xix 124–5, pp. lxiv–viii). See also SP Conclusion 9–16.

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345 ’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s knife Invulnerable nothings. — We decay Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief 350 Convulse us and consume us day by day, And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

XL. He has outsoared the shadow of our night; Envy and calumny and hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight,

345–8. S. perhaps has in mind the dagger speech in Macbeth II ii 33–49. There is also a curious reminiscence of the famous episode on the night of 26 February 1813 when S. was apparently attacked in his house at Tan-yr-allt by mysterious assailants; there is a good discussion of this much-disputed event in Holmes 178–98. 345. who] who, 1829, 1839. 347. in mad trance] Cp. Coleridge, France: An Ode ll. 85–8:   The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain, Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game They burst their manacles and wear the name   Of Freedom, graven on a heavier chain! trance,] trance 1839. 348. Invulnerable nothings] Cp. Virgil, Aeneid vi 290–4: corripit hic subita trepidus formidine ferrum Aeneas, strictamque aciem venientibus offert; et, ni docta comes tenuis sine corpore vitas admoneat volitare cava sub imagine formae, inruat et frustra ferro diverberet umbras. (‘Here on a sudden, in trembling terror, Aeneas grasps his sword, and turns the naked edge against their coming; and did not his wise companion warn him that these were but faint, bodiless lives, flitting under a hollow semblance of form, he would rush upon them and vainly cleave shadows with steel.’) nothings. —] nothings — 1829, 1839. 352. Cp. Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, ‘Nouember’ ll. 163–6: But maugre death, and dreaded sisters deadly spight, And gates of hel, and fyrie furies forse: She hath the bonds broke of eternall night, Her soule vnbodied of the burdenous corpse. shadow] I.e. the conical shadow cast by the earth out into space (cp. PU IV 444 and note). 353. calumny] calumny, 1829, 1839.

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355 Can touch him not and torture not again; From the contagion of the world’s slow stain He is secure, and now can never mourn A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain; Nor, when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn, 360 With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

XLI. He lives, he wakes — ’tis Death is dead, not he; Mourn not for Adonais. — Thou young Dawn Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee The spirit thou lamentest is not gone; 365 Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan! Cease ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown O’er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!

XLII. 370 He is made one with Nature: there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird;

358. Cp. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ ll. 25–6: ‘Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,/Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies’. The head grown grey in vain suggests S.’s c­ onception of Southey in his apostate middle age. 361–9. This stanza specifically recalls earlier formulations in the poem: the opening formula of lamentation, O, weep for Adonais, and the first stanza’s injunction to the hour to mourn our loss are here countermanded; the tearful rainy dawn of ll. 120–2 is transformed by sunshine; and the grieving nature of stanzas xiv and xvi is enjoined to cease its mourning. 361. Death is dead, not he] ‘Death has given Keats true life and hence has negated its own nature’ (GM). 362–3. Thou young Dawn/Turn all thy dew to splendour] I.e. ‘let the sunshine transform the appearance of the dew’. 362. Dawn] Dawn, 1839. 366. Air] Air, 1829, 1839. 367. scarf] Mist or cloud. 369. its] Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839; it’s Adonais (1821). 370–2. As in stanza xvii (see note to ll. 145–9), S. appears to pair allusions to ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, night’s sweet bird, and Hyperion, in which the moan/Of thunder is a recurring motif, e.g. i 39–41: As if the vanward clouds of evil days Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear Was with its storèd thunder labouring up. Cp. also i 325, ii 121 and iii 103. 370. He is made one with Nature] Perhaps recalling the closing stanza of Keats’s ‘Ode to Psyche’, where he sustains a metaphor likening mental interiority to natural and cultivated landscapes.

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He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, 375 Spreading itself where’er that Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own; Which wields the world with never wearied love, Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

XLIII. He is a portion of the loveliness 373–4. Cp. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ stanza v: ‘I cannot see what flowers are at my feet . . .’. 374. herb] vegetation. 375. that Power] In S.’s sceptical terms this Power (which from this point on subsumes and replaces the figure of Urania) probably equates to a Unity underlying nature and thought, and driving human and natural development with a force at one with the laws of nature; Keats’s immortality consists in his assimilation to the abiding body of achieved human creativity which forms part of this Power, now that it has withdrawn his being to its own. 377. Suggesting the affinity of magnetism with human love; cp. the Moon’s lyric to the Earth in PU IV 463–6: I, thy crystal paramour, Borne beside thee by a power Like the polar paradise, Magnet-like, of lovers’ eyes never wearied] never-wearied 1829. 378. The world is sustained by the Power from beneath by gravity, and from above by the sun. 379–87. This stanza combines Platonic ideas with stylistic influences from Spenser, Coleridge, and Keats himself. S. seems to have in mind Plato’s famous and influential account of creation in Timaeus 30a: Let me tell you then why the creator made this world of generation. He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be. This is in the truest sense the origin of creation and of the world, as we shall do well in believing on the testimony of wise men. God desired that all things should be good and nothing bad, so far as this was attainable. Wherefore also finding the whole visible sphere not at rest, but moving in an irregular and disorderly fashion, out of disorder he brought order, considering that this was in every way better than the other. (Trans. Jowett in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Hamilton and Cairns) Spenser’s adaptation of the Platonic doctrine in Hymne of Heavenly Beavtie 29–56 offers parallels with S.’s phrasing in stanza xliii, and cp. also Faerie Queene III vi 37. S.’s lines also have a marked affinity with the account of ‘the Principle that bestows beauty on material things’ in Plotinus, Ennead I vi 2, ‘On Beauty’ (trans. MacKenna and Page). Cp. S.’s essay On the Devil, and Devils: But the Greek Philosophers abstained from introducing the Devil. They accounted for evil by supposing that what is called matter is eternal, and that God in making the world, made not the best that he, or even inferior intelligence could conceive; but that he moulded the reluctant and stubborn materials ready to his hand, into the nearest arrangement possible to the perfect archetype existing in his contemplation. (Julian vii 88–9)

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380 Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear His part, while the one Spirit’s plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there,

This stanza is also the passage referred to in S.’s letter to the Gisbornes of 13 July 1821: I will only remind you of Faust — my impatience for the conclusion of which is only exceeded by my desire to welcome you. — Do you observe any traces of him in the Poem [Adonais] I send you. — Poets, the best of them — are a very c­ amaeleonic race: they take the colour not only of what they feed on, but of the very leaves under which they pass. (L ii 308) The passage in question is from Mephistopheles’s speech to Faust in Goethe’s Faust Part I, 1349–58: Ich bin ein Teil des Teils, der anfangs alles war, Ein Teil der Finsternis, die sich das Licht gebar, Das stolze Licht, das nun der Mutter Nacht Den alten Rang, den Raum ihr streitig macht, Und doch gelingt’s ihm nicht, da es, so viel es strebt, Verhaftet an den Körpern klebt. Von Körpern strömt’s, die Körper macht es schön, Ein Körper hemmt’s auf seinem Gange, So, hoff ’ ich, dauert es nicht lange, Und mit den Körpern wird’s zugrunde gehn. (‘I’m part of the part that in the beginning was all, Part of the dark that gave birth to the light, Proud light that now disputes with Mother Night Her old status and space and never will Prevail however hard it strives because It clings to bodies, Streams with bodies, makes them beautiful, A body thwarts it in its onward course And so, I hope, before much longer With the bodies light too will go under.’ Trans. David Constantine) 379–80. He is a portion . . . more lovely] The dead Keats’s work has become a part of the unity of natural and human creativity to which his poetry contributed while he was a living poet. 381. the one Spirit’s plastic stress] The creative shaping force at work in nature, cognate with the Power of l. 375. Cp. Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp’ (1817 version) ll. 44–8: And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of All? 382. there,] there 1829, 1839.

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All new successions to the forms they wear; Torturing th’ unwilling dross that checks its flight 385 To its own likeness, as each mass may bear; And bursting in its beauty and its might From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven’s light.

383. I.e. all successive generations and transformations in material nature, such as the transformation of corpse into flowers in stanza xx. This line in particular, but also the thought of the stanza as a whole, is a compliment to the speech of Oceanus in Hyperion ii 173–243; cp. especially ll. 206–29: As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs; And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth In form and shape compact and beautiful, In will, in action free, companionship, And thousand other signs of purer life; So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, A power more strong in beauty, born of us And fated to excel us, as we pass In glory that old Darkness: nor are we Thereby more conquered, than by us the rule Of shapeless Chaos. Say, doth the dull soil Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed, And feedeth still, more comely than itself ? Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves? Or shall the tree be envious of the dove Because it cooeth, and hath snowy wings To wander wherewithal and find its joys? We are such forest-trees, and our fair boughs Have bred forth, not pale solitary doves, But eagles golden-feathered, who do tower Above us in their beauty, and must reign In right thereof. For’tis the eternal law That first in beauty should be first in might. wear;] wear 1839. 384–6. All occurrences of its in these lines read it’s in Adonais (1821) (corrected from Adonais (1829) on); see headnote. 384–5. ‘Forcing the stubborn material to resemble the “one Spirit” as nearly as each particular object will allow’ (GM). 385. as each mass may bear] Cp. Paradiso i 127–9: Vero è che, come forma non s’accorda molte fïate a l’intenzion de l’arte, perch’ a risponder la materia è sorda (‘Yet is it true, That as oftimes but ill accords the form To the design of art, through sluggishness Of unreplying matter’) 387. Heaven’s] Heavens’ 1839.

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XLIV. The splendours of the firmament of time May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not; 390 Like stars to their appointed height they climb And death is a low mist which cannot blot The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair, And love and life contend in it, for what 395 Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.

XLV. The inheritors of unfulfilled renown Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought, Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton 388–96. This stanza may be read as in intentional contradiction of stanza v. Cp. Pope, An Essay on Criticism 468–73: For envied wit, like Sol eclipsed, makes known The opposing body’s grossness, not its own. When first that sun too powerful beams displays, It draws up vapours which obscure its rays; But even those clouds at last adorn its way, Reflect new glories, and augment the day. 388. ‘Human “stars” in the sky of history’ (GM). 390. climb] climb, 1829, 1839; climb. Knerr. 392–6. Cp. S.’s letter of 8 June 1821 to Claire Clairmont: the only relief I find springs from the composition of poetry, which necessitates contemplations that lift me above the stormy mist of sensations which are my habitual place of abode. I have lately been composing a poem on Keats: it is better than any thing that I have yet written, & worthy both of him & of me. (L ii 296) 394. The idea of enmity between love and life anticipates TL. 395. the dead live there] ‘Creative minds of the past are a living influence on young thinkers’ (GM). there] there, 1839. 397–414. The image of the illustrious dead rising from their thrones recalls Isaiah xiv 9–10: ‘Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming: it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations’. 397–9. The dead Keats in his transcendent apotheosis as one of the permanent ‘stars’ is greeted in his new sphere by three poets, Chatterton, Sidney, and Lucan, who, like Keats, all died before maturity. 397. unfulfilled] unfulfill’d 1829. 398. their] thier Adonais (1821) (misprint corrected from Adonais (1829) on). 399–401. Thomas Chatterton was born in Bristol in 1752 and died in 1770 aged 17. His extraordinary forgeries of ‘medieval’ poetry and other pseudo-antiquarian material brought him fame and notoriety, particularly through the public controversies that raged about the quality and authenticity of his writings in the years following his death. He thereafter became a symbol in the literary culture for the artist neglected by an indifferent or hostile society. He was long believed to have committed

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400 Rose pale, his solemn agony had not Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought And as he fell and as he lived and loved Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot, Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved: 405 Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved. suicide, in despair from debt and neglect, though this view is not shared by modern commentators who consider his death to have been accidental (‘he died simply from unwisely mixing his venereal medicine with his recreational drugs’; Oxford DNB). Keats dedicated Endymion to Chatterton, and wrote an early sonnet to him (‘To Chatterton’), which, although presumably unknown to S. (it was first published in 1848 in Milnes’s Life, Letters, and Literary Remains), has some very striking affinities with stanza xliv: Thou didst die A half-blown flower which cold blasts amate. But this is past: thou art among the stars   Of highest Heaven: to the rolling spheres Thou sweetly singest (ll. 7–11) 401–4. Sir Philip Sidney (to whom S. was related on his mother’s side) was born in 1554 into a powerful English family and became a central figure in the sophisticated renaissance court culture of Elizabeth I. He was a diplomat and soldier, and in his career perhaps the greatest English writer since Chaucer, producing work of major stature in prose romance (Arcadia), literary criticism (The Defence of Poesy, read by S. and Mary while S. worked on his own DP; see Mary Jnl i 354) and poetry; his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella began the sonnet craze which produced the great sequences by Spenser and Shakespeare. Sidney’s sonnet-sequence is partly based on his love for Penelope Devereux, who eventually married another. The intensity, variety and learned sophistication of Sidney’s life established his reputation as poet, lover and soldier during his lifetime, and this reputation was confirmed by his heroic death, and by the impact of his writings when they came to be published posthumously. Sidney died from a wound received at the Battle of Zutphen at the age of 31 in 1586. His lifelong friend Fulke Greville is the source of the (almost certainly spurious) story of Sidney’s selfless fortitude in the face of death: [the mortally wounded Sidney] being thirsty with excess of bleeding, he called for drink, which was presently brought him; but as he was putting the bottle to his mouth he saw a poor soldier carried along, who had eaten his last at the same feast, ghastly casting up his eyes at the bottle; which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from his head before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man with these words: “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine”. (Life of Sir Philip Sidney (1652) ch. xii, The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, ed. John Gouws (1986) 77) S. refers to this story in his draft letter to William Godwin dated 7 August  1820 (L ii 226). In Adonais, Sidney’s presence has a special resonance in the parallel formed between Spenser’s elegy for Sidney, Astrophel (Sidney was a prominent literary patron, and his death was memorialised in verse by many leading writers of the day), and S.’s own elegy for Keats, which makes frequent allusion to Spenser. 402. fell] fell, 1829, 1839. loved] loved, 1829, 1839. 404. by his death approved] The self-composure and stoicism of Lucan’s death redeemed his treachery in the conspiracy and its aftermath. 404–5. Lucan was a member of a leading Roman family and nephew of Seneca. His anti-Virgilian ‘epic’ Pharsalia, with its republicanism and its extended lurid accounts of the horrors of war and strange

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XLVI. And many more, whose names on Earth are dark But whose transmitted effluence cannot die So long as fire outlives the parent spark, Rose, robed in dazzling immortality. 410 “Thou art become as one of us,” they cry, “It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long Swung blind in unascended majesty, Silent alone amid an Heaven of song. Assume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our throng!”

creatures, was one of the younger S.’s favourite poems (see his letter to Hogg, 22 September 1815, L i 432), although he later came to temper his admiration, e.g. in DP (Reiman (2002) para. 13). Lucan was a favoured presence at the court of Nero, but became estranged and joined the conspiracy of Piso against the emperor. The legendary courage and stoicism of his death following the failure of the conspiracy is recorded in Tacitus, Annals xv 70: Next he [Nero] ordered the destruction of Marcus Annaeus Lucanus. As the blood flowed freely from him, and he felt a chill creeping through his feet and hands, and the life gradually ebbing from his extremities, though the heart was still warm and he retained his mental power, Lucanus recalled some poetry he had composed in which he had told the story of a wounded soldier dying a similar kind of death, and he recited the very lines. These were his last words. Attempts have been made to identify these last words with a passage in the Pharsalia, but it is also possible that the passage in question was from a work of Lucan’s now lost. Tacitus’s account has been taken by some commentators as an ironic criticism of Lucan’s vanity. 406–8. Writers who have died unknown or are vilified (such as Kirke White or Godwin), whose greatness or influence will nevertheless be felt in the long perspective of history. 406. Earth] earth Adonais (1829), 1829. dark] dark, Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839. 408. A favourite image of S.’s for the long-term influence of the work of a writer unsuccessful in his own time; cp. Lines Written among the Euganean Hills ll. 256–84, and OW ll. 63–7. 410–14. Keats assumes his rightful place amongst the great poets, taking a place specifically reserved for him; S. thus honours Keats’s originality. Cp. Hyperion iii 99–102: Point me out the way To any one particular beauteous star, And I will flit into it with my lyre, And make its silvery splendour pant with bliss. See also Timaeus 41d: ‘And having made it [the universe] he [the creator] divided the whole mixture [of elements] into souls equal in number to the stars and assigned each soul to a star’ (trans. Jowett). 410. cry,] cry; 1839. 412. blind] I.e. ‘in darkness’, as in Lat. caecus, ‘devoid of light’. 413. an] a 1829, 1840. Heaven of song] Keats’s sphere has its place among those which make the music of the spheres, implying that in joining harmoniously in their music Keats takes his appropriate place in the company and tradition of great poets. 414. Vesper] The Evening Star, Hesperus, and latest member of the company of stars. The image looks back to the poem’s opening epigraph from Plato (see note), and anticipates the closing lines.

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shelley: selected poems XLVII.

415 Who mourns for Adonais? oh come forth Fond wretch! and know thyself and him aright. Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous Earth; As from a centre, dart thy spirit’s light Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might 420 Satiate the void circumference: then shrink Even to a point within our day and night; And keep thy heart light lest it make thee sink When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink;

415–23. ‘It is foolish to mourn for Adonais, when the mysterious totality both of the universe, and of the microscopic world, are so far beyond our ignorant littleness; so do not worry too much, should you find that you fear, when death approaches, that you have hoped too much for an afterlife [S.’s tone is undogmatically sceptical]’ (KE and GM). The sense of this stanza is difficult, and has attracted various efforts of paraphrase, including John Holloway (Selected Poems of Shelley (1960)): ‘a human spirit (that equally of Adonais or the mourner) can pervade the whole universe, or concentrate at a minute point, because it is essentially not material’; and Taaffe ‘Annotations’: Know thyself and Adonais — he is a freed spirit ranging through infinitude, thou art circumscribed to one narrow nook. Expand thy soul, send it for a moment beyond the world, let it clasp the ball of earth and be effused over the void . . . with such a spacious expansion that it fills the void, so you may have some notion of the home of Adonais: then, if thou canst, shrink back without shuddering into thy own little point on the earth. But be careful or thy heart will sink after having indulged in such a vision of hopes. (Fogle 49) The extreme juxtaposition of very large and very small orders of being is a major theme in PU IV (see note to ll. 236–52, and cp. Ode to Heaven and notes), and cp. S.’s letter to Mary of 1 September 1820: ‘And what, to come from the solar system to a grain of sand, shall we do. — ’ (L ii 234); see also DP: ‘The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with these emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a Universe’ (Reiman (2002) para. 40). 415. Who mourns for Adonais?] The final echo of the poem’s opening formula. forth] forth, 1829, 1839. 416. Fond wretch!] Cameron (1974) 440 forcefully argues that the poem here directly addresses the critic attacked in stanzas xxxvi–xxxvii, and that it continues to do so until the end of stanza lii, thereby effectively urging Robert Southey to consider suicide. It seems unlikely however that S. would have intended such an interpretation, and the reading is also awkward as the critic-murderer has not hitherto actually been represented as a mourner in the poem. It is still an interesting question as to when the poem does cease to address the Fond wretch (see note to ll. 451–9). Fond] Foolish. 417. pendulous] ‘Hanging suspended’ (the Earth is perhaps envisaged as depending like a pendulum from its cone of shadow; see note to l. 352). Cp. Paradise Lost iv 999–1001: Wherein all things created first he weighed, The pendulous round earth with balanced air In counterpoise 422. light] light, 1829, 1839. 423. brink;] brink· Adonais (1821); brink. Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839, and all subsequent eds including Knerr. The punctuation mark is oddly misprinted in Adonais (1821) and appears as the top dot of

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XLVIII. Or go to Rome, which is the sepulchre 425 O, not of him, but of our joy:’tis nought That ages, empires, and religions there Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought; For such as he can lend, — they borrow not Glory from those who made the world their prey; 430 And he is gathered to the kings of thought Who waged contention with their time’s decay, And of the past are all that cannot pass away.

XLIX. Go thou to Rome, — at once the Paradise, The grave, the city, and the wilderness; 435 And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise,

a colon or semicolon (see headnote for evidence that the Pisan printer worked with damaged type); the following stanza xlviii, beginning Or, can be understood as grammatically continuous with the sentence of stanza xlvii, and justifies a semicolon after brink (a reading open to debate, and the only point in the poem where a stanza does not stand grammatically self-contained as a sentence). 424–68. The poem returns at last to the actual place of Keats’s burial, although stanza vii has already emphasized that Keats died in Rome. 424. sepulchre] sepulchre, 1829, 1839. 425–7. Cp. S.’s letter to Peacock of 17 or 18 December 1818: Near [the Coliseum] is the arch of Constantine or rather the arch of Trajan, for the servile & avaricious senate of degraded Rome ordered that the monument of his predecessor should be demolished in order to dedicate one to this Christian Reptile who had crept among the blood of his own murdered family to the supreme power. It is exquisitely beautiful & perfect. — The Forum is a plain in the middle of Rome, a kind of desart full of heaps of stones & pits & though so near the habitations of men, is the most desolate place you can conceive. The ruins of temples stand in & around it, shattered columns & ranges of others complete, supporting cornices of exquisite workmanship, & vast vaults of shattered domes (laquearis) distinct with the regular compartments once filled with sculptures of ivory or brass. The temple of Jupiter & Concord, & Peace, & the Sun & the Moon, & Vesta are all within a short distance of this spot. Behold the wrecks of what a great nation once dedicated to the abstractions of the mind. (L ii 59) 425. not of him, but of our joy] I.e. only the bodily Keats, who had been personally known to his grieving friends, is buried in Rome, and not the immortal poet, who has now entered a different mode of existence. 426. religions] religions, 1839. 428–9. It is not an honour for Keats to be buried in Rome; it is an honour for Rome that he is buried there. 429. those who made the world their prey] I.e. militaristic emperors such as Trajan. 431. time’s] times’ 1840. decay,] decay. 1839. 433–41. With this stanza cp. Ever round around thee flowering (Longman iii 463–4, no. 327). 435–7. At the time of S.’s visits to Rome in 1818 and 1819 the ruins of the ancient city had been overgrown for centuries. S.’s letter to Peacock of December 1818 describes the Coliseum as changed by time into the image of an amphitheatre of rocky hills overgrown by the wild-olive the myrtle & the fig tree, & threaded by little paths which wind among its ruined stairs &

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And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress The bones of Desolation’s nakedness Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead Thy footsteps to a slope of green access 440 Where, like an infant’s smile, over the dead, A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread.

L. And grey walls moulder round, on which dull Time Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand; And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime, 445 Pavilioning the dust of him who planned This refuge for his memory, doth stand immeasurable galleries; the copse-wood overshadows you as you wander through its labyrinths  & the wild weeds of this climate of flowers bloom under your feet. The arena is covered with grass, & pierces like the skirts of a natural plain the chasms of the broken arches around. (L ii 59) See also S.’s long and beautiful description of the Baths of Caracalla ‘hidden & woven over by the wild growth of weeds & ivy’, with ‘the deformity of their vast desolation softened down by the undecaying investiture of nature’ (to Peacock, 23 March 1819; L ii 84–5). Byron describes the ruins of Rome in somewhat similar terms in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV cxliii–cxliv. 437. nakedness] nakedness, 1829. 438. the Spirit of the spot] I.e. the genius loci. 439. a slope of green access] S. describes the Protestant Cemetery in Rome in his letter to Peacock of December 1818: The English bur[y]ing place is a green slope near the walls, under the pyramidal tomb of Cestius, & is I think the most beautiful & solemn cemetery I ever beheld. To see the sun shining on its bright grass fresh when we visited it with the autumnal dews, & hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, & the coil which is stirring in the sunwarm earth & to mark the tombs mostly of women & young people who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep. Such is the human mind  & so it peoples with its wishes vacancy & oblivion. (L ii 59–60) Six months after writing this passage S.’s son William was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, and S.’s own ashes were interred there (in their present position) in March 1823. access] access, Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839. 440. like an infant’s smile] William Shelley died of malaria in Rome on 7 June 1819, aged 3½; the second anniversary of his death would have fallen within the composition period of the later stanzas of Adonais. S.’s fragmentary lines on his son’s death (Longman iii 185–8, no. 254) suggest that he may have transferred the emotional intensity of his grief for his son on to Keats, whom he never knew well (see headnote). dead,] dead 1839. 441. spread.] spread, 1839. 443. brand] In the sense of a ‘piece of wood that is or has been burning on the hearth’ (OED I 2). 444–6. The Roman senator Gaius Cestius Epulo is known only for the pyramidal tomb which is his memorial; by S.’s day the structure had long since been incorporated into a gate of the city walls, which had themselves come to form part of the cemetery boundary.

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Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath, A field is spread, on which a newer band Have pitched in Heaven’s smile their camp of death, 450 Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath.

LI. Here pause: these graves are all too young as yet To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned Its charge to each; and if the seal is set, Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind, 455 Break it not thou! too surely shalt thou find Thine own well full, if thou returnest home, Of tears and gall. From the world’s bitter wind Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb. What Adonais is, why fear we to become?

LII. 460 The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly; 447. Like flame transformed to marble] Cp. Timaeus 56b: ‘Let it be agreed, then, both according to strict reason and according to probability, that the pyramid is the solid which is the original element and seed of fire’ (trans. Jowett); see Wasserman 493 for interesting commentary on this passage. beneath,] beneath 1839. 449. camp of death] A serious pun on Italian camposanto, ‘burial-ground’ (literally ‘sacred field’), as in the famous central square in Pisa where S. lived. death,] Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839; death 1821. 451–9. This stanza presumably marks the point at which the poem ceases to address the Fond wretch of l. 416, and S. now turns to address himself in the remaining stanzas. He is clearly thinking of the death of his son, and of his resolve not to break the seal on his own grief for William. Mary had not recovered from the blow of her son’s death, and these lines also hint at the persisting bitterness and estrangement it brought about in S.’s relationship with Mary. 451. Here] Here, Adonais (1829), 1829. 452. outgrown] Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839; out grown 1821. 457. bitter wind] Perhaps a serious pun on malaria, Italian ‘bad air’. 460–8. ‘Just as white sunlight through stained glass separates into many colours, so the eternal Unity breaks up into the many lives and objects of earthly existence. Colour, though beautiful, “stains” white light; death shatters our separate lives, but reunites us with “the One”. All the beauty and art of ancient Rome is inadequate to convey this total glory embodied in it’ (GM). The language, imagery, and thought in this stanza are in a Platonic idiom, but cannot persuasively be referred with precision to any particular source. ‘Shelley’s statement [in these lines] of the essence of Platonism and the imagery through which he expresses it constitute the best epigrammatic expression of Platonism in English poetry’ (Notopoulos 298); but see Cameron (1974) 442 for a trenchant statement of the view that S. nowhere explicitly commits to an adherence in the strict sense to Platonic doctrine as such (see headnote). 460. ‘The Unity pervading all earthly things is eternal; the things themselves are transient’ (GM). The concept of a Unity underlying the ‘many’ of the material universe is fundamental in Platonism; cp. e.g. Phaedrus 266b: ‘whenever I deem another man able to discern an objective unity and plurality, I follow “in his footsteps where he leadeth as a god” [quoting Odyssey v 193]’ (trans. R. Hackforth). Cp. DP (Reiman (2002) para. 4): ‘A Poet participates in the eternal, the infinite and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not’. 461. forever] for ever Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839. This line has a clear affinity with the Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic.

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Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments. — Die, 465 If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! Follow where all is fled! — Rome’s azure sky, Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

LIII. Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart? 470 Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here 462–3. The image is a compliment to Keats, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ 208–25 (stanzas xxiv and xxv): A casement high and triple-arched there was, All garlanded with carven imag’ries Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass, And diamonded with panes of quaint device, Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damasked wings; And in the midst,’mong thousand heraldries, And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, A shielded scutcheon blushed with blood of queens and kings. Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast, As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon; Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together pressed, And on her silver cross soft amethyst, And on her hair a glory, like a saint: She seemed a splendid angel, newly dressed, Save wings, for Heaven — Porphyro grew faint; She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint. 466–8. ‘All of the various components of the cultural glories of Rome cannot in themselves adequately convey the true glory of that culture as a whole [i.e. the One is greater than the sum of the many, but cannot be directly apprehended]’. In this paraphrase the comma after words in l. 467 is retained (as it is in all eds), implying that one of the glories of Rome is its literature; without a comma however the sense would be more straightforwardly ‘words cannot adequately express the whole glory . . .’; cp. On Life: ‘We are on that verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of — how little we know’ (Reiman (2002) 508). S. in these lines perhaps recalls Thomson, Liberty: A Poem i 100–6: sculpture lives around, and Asian hills Lend their best stores to heave the pillared dome; All that to Roman strength the softer touch Of Grecian art can join. But language fails To paint this sun, this centre of mankind; Where every virtue, glory, treasure, art, Attracted strong, in heightened lustre met. 469–71. Cp. Montaigne, Essays I xix ‘That to Philosophie, is to learne how to die’: ‘To what end recoile you from it, if you cannot goe backe? You have seene many who have found good in death, ending thereby many many miseries’ (trans. John Florio (3rd edn 1632)). 470. are gone before] I.e. ‘are dead already’.

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They have departed; thou shouldst now depart! A light is passed from the revolving year, And man, and woman; and what still is dear Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither. 475 The soft sky smiles, — the low wind whispers near: ’Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither, No more let Life divide what Death can join together.

LIV. That Light whose smile kindles the Universe, That Beauty in which all things work and move, 480 That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love Which through the web of being blindly wove By man and beast and earth and air and sea, Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of

472. the revolving year] Cp. l. 155. 476. thither] I.e. towards the region where Adonais now dwells. 477. Recalling Matthew xix 6: ‘What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder’. Cp. also Alastor 366–9. 478–86. ‘The eternal Beauty, though dimmed by birth into earthly existence, shines on through all earthly things according to how closely they resemble that Beauty (the reckless plural verb [are in l. 484] and mixed metaphor reinforce the paradox)’ (GM). In this complicated sentence the subject of the singular main verb beams in l. 485 is the appositional sequence Light . . . Beauty . . . Benediction . . . Love, i.e. these are all terms for the same thing understood in its various modes of being (and a conception equating with the Power of l. 375 and Spirit of l. 381). The phrase as each are mirrors of in l. 484 should in strictly grammatical terms read ‘as each is a mirror of’, with the ‘each’ referring to each item in the series man and beast and earth and air and sea in l. 483. Cp. the closing stanza of Spenser, Hymne of Heavenly Beavtie ll. 295–301: And looke at last vp to that soueraine light, From whose pure beams al perfect beauty springs, That kindleth loue in euery godly spright, Euen the loue of God, which loathing brings Of this vile world, and these gay seeming things; With whose sweete pleasures being so possest, Thy straying thoughts henceforth for euer rest. S. also recalls the opening of Paradiso i 1–3: La gloria di colui che tutto move per l’universo penetra, e risplende in una parte più e meno altrove. (‘His glory, by whose might all things are mov’d, Pierces the universe, and in one part Sheds more resplendence, elsewhere less.’) 480. Cp. Epipsychidion 25: ‘Sweet Benediction in the eternal Curse!’.

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485 The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me, Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

LV. The breath whose might I have invoked in song Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven

485. thirst,] 1839; thirst; Adonais (1821), Adonais (1829), 1829, Knerr. 487. This line has been understood as a reference to OWW and its account of poetic inspiration, but it is possible that S. has in mind Alastor 18–49; alternatively, the reference may be to the might of Keats’s verse, which has been elevated to its true stature by S.’s poem; cp. Unused stanzas for Adonais R l. 1. 488–92. Recalling the opening lines of Paradiso ii (1–9): O voi che siete in piccioletta barca,   desiderosi d’ascoltar, seguiti   dietro al mio legno che cantando varca, tornate a riveder li vostri liti:   non vi mettete in pelago, ché forse,   perdendo me, rimarreste smarriti. L’acqua ch’io prendo già mai non si corse;   Minerva spira, e conducemi Appollo,   e nove Muse mi dimostran l’Orse. (‘All ye, who in small bark have following sail’d, Eager to listen, on the advent’rous track Of my proud keel, that singing cuts it’s way, Backward return with speed, and your own shores Revisit, nor put out to open sea, Where losing me, perchance ye may remain Bewilder’d in deep maze. The way I pass Ne’er yet was run: Minerva breathes the gale, Apollo guides me, and another Nine To my rapt sight the arctic beams reveal.’) The passage also suggests the lines from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that, according to Peacock, S. ‘often repeated . . . as applicable to himself ’ (see note to l. 264): on the sea,   The boldest steer but where their ports invite,   But there are wanderers o’er Eternity Whose bark drives on and on, and anchored ne’er shall be. Cameron (1974) 647 suggests a further possible influence from a passage in Chapman’s Conspiracy of Charles Duke of Byron, which S. used as the epigraph to the ‘Dedication’ of L&C (see notes to that poem). Cp. also Pope, An Essay on Criticism ll. 645–8: The mighty Stagyrite first left the shore, Spread all his sails, and durst the deeps explore; He steered securely, and discovered far, Led by the light of the Maeonian star. 488. driven] Adonais (1829), 1829, 1839; driven, Adonais (1821).

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Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng 490 Whose sails were never to the tempest given; The massy earth and sphered skies are riven! I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar; Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, The soul of Adonais, like a star, 495 Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

55  The Aziola There is an untitled draft of this poem on the ‘aziola’ (Otus scops, or scops owl) in S.’s hand in ink on one leaf of a bifolium in Box 1 f. 108 (BSM xxi 70–3). On the other leaf (f. 109) is Which like a crane its distant home pursuing (Longman v no. 413) which probably dates from autumn 1821. The recto of f. 108 includes the first of the two stanzas given, with the last two lines of the second stanza. An uncancelled line at the top of the otherwise blank verso, Bodiless voice, invisible complaint — perhaps continuous with the poem’s oblique invocation of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in ll. 14–15 (see note) — may be a rejected opening of the second stanza. There are three transcriptions by Mary. All may be based on the same, now missing holograph. The first, in Mary Copybk 1 pp. 105–6 (BSM ii 212–15), is of the opening stanza only. Although Donald H. Reiman states that ‘this partial text conforms to’ Box 1 (MYRS viii 321), it includes the word hear in l. 1 (lacking in Box 1), has the reading or rather than and in l. 9 and omits ll. 20–1. Such differences support Irving Massey’s view that the derivation of Mary Copybk 1 from Box 1 is ‘by no means certain’ (BSM ii 237). The second transcription in Mary Copybk 2 pp. 50–1 (Massey 126, 130) includes the unfinished second stanza as well as the first, and is entitled The Aziola. Alongside the title is a pencilled note in what appears to be Mary’s hand: ‘This elsewhere I believe, & somewhat different’, possibly a reference to Box 1. The third is a fair copy, now in the Morgan Library & Museum, MA 406.15 (Morgan). Its basis is likely to have been Mary Copybk 2. However, there is no authority in Box 1 or Mary Copybk 2 for the substitution of note with cry in the

489–90. Cp. Ovid, Met. xv 176–7: ‘Et quoniam magno feror aequore plenaque ventis/vela dedi’ (‘And since I  am carried on the great sea and have spread my full sails to the winds’ (Loeb translation modified)). 489. the trembling throng] Ordinary people, who never undertake a great mental or spiritual adventure. 493–5. These lines echo the poem’s opening Platonic epigraph. 494. star,] star 1829.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-55

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final line (see note to ll. 20–1). As GM remarks, ‘The poem was evidently unfinished, and Mary may have changed the last word so as to make a rhyme’. Morgan was the basis of the poem’s first publication in The Keepsake for 1829, ed. Frederic Mansel Reynolds (1828) where it appeared with It was a bright and cheerful afternoon (Longman iii, no 326) and The Tower of Famine (Longman iv, no. 370) under the heading ‘Fragments, by Percy Bysshe Shelley’. As noted in Taylor 78, 1834 was the source of one of the errors in the printing of the poem in 1839 iv 141 (see note to l. 4). There is a collation of the MS witnesses and early printings in Massey 129, 131. Mary placed this poem in ‘Poems Written in 1821’ in 1839. The scene depicted suggests it must have been written after 8 May when S. and Mary moved back to Bagni di San Giuliano from Pisa. Of the summer of that year, she recalled that the ‘aziola cooed in the quiet evening’ (1839 iv 152). The poem’s relish of seclusion (ll. 7–9) echoes S.’s letter to Claire of ?14 May: ‘The Baths, I think do me good, but especially solitude, & not seeing polite human faces, & hearing voices’ (L ii 292). However, the singing habits of the ‘aziola’ allow for the poem to have been written at any point up to 4 August when S. left for Ravenna. In support of a June–July date, it is worth noting that Nora Crook and B. C. Barker-Benfield observe that the physical characteristics of the Box 1 bifolium are similar to those of the paper used in those months for a ‘rough transcript’ of Valperga and for Edward Williams’s draft of Act IV of The Promise; or, A year, a month, and a day (MSW iii 328; BSM xxiii 82). The small, greyish brown scops owl, one of whose breeding grounds is southern Europe, is largely nocturnal and ‘da aprile ai primi d’agosto si ode il suo monotono grido chiù chiù in ogni campagna ricca d’alberi e nei boschi’ (from April to the beginning of August it sings its monotonous cry in countryside rich in trees and in woods) (Enciclopedia italiana (1930) v 35). The sound it makes is mentioned in Odyssey v 66, Theocritus, Idylls i 136 and Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters ix 391 b–c. ‘Ouida’ (Marie Louise de la Ramée), a resident of Tuscany later in the nineteenth century, noted that ‘to the peasantry’ these owls ‘are known as the chiu [il chiù = screech] . . . I have never found any Italian who called this owl aziola’. In Italian, its name is l’assiolo (neither ‘aziola’, an unfamiliar name dramatised in the first stanza of the poem, nor any Anglicised version of the Italian word is recorded in OED; see H. T. Wharton, ‘Note on “The Identification of ‘The Aziola’ of Shelley” ’, The Shelley Society’s Papers, Pt II (1888), 343–7 (343)). ‘Ouida’ describes its cry thus: The note is very far-reaching, deep and sweet, clear and melodious, one single note sounding at intervals of thirty or forty seconds through the still air of the summer night. It is said to be a love call, but I doubt it, for it may be heard long after the pairing season; the bird gives it forth when he is flying as when he is sitting still, and it is unmistakably a note of contentment. Nor do I think it is sad, as Shelley terms it; it has a sound as of pleased meditation in it, and it has a mellow thrill which, once heard, cannot be forgotten ever. (‘Shelley’, in Views and Opinions (1895) 254–80 (254–5)) The sweetness of the owl’s sad cry in S.’s poem recalls the description of the nightingale’s song as ‘Most musical, most melancholy!’ in Milton, Il Penseroso l. 62. The poem’s apparently irregular form may result from its unfinished state. It comprises lines of between two and five, mostly anapaestic, feet and its rhyme-scheme is aabccdbdbece and abaabbcdd. There is some justice in Reiman’s description of it as a ‘ “conversation poem” ’ (MYRS viii 322). Betty T. Bennett compares the treatment of the ‘aziola’ in S.’s poem and Mary’s writings in ‘Mary Shelley’s letters: the public/private self’, in The Cambridge Companion to Mary

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Shelley, ed. Esther Schor (2003) 211–25 (221–2). In Valperga, The Last Man and ‘The Sisters of Albano’, its cry heralds fine weather (see MSW iii 108, 186; MSW iv 141; MSCTS 51). Text from Morgan. A  comma has been added in l. 20 (after ‘Aziola’) and, following Box 1, an exclamation mark in l. 9. Dashes have been removed from the ends of ll. 6, 12, 16 and 19, and a colon from l. 11. Indentation follows the MS. Published in The Keepsake for 1829, ed. Frederic Mansel Reynolds (1828) 162; MYRS viii 324–7 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

The Aziola ‘Do you not hear the Aziola cry? Methinks she must be nigh —’ Said Mary as we sate In dusk, ere stars were lit or candles brought — 5 And I who thought This Aziola was some tedious woman Asked, ‘Who is Aziola?’ How elate I felt to know that it was nothing human, No mockery of myself to fear or hate! — 10 And Mary saw my soul, And laughed and said — ‘Disquiet yourself not, ’Tis nothing but a little downy owl.’ Sad Aziola, many an eventide Thy music I had heard 15 By wood and stream, meadow and mountainside, And fields and marshes wide, Such as nor voice, nor lute, nor wind, nor bird The soul ever stirred — Unlike and far sweeter than them all. 20 Sad Aziola, from that moment, I Loved thee and thy sad cry.

¶ 55. 1 not hear the] not the Box 1. 4. ere stars] ere the stars 1834, 1839, 1840. 7–9. elate . . . hate] ‘S. describes in advance his relief at being told it was only an owl’ (GM). 9. or] and Box 1, 1839, 1840. 12. downy owl] Locock 1911 i 524 cps Keats, ‘Ode on Melancholy’ l. 7. 14–15. Cp. Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ ll. 75–7: thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side 19. them] they 1839, 1840. 20–1. Sad aziola, from one moment I/Loved thee  & thy sad note. — Box  1; Sad Aziola from that moment I/Loved thee and thy sad note Mary Copybk 2.

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56  Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon Napoleon Bonaparte died on St Helena on 5 May 1821. Reports of his death, reproduced from London and Paris newspapers dated 5 and 7 July respectively, first appeared in Galignani’s Messenger, 1987 (9 July  1821) 1–2 and 4. According to the Times, 11290 (5 July 1821) 2 the news had reached London on 4 July. Claire, staying in Livorno at the time, noted the cause — reported in similar terms in an extract from the New Times printed in the 9 July issue of Galignani’s Messenger — in her jnl entry for the 16th of that month (and so must have known before then that he had died): ‘The Signor Duci comes in the Evening & relates the arrival of official intelligence that Buonaparte died of cancer in the stomach on the 5th of last May; the same disease which destroyed his father’ (Claire Jnl 242). The title indicates that Napoleon’s death was communicated to S. by word of mouth rather than from a printed source and that the poem was occasioned immediately rather than, as allowed for by Donald H. Reiman (MYRS iii 85), written at some later point — possibly at Byron’s prompting — before 11 November, when it was sent with Hellas to Ollier for publication. He may have heard the news during one of the visits he made to Pisa from Bagni di San Giuliano on 7, 11, and 15 July (Mary Jnl i 373–4). The position of the rough, untitled draft of the poem in Nbk 19 (in ink on pp. 206 rev. — 202 rev.) is compatible with a date of composition around such a time. In the reversed direction of the nbk as it is now paginated, the draft follows a blank page then a blank stub after The Boat on the Serchio (Longman iv 350–68, no. 406) which was composed between late June 1821 and the middle of the following month (see headnote). The leaf of which only the stub remains may, Nora Crook suggests, have been used for a first attempt (BSM xii p. lii, 368). Following S.’s instruction to Ollier that ‘The ode to Napoleon to print at the end’ (L ii 365), the poem was placed after Hellas in 1822. The 1822 text was based on the transcript by Mary on both sides of a leaf now in the Huntington Library (HM 330, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California). Since HM 330 (HM 330) is copied on paper very likely to be from the same stock as A capering, squalid, squalling one (Longman v no. 419) and Edward Williams’s press copy of Hellas (HM 329), both of which date from early November (see headnotes), Mary’s transcript was probably made at this time too. As Reiman notes, the status of HM 330 as press copy is confirmed by ink marks that show it to have been handled by a printer and there is no reason to doubt his conjecture that the numerical headings for the first three stanzas, added in different ink, are in S.’s hand. However, Reiman’s claim (MYRS iii 86) that HM 330 derives from Nbk 19 is questionable given the roughness of the draft, especially the final stanza on pp. 203 rev.—202 rev. It is more likely that the basis of Mary’s press copy was a now-lost intermediate draft by S., as Crook proposes (BSM xii p. lii). HM 330, not amongst the MSS returned to Mary after S.’s death by Ollier, was sold at the auction of the latter’s papers on 19 July 1877, as recorded in The Academy xii (28 July 1877) 89. The text of the poem in 1839 derived from 1834, which itself was based upon 1829 (see the note to l. 33). As noted by Reiman (MYRS iii 87), the prefixing of the title with the word ‘Lines’ in 1829 has no authority. S.’s view that Napoleon perverted the course of revolutionary change, evident in the poem’s closing lines, is a continual feature of his writings. He is described as ‘like a meteor on the midnight blast,/Or an evil spirit brooding over gore’ in Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things (1811) (Longman vi Appendix A), and as a ‘tyrant’ in To the Emperors of Russia and Austria (Longman i, no. 44) l. 44 and Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte (Longman i, no. 112) l. 1. The assessment in PVR is in a similar vein:

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the lion of the Monarchy of France with his teeth drawn & his claws pared, now sits maintaining the formal likeness of a most imperfect & insecure dominion. The usurpation of Bonaparte, and then the Restoration of the Bourbons were the shapes in which this reaction clothed itself and the heart of every lover of liberty was struck as with palsy by the succession of these events. (SC vi 980) There are further treatments of Napoleon in OL (Longman iii 378–418, no. 322) 174–80, Unused stanzas for Adonais F (Longman iv, no. 403 Appendix), He has made/The wilderness a city of pavilions (Longman iv, no. 385) and TL 215–27. Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon offers, even by S.’s own standards of lyric innovation, a most remarkable and demanding formal complexity (as noted in Chernaik 160 n. 4 and Rognoni 1644). The five eight-line stanzas deploy in total only three rhyme sounds, initiated in the first stanza by Earth, old, and fled. The first, third, fourth and fifth stanzas deploy these sounds in the pattern abbabbcc, but the second stanza varies slightly from this with bababbcc. The variation is significant in that S.’s formal development of the poem involves a constant avoidance of exact repetition in any of its patterns, an effect which makes for bewildering counterpoint with a reader’s sense of the lyric’s structural rigour. The challenge of a limitation to three rhymes is greatly compounded by the further constraint of using a majority of the exact same rhyme words in each stanza. Thus, Earth and dead occur as rhymes in every stanza, and almost all the other rhyme-words occur in two or three of the stanzas (old also appearing twice in the first stanza, and cold twice in the second). Two rhymes are virtually exact repetitions (overbold/bold, uprolled/rolled). And yet there is no repeating pattern in the position of exact rhyme-words within a stanza (except that Earth is the first rhyme in all but the second stanza, and dead is the last in the first three stanzas, and occurs in every concluding couplet), and there are altogether six rhyme-words which do not exactly recur at all: hearth in stanza 2, told and forth in stanza 3, and gold, birth and mould in the final stanza. This increased divergence from pattern in the rhymes of the final stanza goes with a further variation, in that the final stanza offers five different line lengths by syllabic count (9 / 8 / 7 / 11 / 9 / 8 / 10 / 10), whereas the other stanzas have either three (stanzas 1, 2 and 4) or four (stanza 3) different line lengths. None of the stanzas repeats exactly the syllabic count, metre, or strong stress count of any of the others, and yet there is a constant echoing of rhythmic effect and metrical shape throughout the poem. The only definitely repeated formal element in every stanza is that the last three lines have a syllable count of 8 / 10 / 10, and a metrical pulse of an anapaestic line followed by a couplet in iambic pentameter. From the opening line the anapaestic movement, in varying juxtaposition with iambic feet, gives an unusual rhythmic texture, as of fluency repeatedly brought to a partial halt. S.’s use of repeating rhyme words through five stanzas clearly suggests the sestina form, a thirty-nine-line poem consisting of six six-line stanzas and a closing three-line ‘envoi’. In a sestina there are no rhymes as such, but the words that end each line of the first stanza are used as line-endings in the stanzas following, rotating in a complex set pattern. All six end-words are used in the ‘envoi’, three as line-endings and the other three in medial positions. The invention of the form is often attributed to the twelfth-century Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel. It was adapted to an English idiom by Edmund Spenser in the ‘August’ eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender where the lyric, ‘Ye wastefull woodes beare witnesse of my woe’ (ll. 151–89), is a relatively simplified sestina in iambic pentameter which rotates the line-endings by a straightforward linear progression (i.e. 123456, 612345,

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etc.). There is a brilliant double sestina, ‘Ye goat-herd gods, that love the grassy mountains’, in The Old Arcadia of S.’s distant relative Sir Philip Sidney, in the form of a twelve-stanza dialogue between Strephon and Klaius, which rotates the line-endings in a taxing progressive sequence. There are no known examples of sestinas in English after Spenser until the mid-nineteenth century, but if a composition date for S.’s lines in July is correct, then both of these poems would very probably have been fresh in his mind, as he must have been reading both Sidney and Spenser in the spring in connection with the writing of Adonais (see headnote), and indeed the emotional atmosphere of both sestinas would have been suggestive, and potentially useable, in the context of the darker first part of Adonais and its comprehensive evocation of English and earlier pastoral elegy. It is, however, otherwise difficult to explain why S. felt it appropriate to cast his response to Napoleon’s death in terms of such elaborate formality. His decision to use a sestina-like repetition of words from stanza to stanza, and at the same time to follow a pattern of rhyme within each stanza, creates an immense technical challenge, which perhaps explains the poem’s distinctive blend of formal constraint and freedom in variation. If the draft in Nbk 19 is indeed S.’s first attempt, and not based on at least some schematic notes, then given the apparent speed and fluency of the writing it represents, as Crook also observes (BSM xii p. lii), an almost incredible facility of highly controlled improvisation (although there is evidence elsewhere of such facility, for example in the translation of the Hymn to Mercury: see headnote (Longman iii 508–10, no. 336). Text from HM 330. Number headings have been added to stanzas 4 and 5. The layout of stanzas follows that of the third, fourth and fifth in HM 330; the rationale for its indentation of the first two is unclear. This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Published in 1822 59–60; 1829 235–6 (‘LINES | Written on Hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon’); MYRS iii 89–90 (facsimile of MS).

Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon 1 What! alive and so bold, oh Earth? Art thou not overbold? What! leapest thou forth as of old ¶ 56. 1. Here and elsewhere (see the notes to ll. 15 and 34) there appear to be echoes of Byron’s treatment of Napoleon in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III xxxvi — xlv. See, e.g., stanza xxxvii: Conqueror and captive of the earth art thou! She trembles at thee still, and thy wild name Was ne’er more bruited in men’s minds than now That thou art nothing, save the jest of Fame, Who wooed thee once, thy vassal, and became The flatterer of thy fierceness, till thou wert A god unto thyself; nor less the same To the astounded kingdoms all inert, Who deem’d thee for a time whate’er thou didst assert. Hunt in the Examiner 705 (8 July 1821) 417 commented: ‘The news of this event fell upon the town, as if it had been a change in the natural world’. Earth?] earth? 1822.

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In the light of thy morning mirth, 5 The last of the flock of the starry fold? Ha! leapest thou forth as of old? Are not the limbs still when the ghost is fled, And canst thou move, Napoleon being dead?

2 How! is not thy quick heart cold? 10 What spark is alive on thy hearth? How! is not his death-knell knolled? And livest thou still, Mother Earth? Thou wert warming thy fingers old O’er the embers covered and cold 15 Of that most fiery spirit, when it fled — What, Mother, do you laugh now he is dead?

3 ‘Who has known me of old,’ replied Earth, ‘Or who has my story told? It is thou who art overbold.’

4–5. Cp. Paradise Lost v 708–9: ‘His countenance, as the morning star that guides/The starry flock, allured them’. 5. The last of the flock] Recalling the title of a poem by Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads (1798). last] Written beneath first canc. in Nbk 19. 8. move] more 1829, 1834, 1839, 1840. F. G. Fleay proposed the reading move, adopted in Rossetti 1870, in ‘On the Text of Shelley’s Poems’, The Provincial Magazine xiv (February 1859) 59–61 (60). 9. thy quick heart] Cp. WA (no. 341) 118: ‘Where the quick heart of the great world doth pant’. 11. his] thy Nbk 19. knolled] Written after tolled canc. in HM 330; tolled Nbk 19. Cp. Ginevra (Longman iv, 203, no. 398) l. 193 and note. 15. that most fiery spirit] his own fiery spirit Nbk 19. Napoleon’s spirit is associated with fire in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III xlii: But quiet to quick bosoms is a hell, And there hath been thy bane; there is a fire And motion of the soul which will not dwell In its own narrow being, but aspire Beyond the fitting medium of desire; And, but once kindled, quenchless evermore, Preys upon high adventure, nor can tire Of aught but rest; a fever at the core, Fatal to him who bears, to all who ever bore. 16. Mother,] 1822; Mother HM 330. 19. It] 1822; ‘It HM 330. overbold.’] 1822; overbold’ HM 330.

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20 And the lightning of scorn laughed forth As she sung, ‘To my bosom I fold All my sons when their knell is knolled, And so with living motion all are fed And the quick spring like weeds out of the dead.

4 25 ‘Still alive and still bold,’ shouted Earth, ‘I grow bolder and still more bold. The dead fill me ten thousand fold Fuller of speed and splendour and mirth. I was cloudy, and sullen, and cold, 30 Like a frozen chaos uprolled Till by the spirit of the mighty dead My heart grew warm. I feed on whom I fed.

5 ‘Aye, alive and still bold,’ muttered Earth, ‘Napoleon’s fierce spirit rolled 35 In terror, and blood, and gold, A torrent of ruin to death from his birth.

21. To] to HM 330. 22. All my sons] The souls Nbk 19 (souls is written above spirits canc.). knolled,] 1822; knolled HM 330. 24. the quick] the living. 25. Earth,] 1822; Earth HM 330. 28. mirth.] mirth, 1822; an ink blot in HM 330 makes it impossible to know what, if any, punctuation followed mirth. 30. uprolled] See The Boat on the Serchio (Longman iv, no. 406) l. 16 and note. 31. mighty] glorious Nbk 19. 33. alive and still bold] alive and bold 1829, 1834. Of the 1839 readings of ll. 8 and 33 Taylor 77 notes: ‘One error originating with Galignani, whom Ascham used as copy, is retained in 1839, and another is corrected’. muttered Earth] cried the Earth Nbk 19. 34–6. The imagery is volcanic (see the note to l. 36). Cp. the Examiner 705 (8 July 1821) 418: 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, apathy, partial discontent. 34. The first draft of this line in Nbk 19 reads Twice Napoleon was bought & sold, presumably a reference to his defeat by the Allies in 1814 and 1815. fierce spirit] Napoleon’s ‘fierceness’ is referred to in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III xxxvii l. 6 (quoted in the note to l. 1). rolled] rolled, 1822. 35. blood, and gold] A common collocation in S.’s works; see, e.g., PU I 531. The note to that line provides further examples. 36. The draft openings of this line in Nbk 19 are Desolation as a lava stream and A torrent of fire (see the note to l. 34). birth.] 1822; birth, HM 330.

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Leave the millions who follow, to mould The metal before it be cold, And weave into his shame, which like the dead 40 Shrouds me, the hopes from his glory fled.

57  The Indian Girl’s Song [Lines to An Indian Air] Four complete MSS of this much-admired lyric are known to have survived; they exhibit minor differences, no one version being identical to another. Nbk 21 (pp. 144–7, 153) contains an untitled draft of all three stanzas and there are a few lines of draft, also untitled, in Nbk 19 (pp. 200 reverso-199 reverso). An autograph fair copy headed The Indian girls song, deriving from the Nbk 21 draft, is now in the Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cologny (Genève) (Bodmer). Another copy was transcribed on the recto and verso of the first of two leaves damaged by seawater and mud; these, entitled The Indian Serenade, were recovered from the wreck of S.’s boat, the Don Juan, which foundered on 8 July 1822, occasioning his death and that of Edward Williams (MYRS viii 329–35). One side of the second leaf carries a transcription of the libretto of the popular duet ‘Ah perdona’ from the first act of Mozart’s opera La Clemenza di Tito (1791). The MSS of both poem and libretto are now agreed to be in Mary’s hand, though previously they were considered by some to be in S.’s (BSM xxiii p. ix). (See, e.g., Reiman (1977), Reiman (2002), Chernaik 248, BSM xvi pp. l-liii, MYRS viii 336–9; L about S 16–17). The libretto and the poem in this MS are held in the Morgan Library & Museum (Morgan). Mary also transcribed a fair copy into Harvard Nbk 1, again under the title The Indian Serenade (MYRS v 89). A text of the poem (referred to here as I arise from dreams of thee because of its several MS versions whose single common feature is the first line) was first published in 1823, a few months after S.’s death, as Song, Written for An Indian Air, among the ‘Minor Pieces’ in The Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South (I ii 397), the short-lived literary magazine planned by S. and Byron and edited by Leigh Hunt. Judith Chernaik notes that Morgan ‘appears to be the source of the Liberal text, and perhaps of 1824 as well. Since these transcripts were both made during Shelley’s lifetime, they may conceivably have independent authority’ (Chernaik 248). Mary mentions in a letter to Jane Williams of January 1823 that the version to appear in The Liberal had been ‘altered’ by Hunt (Mary L i 306). This seems likely to refer to the removal of ‘die’ from l. 15, so attenuating the sexual connotation of the line, and to the substitution of ‘me’ for the ‘it’ of all other witnesses in l. 23. A text differing slightly from The Liberal printing appeared without date in 1824 under the title Lines to an Indian

37. millions who follow] spirits that come canc. (with ages written above spirits) in Nbk 19. 38. cold,] cold; 1822. 39–40. ‘The idea is obscurely expressed, the sense being perhaps “And to weave into the robe of his shame — which is like a shroud on him and on me — the hopes of regeneration which refused to be woven into the robe of his ambition” ’ (Locock 1911 ii 520).

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Air. Mary included this version, with two minor variants, in 1839 and 1840, grouped with poems of 1821. A date of composition in the latter half of that year would be consistent with the position of the complete draft in Nbk 21 and with that of the few draft lines in Nbk 19 (see BSM xii pp. lii-liii; BSM xvi pp. l-liii) — as well as with Medwin’s recollection that the lyric was composed in summer 1821 for Jane Williams to sing ‘adapted to the celebrated Persian air sung by the Knautch [or Nautch] girls, [professional Indian dancers], “Tazee be tazee no be no” ’. Jane had learnt several airs of Eastern origin during her time in India (Medwin (1913) 317–18; Relics 98–9). For his part, Trelawny recalled that the Scottish tenor John Sinclair (1791–1857), who in late 1821 and early 1822 was performing at the Opera House in Pisa (Mary Jnl i 388–9; Mary L i 215–18), had requested that S. and Byron each write a song for him. Apparently in response, Byron composed his Stanzas to a Hindoo Air on 1 January 1822 (Byron PW vii 511, 721; MYR Byron iii 443–7) while S.’s contribution was I arise from dreams of thee — both to be sung to ‘an Indian air which Jane Williams had often played to them . . . which begin[s] “Allah Malla punca” ’ (Iris Origo, The Last Attachment (1949) 298–9, 508). S.’s song was evidently well known in the Shelley circle at Pisa. He replies in a letter of March 1822 to Claire Clairmont, then living in Florence, that Mary will ‘send you the Indian air’, very likely the one including the refrain Tazee be tazee no be no that Medwin recalled as that to which I arise from dreams of thee was set (L ii 403). Claire transcribed this air — which is traditionally included as the third ghazal (lyric) in the Divan (collected poems) of the medieval Persian poet Hafiz (1315–90) — into her journal, headed Indian Song (Claire Jnl 286–8). The refrain Tazee be tazee no be no (or in the transliteration in Claire Jnl, tazu bu tazu now bu now) she gives variously (as they appear in a contemporary translation): ‘ever fresh and ever gay’, ‘ever fresh and ever fine’, ‘ever fresh and ever sweet’, ‘ever fresh and ever young’. A year after S.’s death, in a letter of August 1823, Mary writes from Paris to Leigh Hunt that, at a musical evening, she had been deeply disturbed to hear played on a harp the first notes of what may well have been the air (or one of them) associated with I arise from dreams of thee in the Pisan circle; these introduced the Indian air you have often heard me mention that [? Edward and] Jane used to sing together. . .It was the only air except one other of E’s [Edward’s] — in the world, I think, that I cd not have heard through. . .but how could I hear the mimickry of that voice — the witch [sic] to recall such scenes. — Let me forget it — the very remembrance makes me melancholy. (Mary L i 374–5) Against the substantial body of evidence in support of composition in late summer/autumn 1821 there needs to be set some indications of an earlier date which have influenced understanding of the poem’s genesis and associations. In Rossetti 1870, William Michael Rossetti discloses that he was in possession of a copy of the poem communicated to me by Mr. Catty [one of Sophia Stacey’s two sons]. The verses were given to Miss  Sophia Stacey in 1819, and perhaps written in 1818. They have hitherto been referred to the year 1821, and supposed to have had their origin in the oriental air to which Mrs Williams (whom Shelley did not know in 1819) sang them. (ii 565)

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Sophia Stacey (see headnote to Thou art fair, and few are fairer, and Rossetti Papers 1862 to 1870 (1903) 392, 414–16), a relation of S.’s by marriage — who was still alive when her son passed to Rossetti a copy of I arise from dreams of thee, which he remembered as having been presented to his mother by S., — made a stay in Florence from 8 November to 29 December 1819 on a tour of Italy, taking rooms in the same house in which the Shelleys were then lodging. During these weeks she and S. were frequently in each other’s company, and he gave her a number of original lyrics. According to Helen Rossetti Angeli, Sophia’s diary — its location is now unknown — records that ‘after hearing her sing on the evening of the 17th November [S.] handed her the exquisite verses, “I arise from dreams of thee”, having promised to write her some poetry the day before’ (Shelley and his Friends in Italy (1911) 98). Sophia’s younger son Corbet Stacey Catty confirms this entry. Nonetheless Rossetti, considering 1824 as more authoritative, takes that version as his text — the title of The Indian Serenade and two minor verbal changes apart. He does not include in his commentary any distinctive readings from the text of the poem he says he received from the Catty family. He does cite both Relics 98–9 and, from Hunt Correspondence ii 266–7, a letter of Robert Browning dated 6 October 1857 in which Browning notes a few differences between the 1824 text and the one (Morgan) recovered from the salvaged Don Juan, which he had just been able to examine. To these Rossetti tentatively adds two further variants which, he says, he has seen in ‘what purports to be a verbatim copy of The Indian Serenade, as recovered from Shelley’s corpse’ (evidently Morgan): From the first sweet sleep of night — [l. 2] Where it must break at last [l. 24] The first of these clearly differs from Morgan and the other surviving textual witnesses, as does the second, though it cannot be decisively compared to Morgan because line 24 (see note) has been damaged in that MS. Forman considered the first ‘a clerical error’ and the second to be the final two letters of ‘must’, a possible reading (The Athenaeum 4166 (31 August 1907) 240). These two traditions of evidence for composition — in 1819 for Sophia Stacey, in 1821 for Jane Williams — can hardly be reconciled on the basis of such information as we now possess without recourse to indemonstrable hypotheses. For example, did S. compose I arise from dreams of thee in late 1819, present it to Sophia Stacey, then (having kept no copy or lost one he did keep) redraft the song, based on his memory of it, in the latter half of 1821 for Jane Williams to sing? Possibly. In The Athenaeum 4199 (18 April 1908) 478 Corbet Stacey Catty recalls that I arise from dreams of thee was for many years in her [Sophia’s] possession, and which I constantly saw in the MS. Unfortunately, about the middle of the fifties, this was lost in a sale of [household] effects [following a fire], whether stolen or burnt I cannot say . . . ‘I arise from dreams of thee’ . . . she always accepted as specially written for her, and which she was never tired of singing when they were wedded to Salaman’s beautiful music [published in Six Songs (1838) by Charles Kensington Salaman. (1814–1901)] Other conjectures in favour of composition in 1819 could be advanced (see, for example, BSM xvi pp. lii-iii), and there is no reason to suspect Sophia Stacey/Catty or her sons of

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either inaccurate recollection or deceit. But, resting largely on testimony rather than existing MS evidence, their claims can hardly weigh conclusively against those for 1821. That a complete draft exists in a notebook securely dated to the latter half of that year or early the next warrants a practical editorial decision in the matter of date of composition, while not absolutely excluding the possibility that a version of the poem was first composed in 1819 and given to Sophia Stacey, the autograph MS then lost in the mid-1850s, and a copy that had been taken kept in the family and transmitted to Rossetti. Forman 1876–7 accepts the title The Indian Serenade from Morgan as reported by Rossetti, as well as the 1819 date of composition, otherwise putting together a somewhat eclectic text from both MS and printed sources. The coming to light of an autograph MS (Bodmer) once in the possession of Sir Percy and Lady Shelley, which was sold at Sotheby’s in 1962 and is now in the Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cologny (Genève), introduced a new title, The Indian Girl’s Song. This MS has been taken as copy-text for the present edition; variants of interest from other witnesses are recorded in the notes. In the months between the draft of I arise from dreams of thee and his death the song was evidently regularly performed in S.’s Pisan circle. The title of The Indian Girl’s Song (Bodmer) in itself strongly suggests that that copy was indeed intended to be sung by Jane Williams, as Medwin recalled, and to an air she had acquired when living in India. As a girl, Jane had spent some years there and retained a fondness for the country and its culture. During the Pisan carnival season of 1822, she chose to put on Hindustani costume (18 February: Gisborne Jnl 131). If the song was at some stage meant to be, as When the lamp is shattered is very likely to have been, one of the lyrics for incorporation into Fragments of an Unfinished Drama (Longman vi, no. 436), it would suit the character of the Indian Lady, the part that seems the most appropriate for Jane to have assumed. Certainly, dreams and dreaming form an important theme of the play, which shares with the song both its melancholy tone and its sombre undertones. Whether there is any significant relation between I arise from dreams of thee and S.’s transcription of the duet ‘Ah perdona’ in the libretto of La Clemenza di Tito by Caterino Mazzolà (MYRS viii 338), for which Mozart furnished the music, appears uncertain. The dramatic situation of the duet is that the emperor Tito, unaware that the two are in love, has sent Annio to inform Servilia that he has chosen her to be his empress. The anguish of loving one on whom a higher claim exists will have resonated with S.’s feelings for the ‘married’ Jane Williams. He in all probability encountered the duet in La Clemenza di Tito at least as early as July 1817, when the opera was staged in London and reviewed by Leigh Hunt in the Examiner, as H. B. Forman pointed out (‘Shelley, Metastasio, and Mozart: “The Indian Serenade” ’, The Athenaeum 4175 (7 November 1907) 550–51). Forman considered that one might reasonably suppose Mozart’s to have been the ‘tune running in his head’ when S. composed I arise from dreams of thee; and he goes on to speculate that Sophia Stacey’s playing on the harp in 1819 together with ‘the main melodic trend’ of Mozart’s music for the duet, associated both of these with the genesis of I arise from dreams of thee. The poem is one of S.’s that has been most frequently set to music, Burton R. Pollin’s Music for Shelley’s Poetry (1974) listing 150 different settings. Text from autograph fair copy now in the Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cologny (Genève). The apostrophes in the title and in l. 13, the commas in ll. 15 and 18, and the semicolon in l. 22 have been supplied. Published in The Liberal I ii (1823) 397 (entitled Song, Written For an Indian Air); 1824 163 (entitled Lines to an Indian Air).

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The Indian Girl’s Song I arise from dreams of thee In the first sleep of night — The winds are breathing low And the stars are burning bright. 5 I arise from dreams of thee — And a spirit in my feet Has borne me — Who knows how? To thy chamber window, sweet! — The wandering airs they faint 10 On the dark silent stream — The champak odours fail Like sweet thoughts in a dream; The nightingale’s complaint — It dies upon her heart — 15 As I must die on thine, O beloved as thou art!

¶ 57. Title Song, Written For an Indian Air Liberal; Lines to an Indian Air 1824, 1839, 1840; The Indian Serenade Morgan, Harvard Nbk 1, eds. Although serenading one’s beloved in the open air beneath her chamber window is traditionally a role for a male singer, the Girl’s in the title of Bodmer is the only gender-specific indication in the language of the MSS witnesses. 1. [From dreams of thee beloved, I have risen wild & joyous] Nbk 21. 2. sleep] Nbk 21, Nbk 19; sweet sleep Morgan, Harvard Nbk 1, Liberal, 1824, 1839, 1840, eds. 3. The winds] Chernaik, Reiman (2002), When the winds Morgan, 1824, 1839, 1840, eds; [When] The winds Harvard Nbk 1. 4. burning] Nbk 21, Harvard Nbk 1, Liberal; [?shin] Morgan; shining 1824, 1839, 1840, eds. 7. Has borne] Nbk 21, Harvard Nbk 1; Hath led Morgan, Liberal, Forman 1876–7, Hutchinson, Locock 1911; Has led 1824, 1839, 1840. Who knows] oh! who knows Morgan, [oh] who knows Harvard Nbk 1. 8. In the Nbk 21 draft S. hesitated between lattice and window, finally preferring the latter. Beneath the Nbk 21 p. 144 draft of the first stanza is the line: Come forth, look forth I die away. 9–10. [The airs around me faint on the flowers & the trees/The dewy odours die on the dewy dying breeze] Nbk 21. 10. dark silent] the dark & silent Nbk 21; the dark, the silent Morgan, Harvard Nbk 1, Liberal, 1824, 1839, 1840, eds. The draft in Nbk 21 contains various attempts at this line: on the flowers & the trees, on the bosom of the stream, upon the dewy [?]; and see previous note. 11. The odours of my chaplet fail Nbk 21. And the Champak’s odours fail Morgan, Forman 1876–7. The champak is a large evergreen tree of the magnolia family bearing fragrant flowers varying in colour from cream to orange. S. could have found references to it in Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817) and Sir William Jones’s Botanical Observations (c. 1770, rptd 1807). See B. A. Park, ‘The Indian Elements of the “Indian Serenade” ’, K-SJ x (1961) 8–12, and Chauncy B. Tinker, ‘Shelley’s Indian Serenade’, The Yale University Library Gazette xxv (1951) 70–72. 12. [on the dying/dewy wind/breeze] Nbk 21. 14. S.’s first attempt at the line in Nbk 21 reads: grows weak in [her wild dream]. 15. Harvard Nbk 1, 1839, 1840, Rossetti 1870, Rossetti 1878, Locock 1911; As I must on thine Morgan, Liberal, 1824, Forman 1876–7, Hutchinson; And I must die on thine Nbk 21.

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O lift me from the grass! I die, I faint, I fail! Let thy love in kisses rain 20 On my lips and eyelids pale. My cheek is cold and white, alas! My heart beats loud and fast; O press it close to thine again Where it will break at last.

58  Autumn: a Dirge This short poem is the most ambitious and most resolved of the meteorological lyrics that S. attempted between October 1821 and March 1822, which also include Rough wind that moanest loud (Longman v, no. 422) and The rude wind is singing (Longman vi, no. 438). The themes of Autumn are also in keeping with speeches in, and related to, Hellas, for example: the Phantom’s speech at ll. 871–86, the semichoruses at ll. 1024–49, and the Maidens’ chorus at the close of I would not be a King: enough (Lines connected with Hellas (Longman v, no. 411 Appendix), Appendix J) ll. 45–51. There is a rough draft of Autumn in S.’s copy of Euripides, Euripidis Tragœdiæ Viginti, cum variis lectionibus, ed. Josuae Barnes, 6 vols bound as three (1811–12) (Eton Euripides), now in the library of Eton College. On this edition and its provenance, see the headnote to An archer stood upon the Tower of Babel (Longman v, no. 414). This draft is written in pencil across the free upper endpaper verso and the first flyleaf recto of the second volume. It is untitled and comprises fourteen lines (a first stanza and the first three lines of a second). At this stage, S. has already decided on a lyric with lines of varied rhyme and metre, and established many of the elements, including the refrain on the ‘year’. The numerous cancellations and alternatives on these pages, and the fact that in mourning array is written in the margin at right angles to the rest, show that this draft underwent heavy revision. A subsequent draft, which starts on p. 143 of Nbk 21, continues on p. 142, and ends on p. 141, includes a development of this phrase, with your saddest written above mourning canc. on p. 143. The Nbk 21 draft is written in ink and begins neatly on p. 143, but becomes rougher in the second stanza on p. 142. The several mathematical calculations in S.’s hand on pp. 142–3 (see BSM xvi 144–5) are likely to have been in place before the poem was drafted. In this intermediate draft the lyric is titled A Dirge, and it differs from the later, apparently final, draft in Box 1 f. 99 only slightly. The most significant variant is Wrapt in

17–18. B. A. Park cps Sir William Jones’s Hymn to Náráyena: ‘Oh! raise from cumbrous ground/My soul in rapture drown’d’. 19. [Let] thy [kisses] fall [like dew] rain Nbk 21. 21. [My breath is ebbing and my heart] Nbk 21. 23. press it close to thine] Harvard Nbk 1, 1824, 1839, 1840, Rossetti 1870, Rossetti 1878, Locock 1911; press it against [?this] Nbk 21; press it to thine own Morgan, Forman 1876–7, Hutchinson; press me to thine own Liberal. 24. it will break at last] Harvard Nbk 1, Liberal, eds; [?there] let it break at last Nbk 21; [?st] break at last Morgan.

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azure and grey instead of the reading in l. 18. On Nbk 21 p. 141 S. wrote the following heavily cancelled lines and false starts, which may be an attempt at a third stanza: The [hoar white] hoar frost is [creeping], [the pale Sun is sleeping] the The snow falls [Rich] [The rich are now] [The lord is] [With] Drawn by [With cold hand]    [Comes winter, the [?]] Of the year. — The poor man is pining, the richman is dining [The snow] This appears to be a rough third stanza as the first line continues the progressive movement through the seasons of the earlier stanzas, from warm sun to chill rain on to hoar frost. It is impossible to say why S. chose not to complete the turn he makes to more human and political subjects in this unresolved stanza. As Carlene Adamson first deduced, the single leaf comprising the final draft, now in Box 1, was torn out of Nbk 21 between p. 154 and p. 155 where a stub is now visible. The Box 1 draft is written in ink and titled Autumn A Dirge; it is written neatly and contains only a few cancellations. S. also takes care over the line indentation and stanza spacing. (See the photograph facing the title-page of this volume which shows the manuscript of ll. 1–18 of the text in Box 1 f. 99r.) The Box 1 draft could conceivably have been a presentation copy: the hand is clear, the layout is tidy, and the leaf has also been folded twice, which might suggest that it was enclosed in a letter. For another possible case of a presentation copy made from a page removed from a notebook see Lines to — [Sonnet to Byron] (Longman v, no. 429) and headnote. However, a number of factors cast doubt on this hypothesis: the leaf appears to have been torn from Nbk 21 quite roughly, the layout is not as neat as that of the presentation copies of poems given to Jane Williams and Edward Williams (see headnote to To — (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’)), and it is impossible to confirm whether the folds to the leaf were made by S. or someone else. Lines 18–22 are copied at the top of p. 18 of Mary Copybk 1, which was used by Mary between autumn 1822 and autumn 1823 to transcribe S.’s unpublished verse. A collation of Mary Copybk 1 by B. C. Barker-Benfield (see BSM ii 244) reveals that four pages preceding folio 18 have been removed from this notebook, and presumably the page that immediately preceded it contained ll. 1–17 of the poem. In Mary Copybk 1, Mary transcribes l. 18 as, Wrapt in azure and grey/Put on white, black & grey thus presenting the line, first as it appears in Nbk 21 p. 142, and then as it stands in the final draft in what is now Box 1. This implies that Mary was unaware of the later draft when she began copying the poem in Mary Copybk 1, and that she transcribed this final reading later, when she had access to the Box 1 leaf. The poem was first published in 1824 with the title ‘Autumn: a Dirge’ (166); in the Table of Contents, it is given as ‘Autumn, a Dirge’ (ix). In 1824 the reading of l. 18 is ‘Put on white, black, and grey’, suggesting Mary knew this was not a variant, but rather the final version of the line. Either she could have overlooked the Box 1 leaf in her initial transcription in Mary Copybk 1, or, if S. had given the Box 1 leaf to someone else, it was returned to Mary allowing her to add the later reading.

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Given its material, themes, and formal characteristics, it is highly likely that Autumn was written in the last quarter of 1821. The original drafting of Autumn in S.’s copy of Euripides coincides with other compositions in the volume during this period, and its development in Nbk 21 takes place alongside Hellas and other smaller lyrics dated after September  1821. The knotted composition and editorial history of Autumn has, however, led to some problems in dating this lyric. For example, in 1839 iv 40, Mary places it amongst poems written in 1820. In light of this dating, Forman went on to speculate that Autumn was one of the poems which S. asked ‘to be added to the pamp[h]let of Julian & Maddalo’ in a letter to Ollier of 10 November 1820 (see Forman 1876–7 iii 132 and 153–4; L ii 246). Donald Reiman and Michael Neth plausibly suggest in BSM xvi p. xlix that Mary’s date may result from the manuscript witness in Eton Euripides leading her to consult her journal in order to find the last time she recorded S. having read Euripides: June 1820 (Mary Jnl ii 646). Locock also claims that this lyric has an earlier foundation than the last quarter of 1821, and speculates that The death knell is ringing (Longman iii 727–8, no. 357) ‘reads like a study for Autumn, A Dirge’ (Locock Ex 22; see also Locock 1911 ii 228). However, as shown in the headnote to The death knell is ringing, while there are some similarities between that poem and Autumn, there is no material connection between them. The subject of Autumn suggests that it was composed during a period when an autumn was becoming a winter, and the blithe swallows of l. 15 are typical of S.’s interest in migratory birds in late 1821 (see headnote to Which like a crane, its distant home pursuing (Longman v, no. 413)). The metrical variety and playfulness have similarities with a number of later lyrics such as The flower that smiles today, To — (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’), and Swifter far than summer’s flight/Remembrance. A comparison between Autumn and Dirge for the Year (Longman iv 82–5, no. 381) shows S.’s stylistic development over the course of his final two winters. Dirge for the Year was written during a period of illness in the cold December of 1820, and while the poem shares the meteorological concerns of Autumn, it has none of the formal complexity or modulations of tone that are central to S.’s last lyrics. As the title makes clear, the poem is a dirge: a mournful song traditionally performed at a funeral. But the title is also somewhat deceptive as the dirge is not for autumn, but for the passing year that S. personifies as female. Although a quite different poem in theme and voice, Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ (published in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820) that S. read avidly from October 1820 until his death) may have influenced the use of a female personification, the swallows of l. 15, and the eleven-line stanza in Autumn. As discussed earlier, the poem’s subject is typical of the melancholy cast of many of S.’s works in late 1821, and shares the avian and meteorological images of his verse in this period. The poem makes a seasonal progress from an autumn of dying flowers and failing sun in stanza 1, to the rain and cold of winter in stanza 2, and finally to the vernal regeneration suggested in the last line. There is a complex rhyme scheme (abcdbeeefff), which is further tangled by the gerund rhymes in the first two lines of each stanza and the repeated refrains at lines 3, 5, 9, 10. The combination of repetitive musicality and the halting quality of the unrhymed lines 1, 3, and 4 creates the dolefulness appropriate for a dirge. The metre is similarly sophisticated, with the stanza split into two units divided after line 5. In the first part, lines 1, 2, and 4 of the stanza are hexameters, each with internal rhymes or half rhymes and strict medial caesurae, and these are balanced by the shorter lines 3 and 5. By contrast, the second half of the stanza creates a song-like quality through short iambic lines that share some rhymes (‘away’, ‘bier’, ‘year’) in both stanzas. The metrical variation between

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stanzas, provided by substituted feet and feminine endings, is highly characteristic of S.’s most accomplished lyrics, such as The Cloud and To a Skylark. Text from Box 1 f. 99. Published in 1824; BSM xvi 156–9 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

Autumn: a Dirge The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing, The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying, And the year, On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead, 5 Is lying: Come months, come away, From November to May, In your saddest array; Follow the bier 10 Of the dead cold year, And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre. The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling, The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling For the year. — ¶ 58. T itle. See headnote. 3. year] Year BSM. 4–5. leaves . . . lying] The inversion and the delayed verb recalls Ode to the West Wind 2–3: ‘the leaves dead/Are driven’. 4. See the burial of the ‘Poet’ in Alastor ll. 52–4 where ‘the charmed eddies of autumnal winds/Built o’er his mouldering bones a pyramid/Of mouldering leaves’. The Nbk 21 draft of this line reads: In a shroud of leaves dead, on the earth her deathbed. the] Written over her in Box 1. 6. Come] Come, 1824. Alt. from Comes in Box 1. 8. saddest array] See Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard ll. 113–14: ‘ “The next with dirges due in sad array/Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne” ’. 10–11. Cp. OWW 23–5: Thou Dirge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre 11. like dim shadows watch] S. first wrote like shadows sit down in Box 1 then cancelled sit down, wrote watch above, and inserted dim before shadows. sepulchre.] 1824; sepulchre Box 1. 12. nipped worm] OED 3a defines nipped as ‘pinched, compressed, tightly squeezed’ and uses Autumn as an example of this definition. Lloyd N. Jeffrey in ‘Shelley’s “Plumèd Insects Swift and Free” ’, K-SJ xxv (1976) 105, claims that the worms ‘evoke the gloomy cold of fall, particularly to those readers who have observed with Shelley that an early freeze often leaves large numbers of caterpillars lying numbed and feeble under the trees and shrubs’. Worms are cold-blooded, and therefore their behaviour is highly affected by changes in temperature: S.’s worm is nipped because in winter its movement is reduced. 13. is knelling] Written above is yelling canc. in Box 1. 14. year. —] year; 1824.

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15 The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone To his dwelling; Come months, come away, Put on white, black, and grey, Let your light sisters play — 20 Ye, follow the bier Of the dead cold year, And make her grave green with tear on tear.

59  ‘The flower that smiles today’ [Mutability] Nbk 21 contains a draft and a fair copy of this sombre lyric, both untitled: the draft on pp. 1, 2 and the front (originally the back) pastedown, and the fair copy on p. 154. Page 1 also carries S.’s draft of the first eight lines of The Zucca (Longman v, no. 421) written crossways over the draft of the final stanza of The flower that smiles. As The Zucca dates from late December 1821 to January 1822, The flower that smiles must have been drafted earlier. Its position on pp. 1, 2 and the front pastedown is inapt to serve as evidence for assigning a date of composition early in the period when the notebook was in use (late summer 1821-January 1822). However (as Donald Reiman and Michael Neth point out in BSM xvi p. liv), because in some other instances S. left a small number of pages blank at either end when he began to write in a fresh notebook, he may have done so with Nbk 21. The fair copy, on the other hand, situated as it is in the midst of the drafts for Hellas, appears to have been entered towards the middle of October 1821, the month during which the lyric drama was composed. Mary transcribed the fair copy of The flower that smiles into Mary Copybk 1 pp. 18–19 (BSM ii 38–41) without giving it a title, and published it in 1824 as ‘Mutability’, the title that S. had assigned to the 16-line lyric We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon, which he included in 1816. GM argued that The flower that smiles should be recognised as a dramatic lyric intended ‘for the opening of Hellas, to be sung by a favourite slave, who loves him, to the literally sleeping Mahmud before he awakens to find his imperial pleasures slipping from his grasp’ (‘Shelley’s Lyrics’ in The Morality of Art: Essays Presented to G. Wilson Knight, ed. D. W. Jefferson (1969) 205–06). It is possible that such was S.’s intention at some early stage in the composition of Hellas, the draft of which fills most of Nbk 21, but neither draft nor fair copy offers sufficient evidence to warrant a secure conclusion on the dramatic poem as original destination for the lyric. The flower that smiles shares the essential pessimism of such late 15–16. These lines invert the spring imagery of Adonais ll. 157–161. 15. The blithe swallows are flown] Cp. Keats, ‘To Autumn’ l. 33 ‘And gathering swallows twitter in the skies’. lizards] 1824; lizards, Box 1. 17. Come] Come, 1824. months,] 1824; months Box 1. away,] away; 1824. 18. white, black,] 1824; white black Box 1; white, black Mary Copybk 1. 19. play —] play, Mary Copybk 1. 20. Ye,] Ye Mary Copybk 1. bier] Written after year canc. in Mary Copybk 1. 21. year,] 1824; year Box 1, Mary Copybk 1. 22. tear.] Mary Copybk 1, 1824; tear Box 1.

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pieces as Swifter far than summer’s flight/Remembrance and Rough wind that moanest loud (Longman v, no. 422); its peculiarity among these is specified in detail by Chernaik (155–6) in an illuminating exposition of the poem as a variant on the traditional theme of carpe diem. Text from Nbk 21 p. 154. Commas have been supplied at the end of ll. 6 and 19. Published in 1824 p. 198.

‘The flower that smiles today’

5

10

The flower that smiles today Tomorrow dies; All that we wish to stay Tempts and then flies; What is this world’s delight? Lightning, that mocks the night, Brief even as bright. — Virtue, how frail it is! — Friendship, how rare! — Love, how it sells poor bliss For rich despair! But these though soon they fall,

¶ 59.  Title. Mutability 1824, eds. 7. even as] In the draft on p. 2 of Nbk 21 the line reads Brief although bright; S. carried this over to the fair copy on p. 154 before substituting even as for although. 9. how] too 1824, 1839, 1840, Rossetti 1870. 10–11. Ironically altering the traditional sense of rich and poor in relation to the theme of Love — as in Romeo and Juliet I i 212–13: ‘O, she is rich in beauty, only poor/That when she dies, with beauty dies her store’. 11. rich] rich is the reading of the draft in Nbk 21 front pastedown which S. transcribed into the fair copy on p. 154, cancelled it in favour of proud written above the line, then underlined rich for retention. 1824 and eds prefer ‘proud’. The draft also shows the alternative line: [And leaves] despair. 12–14. Virtue, Friendship, Love ‘outlive the joy which they briefly occasion, and the illusion of possession. Love flowers as bliss, but lingers as despair’ (Chernaik 156). 12. these] then Mary Copybk 1; we, 1824, 1839, 1840, eds. Rossetti 1870/1878 considered it ‘almost certain’ that the line should read: ‘though soon we fall’ or ‘so soon they fall’.

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15

20

Whilst skies are blue and bright, Whilst flowers are gay, Whilst eyes that change ere night Make glad the day; Whilst yet the calm hours creep, Dream thou — and from thy sleep Then wake to weep.

60  ‘A widowed bird sate mourning for her love’ [A Song] This lyric is drafted in ink on Nbk 19 p. 52 reverso. The first two stanzas appear to have been written in one sitting with only the third line of the opening stanza having been re-worked; the last two lines of the second stanza are written around a patch of ink bleeding through from the other side of the leaf (p. 51) containing a draft of Charles the First (Longman v, no. 426) iii 76–82. The third stanza, at the foot of the page, shows much re-working and its several abandoned starts, along with cancel strokes through the first two words of its third line and the overwritten word at the start of the fourth, testify to its unfinished state. The darker ink of this third stanza and the fact that it is offset to the left with the writing beginning closer to the edge of the page than the stanzas suggest it was composed at a later point than they were. The horizontal lines after ll. 4 and 8 signal stanza breaks, and a second, long and thick line in dark ink beneath l. 4 was perhaps added at the time the third stanza was drafted. There is no evidence to support R. B. Woodings’ claim in ‘Shelley’s Widow Bird’, RES n. s. xix (1968) 411–14 that this poem could have been written as early as ‘late 1821’ (413). Instead, a date of composition on, or shortly after, 20 January 1822 is likely for the first two stanzas (which were probably in place before Art thou pale for weariness on the page opposite, p. 53 reverso, was drafted). S. wrote ‘20th Jany.’ in a small hand between the draft of ll. 521 and 522 of Charles’s concluding speech to scene ii in Nbk 19 p. 102 reverso (see BSM xii 160–1). Assuming 20 January to be the date on which S. had reached that point on the page, Archy’s final speech on the following page (p. 101 reverso; see BSM xii 158–9) must have been written slightly later, after S. realised the need to have Archy exit in order to leave Charles and Henrietta alone on stage for a closing dialogue to the scene. The draft of Archy’s song and his preface to it (see Charles the First ii 475–88) on p. 101 reverso also

20–21. Cp. Caliban’s words in 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’. 21. to] and Nbk 21 p. 1.

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includes a conclusion (in prose, not verse), which differs starkly in tone as well as form from the abandoned third stanza on p. 52 reverso. The punctuation of the MS after A widowed bird, sate mourning upon a wintry bough . . . . . . on p. 101 reverso (with a long dash beneath the six suspension points), suggests S.’s possible shorthand cross-reference to the draft of ll. 1–8 on p. 52 reverso. (For a discussion of S.’s linking devices, Archy’s preface and conclusion, and the significance of this lyric’s first two stanzas in Scene ii of Charles the First see note to ii 475–88 and following notes through to 489. SD.) Nora Crook states that the lyric on p. 52 reverso ‘is written in the same grayish brown ink and scratchy quill as Archy’s exit speech on p. 101 reverso, which suggests that the two were written about the same time’ (BSM xii p. xlviii). However, while the MS evidence Crook adduces is accurate concerning the first eight lines on p. 52 reverso, the third stanza may have been written at a later time, though possibly not much later than 26 January when S. wrote to John Gisborne claiming of Charles the First that, ‘I cannot seize the conception of the subject as a whole yet, & seldom now touch the canvas’ (L ii 388). The poem was transcribed in Mary Copybk 2 (Massey 76–7) under the heading ‘A Song’ and published under that title in the ‘Miscellaneous Poems’ section of 1824, apparently indicating that Mary was unaware of its destination in Charles the First immediately prior to Henrietta’s speech in Scene ii beginning at l. 489 which is printed after a line of asterisks in 1824 245. She placed it among ‘Poems written in 1822’ in 1839 iv 180. Probably as a result of the loan of Nbk 19 by Richard Garnett for nine days in March 1869 (see Rossetti Papers 1862 to 1870 (1903) 385–6), Rossetti was able to propose that this song belonged to Charles the First: ‘[t]he lyric “A widow bird,” & c. has hitherto been printed separately, not as forming any part of the action’. Of the draft on p. 101 reverso, he commented: ‘This fragment of a scene appears to belong to a much later portion of the drama than those which have preceded; perhaps to the period of King Charles’s captivity, or even after his death’ (Rossetti 1870 ii 586). In placing the p. 101 reverso lines in a separate scene (‘Scene V’) at the end of his edition of Charles the First (Rossetti 1870 ii 394), Rossetti failed to recognize their correct position in Scene ii. In his edition, he added the stage direction ‘[Sings]’ to Archy’s song, placed ll. 488–91 before 480–7, and enclosed the present lines within speech marks. The abab rhyme and the metrical pattern of the first two quatrains — iambic pentameter in the first line, iambic tetrameter in the third, and iambic trimeters in the second and fourth — are also evidently followed in the three completed lines of the third quatrain. Woodings’s suggestion that this poem re-purposes Archy’s song for Charles the First as a ‘personal love lyric’ reflective of S.’s ‘emotional situation’ regarding Jane Williams (‘Shelley’s Widow Bird’, 414) may be supported by echoes of the motif of the ‘widowed bird’ in To — (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’) and elsewhere in S.’s poetry of late January and February 1822 (see the note to l. 1). Crook takes issue with Woodings in BSM xii pp. xlvii-xlviii and 127. Text from Nbk 19 p. 52 rev. Indentation follows the MS. Published in 1824 217 (ll. 1–8 only); Rossetti 1870 ii 394 (ll. 1–8 only); Massey 242 (ll. 1–8 only); BSM xii 108–9 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

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‘A widowed bird sate mourning for her love’ A widowed bird sate mourning for her love Upon a wintry bough; The frozen wind crept on, above The freezing stream below — 5

10

There was no leaf upon the forest bare, No flower upon the ground — And little motion in the air, Except the mill-wheel’s sound. And as she sung upon the smooth bright snow I copied from my heart [Her] [name], which [                    ] Whose music made me start —

¶ 60.  Title. See headnote. 1. See To — (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’) ll. 4–6 (‘The widowed dove must cease to haunt a bower/Like that from which its mate, with feignèd sighs,/Fled in the April hour — ’) and Fragments of an Unfinished Drama (Longman vi, no. 436) i 119–21 (‘And on the wintry bough the widowed bird,/Hid in the deepest night of ivy leaves,/Renewed the vigils of her inmost sorrow — ’). Cp. also O Mary dear, that you were here (Longman ii 419–20, no. 177), ll. 3–5: ‘And your sweet voice, like a bird/ Singing love to its lone mate/In the ivy bower disconsolate — ’. widowed bird] widow bird 1824, eds. sate] sat Mary Copybk 2. 2. bough;] Mary Copybk 2, 1824; bough Nbk 19. 3. There are several mostly cancelled starts to this line in Nbk 19: [And the frozen stream it]/The [frozen] [frozen wind it fle]. frozen] Written above [icy] wind, [it] in Nbk 19; [icy] is faintly underlined suggesting S. considered reinstating it. crept] 1824 Errata, 1834, 1839, 1840; kept 1824, 1829. on, above] on above, Mary Copybk 2, 1824. 4. below —] below. Mary Copybk 2, 1824. 5. There] Written beneath The canc. in Nbk 19. bare,] Mary Copybk 2, 1824; bare Nbk 19. 6. ground —] ground; Mary Copybk 2; ground, 1824. 7. air,] air 1824. 9. There are several false starts to this line in Nbk 19: I would not be a bird/[?And canc.] [?the canc.]/ [Sung as forever]. And as she sung] Written above Passing along the canc. in Nbk 19 (with as written over another she). smooth bright snow] Written above upon the snow canc. and beneath misery canc. in Nbk 19. 10. copied] Written after traced the canc. in Nbk 19. 11. The cancelled words [?is] and [?was] are written in the margin before the start of this line in Nbk 19. which] Written above which uttered canc. in Nbk 19. 12. Whose] Written over Which canc. in Nbk 19.

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61  ‘Art thou pale for weariness’ [To the Moon] This unfinished lyric was drafted in ink in Nbk 19 p. 53 reverso after the top of the leaf had been torn away. It is found amongst a draft of Charles the First (Longman v, no. 426), which was written between 3 and 26 January 1822 (see headnote to that play). Nora Crook suggests that it may ‘have been written on the same occasion’ though ‘slightly before’ (BSM xii 110) A widowed bird sate mourning for her love, also in ink on the facing page (p. 52 rev.). However, the cramped writing of the incomplete second stanza, at the bottom of the page, near the gutter, indicates that A widowed bird was probably in place before this lyric’s composition. For the possibility that both lyrics were written on, or soon after, 20 January, see the headnote to A widowed bird. Crook speculates that this poem ‘could be a dramatic lyric, conceived as a lute-song for an unwritten scene [of Charles the First]; if sung by the Queen [Henrietta], it voices her deepest fears, and prophesies her future, wandering companionless as an exiled widow’, supporting her conjecture with the claim that ‘a dry-quilled word at the top of the page looks like a speech heading and could be “Queen” ’ (BSM xii pp. xlviii-xlix). However, the present editors are unsure of her reading of the hardly legible word, which may possibly be Thou (see ll. 1 and 7) or Those. Mary transcribed ll. 1–6 in Mary Copybk 2 pp. 28–9 (see Massey 76–9) under the heading ‘To the Moon’ and published the poem under this title in the same section of 1824 (‘Fragments’) as Charles the First. In 1839 iv 45, she placed it amongst ‘Poems written in 1820’, a mistaken dating accepted by late C19 and early C20 editors. Rossetti added ll. 7–8 in Rossetti 1870 ‘from Shelley’s own MS’ (ii 582) but failed to reproduce the space between l. 6 and l. 7 in Nbk 19 which seems to signal a stanza-break. Forman divided the eight lines into two stanzas (Forman 1876–7 iii 61) and, with no MS authority, inserted stanza number-headings (which are reproduced in Hutchinson and Locock 1911). The first stanza, a sestet with a rhyme scheme of ababcc, combines iambic pentameters (ll. 2, 4–6) and slightly irregular tetrameters (ll. 1, 3) with the pulse varying through the feet. The incomplete second stanza seems as if it were going to continue in the same manner. Addresses to the moon are frequent in S.’s verse. See, e.g., And like a dying lady lean and pale (Longman iii 19–20, no. 225), Tell me star, whose wings of light (Longman vi, no. 454) and Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven ll. 7–14. Text from Nbk 19 p. 53 rev. Indentation follows S.’s apparent intentions in the MS. Published in 1824 263 (ll. 1–6); Rossetti 1870 ii 340–1 (ll. 1–8); Massey 243 (transcription only); BSM xii 110–11 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

‘Art thou pale for weariness’ Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing Heaven, and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth, ¶ 61.  Title. See headnote. 1–3. Cp. Tell me star, whose wings of light (Longman vi, no. 454) ll. 5–8. 1. There is a faint line over the first word and the first two letters of the second word in Nbk 19; it is difficult to determine whether it is a cancel stroke or a quill slip.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-61

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shelley: selected poems And ever changing, like a joyless eye That finds no object worth its constancy? Thou chosen sister of the spirit That gazes on thee till in thee it pities The woe

62  To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’) [To Edward Williams] General Headnote for S.’s Poems to Jane Williams Edward Williams (1793–1822), the son of a Bengal Army officer, was a schoolboy at Eton 1805–1807, overlapping with S.’s own time there (where they seem not to have met). Williams left Eton to join the Royal Navy as a Midshipman, but following his father’s death at sea in 1809 he gave up the Navy and purchased a commission in the 8th Dragoon Guards. While serving in India he met Thomas Medwin, S.’s cousin and schoolboy companion, who was a lieutenant in the 24th Light Dragoons. Little is known of Williams’s life in India, but by 1817 he had left his regiment and returned to England. He appears in the Army List for 1820 as having been a half-pay lieutenant in the 21st Foot since May 1818 (see Edmund Blunden, K-SMB iv (1952) 49–51 for details of Williams’s bafflingly complicated family background). It is not known where or when Williams met his common-law wife Jane (1798–1884). She was born Jane Cleveland and as a girl probably spent time in India before returning to England where in 1814 at the age of 16, she married John Edward Johnson of the East India Company. It is possible that Edward and Jane first encountered each other through Anglo-Indian connections in London. Jane’s marriage to Johnson was unhappy and, following what she described as ‘irreparable injuries’ suffered at the hand of her husband, Jane eloped with Williams some time in 1817 (see Joan Rees, Shelley’s Jane Williams (1985) 40).

2. Cp. the description of the moon in Tell me star, whose wings of light l. 6: ‘Pilgrim of Heaven’s homeless way’. S. first wrote, then cancelled, Lady of the spheres at the start of this line in Nbk 19. Heaven] heaven 1824. earth,] 1824; earth Nbk 19 (written above world canc.); Earth? Mary Copybk 2; earth, — Rossetti 1870 4. birth,] birth Nbk 19; birth; Mary Copybk 2; birth, — 1824. 5. ever changing,] Mary Copybk 2, 1824, Rossetti 1870; ever changing Nbk 19; ever-changing, 1839, 1840. 6. its constancy?] 1824; its constancy — Nbk 19; its’ constancy. Mary Copybk 2. 7. S. wrote, then cancelled, Sole s (possibly the s was a beginning for spirit or sister) at the start of this line in Nbk 19. Thou chosen] Thou [spi] chosen Nbk 19. sister of the spirit] On spiritual sisterhood, see Epipsychidion 1 and Adonais 145. The moon is described as the sun’s ‘weak sister’ in Cyprian (Longman vi, no. 441) ii 168. spirit] spirit, Rossetti 1870. 8. gazes on thee till in] Written above pitys and loves and canc. in Nbk 19. pities] pities . . . Rossetti 1870. 9. The woe] These words are cancelled and underlined in Nbk 19 suggesting reinstatement.

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When Medwin returned from India to London in early 1819, the friendship with Edward Williams was resumed. Medwin says he came upon a copy of RofI in Bombay (Medwin (1913) 230) and shared with Williams his newly-rekindled enthusiasm for S.’s poetry. Once Medwin had determined upon leaving England for a cheaper lifestyle on the Continent, and with the intention of renewing his friendship with S., Edward and Jane decided to join him there. They were in hopes of a meeting with S., and also needed to escape gossip about their situation and possible aggression from Jane’s legal husband (whose subsequent history was to confirm him as a criminally reckless and even dangerous character; see Ernest J. Lovell, Captain Medwin (1963) 136–7). Medwin and the Williamses were settled in Geneva by September 1819, and while there came in contact with Edward Trelawny, himself a new convert to S.’s poetry and delighted to meet by chance a relative and friend of S. (on Trelawny’s early enthusiasm for S. and the circumstances of his first acquaintance with Medwin and the Williamses, see William St Clair’s discussion of Trelawny’s notebook for 1820–1823, SC 656, SC viii 611–703). This group, Edward and Jane, Medwin and Trelawny, all agreed in wishing to travel to Pisa to encounter the brilliant young poet of Medwin’s accounts for themselves. Medwin, having written to S. and received an encouraging reply with an invitation to visit him in Italy (L ii 169) had by October  1820 joined the Shelleys in Pisa (Mary Jnl i 337). Medwin later claimed that ‘It was under the idea that their enlightened society and sympathy would tend to chase Shelley’s melancholy, that I allured [the Williamses] to Pisa from Chalons’ (Medwin (1913) 267). Edward and Jane sailed from Marseille to Leghorn, arriving on 13 January; they joined Medwin in Pisa on the 15th or 16th, and were introduced by him to S. and Mary on 16 January 1821 (Gisborne Jnl 103, Mary Jnl i 349). Trelawny was not to join the ‘Pisan Circle’ until January 1822 (Mary Jnl i 389). S. and Mary’s initial impressions of the new arrivals were mixed, Mary noting in a letter to Claire Clairmont of 24 January  1821 that Jane was ‘certainly very pretty, but she wants animation and sense; her conversation is nothing particular, and she speaks in a slow monotonous voice: but she appears good tempered and tolerant’; her opinion of Edward, however (he is already ‘Ned’), was markedly more positive, enthusiastically approving his ‘good humour and obligingness’, his talent for drawing, his ‘soft harmonious voice infinitely pleasing’, and the pleasure of his conversation (Mary L i 178). S. also communicated his first impressions to Claire (in a letter dated by Jones to 16 January 1821): ‘The Williams’s are come & Mrs. W. dined here to day, an extremely pretty & gentle woman — apparently not very clever. I like her very much’ (L ii 256–7). From the date of this first meeting, the Williamses rapidly established themselves as unusually congenial companions for S. and Mary, and the two couples were to grow very close through virtually daily contact and intimacy for the entire period from January 1821 to the deaths by drowning of S. and Edward Williams when their boat, the Don Juan, sank eighteen months later. Both couples had very young children; Edward Medwin Williams — ‘Meddy’ — had his first birthday on 7 February 1821, and the Shelleys’ sole surviving child, Percy Florence, was only three months older. In January 1821, Jane was in the final months of pregnancy and Mary’s friendship with her had already ripened sufficiently by the birth of Dina on 16 March for Mary to stand as Godmother. S. and Edward shared their Etonian background, and S. would doubtless have been encouraged by Edward’s deep and explicit admiration for his writings, at a time when the lack of any public success or recognition often left him dejected, particularly in comparison with Byron: ‘I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may: and there is no other with whom it is worth contending’ (L ii 323 to Mary); ‘I do not write — I have lived too long near Lord Byron & the sun has extinguished the glowworm; for I cannot hope with St. John, that “the light came into the world, & the world knew it

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not” ’ (L ii 423 to Horace Smith; see headnote to Lines to —— [Sonnet to Byron] (Longman v, no. 429)). S. was encouraging of Williams’s own literary ambitions, advising him on his (unperformed and unpublished) drama The Promise; or, A year, a month, and a day and contributing material for it (see headnote to Epithalamium (Longman iv 225–34, no. 401)). The two couples lodged near each other in Pisa, until in late April 1821 the Williamses took a pleasant villa in the hamlet of Pugnano a few miles outside Pisa, and when the Shelleys moved back to San Giuliano on 8 May for the summer, both families were in constant easy communication. Edward Williams was S.’s partner in numerous boating expeditions, including the dramatic capsize of 31 May in company with Henry Reveley (see headnote to The Boat on the Serchio (Longman iv 350–68, no. 406)). By mid-May S. apparently was still uncertain of Jane’s attractions, writing to Claire Clairmont ‘W. I like & I have got reconciled to Jane’ (L ii 292). Less than a month later, however, he was decidedly positive in another letter to Claire: ‘We see a good deal of the Williams’s — who are very good people, & I like her much better than I did’ (L ii 296). Mary was sitting for her portrait to Edward by the end of July (it was intended as a present for S.’s twenty-ninth birthday on 4 August; however, he was not in Pisa to receive it but visiting Byron in Ravenna, having become further embroiled in the acrimonious dispute between Claire and Byron over the care of their daughter, Allegra). The Williamses become ‘Edward’ and ‘Jane’ (usually by their initials) permanently in Mary’s journal from August (Mary Jnl i 377). S. and Mary moved back to winter quarters in Pisa on 25 October, taking an apartment in the Tre Palazzi di Chiesa on the Lung’Arno. The Williamses joined them there a week later and shared the apartment from 1 to 24 November before moving to an apartment below in the same building. This close residential proximity was maintained for six months until they all left Pisa for the last time the following May to stay at Villa Magni (often also referred to as Casa Magni) for the summer. At Villa Magni the two couples then lived in even closer proximity (see Mary’s drawing of the house’s layout in Mary L i 244). Byron arrived at Pisa on 1 November and moved into the Palazzo Lanfranchi, across the Arno from the Shelleys’ apartment. This completed the cast list of the ‘Pisan Circle’ that provided the first relatively settled and sociable community for S. since his move to Italy almost four years earlier (and arguably one of only two such communities he ever enjoyed, together with his residence at Marlow in 1817–1818). The men in this group, who were all in some way or other active in literary endeavours (principally S. and Edward Williams, Medwin, the Irishman John Taaffe, and Byron), met together constantly, with the women (principally Mary and Jane) left to occupy their days separately: ‘Our good cavaliers flock together, and as they do not like fetching a walk with the absurd womankind, Jane (i.e. Mrs. Williams) and I are off together, and talk morality and pluck violets by the way’ (Mary to Marianne Hunt, 4 March 1822, Mary L i 221). A period followed of constant dining together, with lunches and regular long extravagant dinners at the Palazzo Lanfranchi, walks and horse-riding, soirées and festivities with various members of cultivated Pisan society and its small English community, and frequent expeditions to practice pistol-shooting just outside the city with Byron and his entourage. The men and women very often went together to the opera in the evenings (see C. L. Cline, Byron, Shelley, and their Pisan Circle, 1952). It has been influentially argued by Donald H. Reiman that, throughout the final months with S., Mary gave no substantial indication of radical unhappiness with her life in Pisa or, more particularly, at Villa Magni, and that there is consequently nothing in her behaviour to support the hypothesis that S. was in those final months turning increasingly to Jane for affection, and possibly physical comfort, partly in reaction to Mary’s perceived coldness

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towards him. It is therefore important to weigh the evidence for Mary’s state of mind in the first half of 1822, as it bears directly on the question of S.’s relations with the Williamses, and especially with Jane. Over the winter of 1821–22 Mary suffered both physically and mentally, exacerbating the tension between S. and herself that had been evident ever since her depression following the death of William Shelley, aged three-and-a-half, some two-and-ahalf years earlier. She clearly enjoyed the company of Edward Williams, and was uncharacteristically animated in her friendship with Prince Mavrocordato before he left Pisa to join the Greek struggle for independence (see headnote to Hellas (Longman v, no. 411)). After Trelawny’s arrival in Pisa in January 1822, she was also energised by his company, allowing some unusually introspective and discursive entries in her journal about his effect on her (see Mary Jnl i 390–91, 395–6). Trelawny himself later recalled that S. never walked out with his wife during his time in their company (The Diary of W. M. Rossetti 1870–1873, ed. Odette Bornand (1977) 170). Certainly, Mary was often distant and unresponsive to S. in their final months together, and also sometimes bad-tempered, although there was much in her life at that time to explain a depression, with constant harassment from her father, her illnesses and dangerously failed pregnancy, and the constant dark shadow of the deaths of two young children. S., on the other hand, enjoyed generally better health than usual, and at times a more settled serenity, in the winter months of 1822, and clearly found his feelings for Jane Williams deepening. He wrote to John Gisborne on 12 January 1822 ‘The Williams’s are well. Mrs. W., more amiable and beautiful than ever, and a sort of spirit of embodied peace in our circle of tempests. So much for first impressions!’ (L ii 376). Jane Williams was a notably accomplished musician and singer, and played the harp, piano, and guitar. Mary wrote to Marianne Hunt in March 1822 anticipating ‘many duets with [Jane] and Hunt. She has a very pretty voice, and a taste and ear for music which is almost miraculous’ (Mary L i 221). Medwin, a particular admirer of Jane’s, praises her talent more than once (Medwin (1913) 317, 372). On her return to England after the deaths of Edward and S. she carried a letter of introduction from Hunt to the famously musical Novello family: ‘The lady who brings you this is the widow of Lieutenant Williams . . . she is said to be an elegant musician, but she has not had the heart to touch an instrument since I have known her’ (Leigh Hunt, letter to the Novellos, 9 September 1822, in Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (1878) 216–7). Vincent Novello later wrote to Hunt of Jane ‘She is, I suspect, an accomplished musician, if I may judge from what she says of Mozart’s operas in general, and of his “Don Giovanni” in particular’, and Keats’s schoolfriend Edward Holmes, the biographer of Mozart and intimate of the Novellos, also praised her (see Sylva Norman, After Shelley: the Letters of Thomas Jefferson Hogg to Jane Williams (1934) xix-xx). S. was always extremely fond of vocal music (see To Constantia and e.g. Medwin (1913) 371), with a particular love of Mozart (see Peacock Works viii 82: ‘[S.] delighted in the music of Mozart, and especially in the Nozze di Figaro’), and often joined Mary and the Williamses in their frequent visits to the opera in Pisa. Jane’s musical accomplishment would have been an obvious attraction for S. By late January, he was sending short lyrics for her to set to music (see Swifter far than summer’s flight/Remembrance) and around the time of her twenty-fourth birthday on 21 January 1822, he was trying to borrow money from Horace Smith in Paris to buy her a pedal harp. Edward Williams’s entry in his journal for Saturday 26 January marks a significant turning point in relations between S. and Jane Williams: ‘S sent us some beautiful but too melancholy lines’ (Gisborne Jnl 127). These lines were the poem To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’), sent in a letter to Edward (who was of course living in the same building with S. and Mary) reading in part If any of the stanzas should please you, you may read them to Jane, but to no

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one else, — [and yet on second canc.] thoughts I had rather you would not (for a facsimile of the MS, see MYRS viii 414). The no one else can refer only to Mary. To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’) articulates S.’s anguished awareness of the contrast between the apparently perfect amity of the Williamses’ ‘marriage’ with his persisting, and worsening, estrangement from his own wife. It inaugurates the series of poems to Jane written during the final six months of his life which, together with TL, constitute the last great achievement of S.’s poetic career (the series comprises To Jane. The invitation, To Jane — The recollection, When the lamp is shattered, One word is too often profaned, With a guitar. To Jane, The magnetic lady to her patient, To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’), Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven, and That moment is gone for ever (Longman vi, no. 456A)). As is discussed in the headnotes to the individual poems, it is clear that Mary remained unaware of these poems during S.’s lifetime, and, with three exceptions (The keen stars were twinkling, Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven, and That moment is gone for ever) for many years after his death. Most of the poems to or about Jane were given by S. to Jane or to Edward and Jane jointly in very carefully written fair copies, which remained in Jane’s possession at the time of S.’s death. Only a very few scraps of preparatory draft for any of these poems survive, further confirming that S. was scrupulous in preserving them from Mary’s knowledge. A curious exception is the MS from which Mary derived the poem published in 1824 as The Pine Forest of the Cascine, near Pisa (Longman vi, no. 431/432 Appendix). For detailed discussion of the circumstances, composition and publication of the Jane poems see the headnotes to individual poems. They chart the development of S.’s relationship with Jane from January to July 1822. It is clear from the paired poems To Jane. The invitation and To Jane — The recollection that by as early as the beginning of February 1822 S.’s feelings for Jane were strengthening, and his awareness of the effect on himself and others of Mary’s low spirits was heightening. S. was changing and maturing rapidly through the last six months of his life, and the growing likelihood of a crisis in his relationship with Mary at the end of their summer residence by the sea in Villa Magni, and the apparently hopeless prospect of any viable new serious relationship with Jane (who seemed perfectly happy in her relationship with Edward) produced a new emphasis in him on the value of life lived in the moment, without backward or forward perspective. S. wrote with unmistakably personal resonance to Claire on 24 March about her desperation to gain access to her daughter: give up this idle pursuit after shadows, & temper yourself to the season; seek in the daily & affectionate intercourse of friends a respite from these perpetual & irritating projects. Live from day to day, attend to your health, cultivate literature & liberal ideas to a certain extent & expect that from time & change which no exertions of your own can give you. (L ii 400) A week later he advised her ‘to think and act without a plan, and let the world pass’ (L ii 402). This growing sense in S. that he could find happiness only by seeking to blot out past and future, and live in the present moment, becomes eloquent in the very last months of his life; in a letter to John Gisborne of 18 June he writes: Williams is captain, and we drive along this delightful bay in the evening wind, under the summer moon, until earth appears another world. Jane brings her guitar, and if the past and the future could be obliterated, the present would content me so well that I could say with Faust to the passing moment, ‘Remain, thou, thou art so beautiful’. . .I

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do not go on with ‘Charles the First’. I feel too little certainty of the future, and too little satisfaction with regard to the past, to undertake any subject seriously and deeply. I  stand, as it were, upon a precipice, which I  have ascended with great, and cannot descend without greater, peril, and I am content if the heaven above me is calm for the passing moment. (L ii 435–6) His feelings for Jane were now growing more reflectively deep; S. wrote on 19 June to Leigh Hunt that Williams [is] one of the best fellows in the world, & Jane his wife a most delightful person — whom we all agree is the exact antitype of the lady I described in the Sensitive plant — though this must have been a pure anticipated cognition as it was written a year before I knew her. (L ii 438) Medwin had in fact written to S. describing Jane’s attractions as early as the Spring of 1820, almost a year before the Williamses arrived in Pisa, and S.’s imagined sense of Jane may have informed the portrait of the lady in SP; see L ii 184–5. In addition to her talents as a musician, S. must have been drawn to Jane’s enthusiasm for gardening, not least because of his own interest in houseplants in the final Pisan winter, and his repeated self-image as a withered flower requiring careful tending (see headnotes to The Zucca and Fragments of an Unfinished Drama (Longman vi, nos. 421 and 436)). There was indeed much to vex and little to cheer S. through these last months. His most recent effort to write a major work, the drama Charles the First (Longman v, no. 426) was proving a challenge (‘a devil of a nut. . .to crack’), which he had more or less abandoned by the end of January (L ii 373 to Peacock; see headnote to Lines to —— [Sonnet to Byron]), and he managed little more than a start on another drama, left untitled and fragmentary at his death (see headnote to Fragments of an Unfinished Drama). The difficulties with progress on a new major project were, as ever, compounded by the apparent ease with which Byron continued to produce successful new work; the Pisan Circle was tremendously impressed by his most recent dramatic poem Cain, and were reading Don Juan as he completed new Cantos during the Pisa period. S.’s relationship with Byron was anyway stressed, often to breaking point, by the continuing wrangle over the future of his daughter with Claire, Allegra, whom Byron had placed in a convent. The arrangement, and Byron’s stubborn refusal to allow Claire any access to her four-year-old child, often brought Claire to the verge of nervous collapse, with the responsibility for trying to manage both sides of the affair falling on S. This shadow became a new catastrophe when news of Allegra’s death from typhus on 19 April reached Pisa on the 23rd. The death of yet another young child affected S. powerfully; notwithstanding his unwitting recklessness in the events leading up to the death of Clara, he was especially fond of young children (see L ii 334 for S.’s affectionately detailed account of his meeting with Allegra in her convent in August 1821; Medwin recalls S. playing on the floor ‘by the hour’ with the two-year-old Percy Florence: Medwin (1913) 269; cp. also S.’s sister Hellen’s recollection of S. playing with his toddler brother John at Field Place (Hogg i 10), and Peacock’s Memoir: ‘Shelley was extremely fond of his children. He was pre-eminently an affectionate father’ (Peacock Works viii 70)). Mary had been feeling particularly unwell in March, when it must have become clear that she was pregnant again. There were also money worries, and in particular a constant pressure from

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William Godwin in London for S. to provide financial assistance. Mary’s spirits were further depressed by Godwin’s increasingly melodramatic appeals, culminating in a letter of 16 April, written on the day a court decided his debts meant the Godwin family must leave their home in Skinner Street, entreating Mary to ‘forget that you have a father in existence’ (quoted in William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys (1989) 465). The precise nature of the relationship that continued to develop between S. and Jane Williams from January to July 1822 will never be certainly known. GM argued in a series of articles (TL (GM), ‘Shelley and Jane Williams’, RES n.s. xii (1961) 40–48, ‘On Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’’, Studia Neophilologica, xxxiv (1962) 104–134), and his review of TL (Reiman) in JEGP, lxvi (1967) 597–605 that by June the relationship had become ‘a love-affair, passionate on Shelley’s part and at least complaisant on Jane’s, cutting across the pattern of marriages within the confined little community of Casa Magni’. He further contended that the affair had very probably been consummated before S.’s death. As such, the relationship with Jane would have constituted a convulsive crisis for S., calling his integrity into question, and threatening to destroy his marriage and thus undermine the entire justification for much of the conduct which had brought him into public notoriety, particularly with regard to his treatment of his first wife Harriet, her subsequent suicide, and the disaster of losing custody of his children by her. In support of this hypothesis, GM drew on evidence from the MS of TL in Box 1 which, he argued, showed that in making late pencil revisions to TL S. made reference to Jane by name, thereby underlining a connection between the highly-charged and darkened emotional tone of the poem and his strained domestic circumstances. GM specified three such references, characterising them as ‘glosses’ which ‘must mean either that Shelley, for his own bitter satisfaction, was translating the universalized despair of the poem [TL] back into the private experience that had helped to generate it, more or less as he went along, or else that in reading over his draft he was struck by its retrospective aptness as a commentary on that experience’ (‘Shelley and Jane Williams’, 47–9; see headnote to TL). The three ‘glosses’ identified by GM occur in the TL draft in Box 1 f. 52r, f. 26v, and f. 52v. The first of these is a word at the top right-hand corner of the page, just below and to the left of a single word shone (which is clear and unambiguous). The unclear word below GM read as Jane. It is transcribed as ‘[?shon]’ in BSM i 267, and the present editors agree that this is the likelier reading. GM’s second gloss, on f. 26v, which reads a very faint and all but illegible interlinear phrase as Jane & I (in a suggestive context of TL at that point, ll. 142–164), is transcribed as ‘[?Sun &,]’ in BSM i 167. The present editors are less certain about this reading, where the MS is all but impossible to decipher decisively. GM’s third gloss, however, is much more convincing, and also more critical to his argument for a fast-developing and potentially sexual relationship between S. and Jane Williams. Written in a tiny but quite emphatic hand between two of TL’s closing lines is a phrase convincingly read by GM as Alas I kiss you Jane. Donald Reiman in BSM i 269 reads this as ‘Alas I kiss you [?]’, commenting in his ‘Notes on the Manuscript and the Transcription’ that ‘the significance of this obscure phrase was discussed by GMM [i.e. GM] in RES . . . and disputed by DHR in PMLA’ (BSM i 315). Reiman’s reference is to his article ‘Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’: The Biographical Problem’, PMLA lxxviii (1963) 536–550, which argues against GM’s hypothesis of a sexual relationship between S. and Jane. Interested readers should consult the relevant discussions cited earlier, and the headnote to TL in this edition. For further detailed discussion of the evidence for and against a sexual relationship between S. and Jane, see the headnote to Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven. With reference to the general context of S.’s poems to Jane, however, it should be noted that Reiman’s efforts to downplay the extent of Mary’s estrangement from and

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coldness towards S. in the last months of his life, and in particular her unhappiness with the living arrangements and setting of Villa Magni, are not persuasive. It is patently clear from all available witness accounts (including those of Leigh Hunt, Trelawny, Claire Clairmont and Jane), not excepting those by Mary herself, that she was deeply unhappy during May and June. Her agonised letter to Maria Gisborne of 15 August (written little more than five weeks after S.’s death), giving ‘some account of the last miserable months of my disastrous life’, is eloquently explicit: I wrote to you at the end of May or the beginning of June. I described to you the place we were living in: — Our desolate house, the beauty yet strangeness of the scenery and the delight Shelley took in all this — he never was in better health or spirits than during this time. I was not well in body or mind. My nerves were wound up to the utmost irritation, and the sense of misfortune hung over my spirits. No words can tell you how I hated our house & the country about it. Shelley reproached me for this — his health was good & the place was quite after his own heart — What could I answer — that the people were wild & hateful, that though the country was beautiful yet I liked a more countryfied place, that there was great difficulty in living — that all our Tuscans would leave us, & that the very jargon of these Genovese was disgusting — This was all I had to say but no words could describe my feelings — the beauty of the woods made me weep & shudder — so vehement was my feeling of dislike that I used to rejoice when the winds & waves permitted me to go out in the boat so that I was not obliged to take my usual walk among tree shaded paths, allies of vine festooned trees — all that before I doated on — & that now weighed on me. My only moments of peace were on board that unhappy boat, when lying down with my head on his knee I shut my eyes & felt the wind & our swift motion alone. (Mary L i 244) There are also the famously grief-tormented first entries Mary made in her new journal following S.’s death, headed ‘The Journal of Sorrow’, with its unremittingly harsh self-flagellation in circling round her exclamation ‘It is not true that this heart was cold to thee’ (Mary Jnl ii 429 and following pages, and see editorial commentary on 430). See also Mary’s much later statement in her ‘Note on Poems of 1822’ in 1840 324 (this passage does not appear in 1839): During the whole of our stay at Lerici, an intense presentiment of coming evil brooded over my mind, and covered this beautiful place, and genial summer, with the shadow of coming misery — I had vainly struggled with these emotions — they seemed accounted for by my illness, but at this hour of separation [i.e. S.’s departure on his final journey] they recurred with renewed violence. Jane was herself particularly emphatic, from the earliest weeks following the drownings, that Mary had made S.’s final weeks miserable, sharing her disapproval of Mary’s behaviour with Hunt to the detriment of his relations with Mary in Italy over the summer and autumn of 1822, and later precipitating a bitter quarrel with Mary once her spreading of the same story to mutual friends in London became known to Mary in July 1827 (see Mary Jnl ii 502, ‘My friend [i.e. Jane in 1827] has proved false & treacherous!’). Reiman’s argument against GM’s hypothesis also omits to mention the singular circumstance that every one of the poems S. wrote to Jane was kept entirely secret from Mary at the time, even though the Shelleys and the Williamses were living communally in extremely confined quarters right through the

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composition period of all the relevant poems. After the death of S. and Edward Williams, Jane returned to England in September 1822 and almost immediately met Thomas Jefferson Hogg, S.’s friend from Oxford. Hogg had already displayed a curious tendency of strong attraction towards the women in S.’s life, including his sister Elizabeth, his first wife Harriet, and Mary herself. In 1826 Jane committed herself to Hogg as his common-law wife (she was still married to Johnson) and lived with him until his death in 1862. Her relations with Mary once both women had returned to England were sometimes strained but also often affectionate, until Mary’s discovery in 1827 that Jane had been spreading gossip about her. Jane Williams died in 1884 at the age of eighty-six, remarkably little consulted through the decades following S.’s death given his rise to high poetic eminence in the Victorian period (William Michael Rossetti was surprised to learn from Trelawny in 1871 that she was still alive, and recorded an evening subsequently spent with her; Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti, 2 vols (1906) ii 377).

To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’) The sole textual authority for To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’) is a very neat copy in S.’s best hand, written in double column on one side of a single sheet and with the title To —— written clearly above the left-hand column. It is possible, as Nora Crook has argued (BSM xii 141 and p. xxix) that one of ‘the many pages torn between pp. 93 and 72 reverso’ from Nbk 19 may once have held a rough draft of the poem. S. sent the fair copy MS to Edward Williams on Saturday 26 January 1822 together with a covering note (reproduced in facsimile in MYRS viii 414) to My dear Williams: Looking over the portfolio [from] in which my friend used to keep his verses, & [from] in which those I sent you the other day were found, — I have lit upon these; which as they are too dismal for me to keep I send them you. [who can afford] If any of the stanza’s should please you, you may read them to Jane, but to no one else, — [and yet on second] thought I had rather you would not, [as it is?necessary to ha] [Do you shoot today] Yours ever affectionately. P. B. S. The poem was enclosed in the sheet containing this letter, which was sealed with red wax and addressed to Il Signor Williams (who was living in the same small building). As Michael O’Neill notes, ‘there is a striking difference between the way the poem is written (beautifully) and the way the letter to Williams is written (very “distrait,” possibly deliberately so)’ (MYRS viii p. xxi). Both poem and letter were in Jane Williams’s possession after the death of Edward and S.; thereafter they were acquired by Trelawny, and passed on his death in 1881 to his daughter Laetitia (Mrs Charles F. Call), who presented them to Edinburgh University Library in 1907 (where they are shelfmarked ‘Dc. 1.100/4’). S.’s reference in the letter to the portfolio of a friend suggests the distancing device of the draft prefaces to Epipsychidion (see notes to the ‘Advertisement’) with its fiction that ‘The following Poem was found in the PF of a young Englishman’. Williams was doubtless familiar with Epipsychidion, and S. had presumably already sent verses under the same device, including lyrics for Jane to set to music (see Swifter far than summer’s flight/Remembrance). Williams recorded receipt of the poem in his journal for 26 January, which also confirms that he had immediately shared it with Jane: ‘S sent us some beautiful but too melancholy lines’ (Gisborne Jnl 127). Mary in

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1839 included To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’) under the title ‘Stanzas’, among the ‘Poems written in 1821’, but it seems extremely unlikely that it was composed until just before S. sent it to Williams. Two days earlier, on 24 January, Byron received from Murray a copy of Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari, and Cain, which had been published together in one volume (Gisborne Jnl 126; Byron L&J ix 91). S. wrote to John Gisborne on the 26th ‘What think you of Lord Byron’s last Volume? In my opinion it contains finer poetry than has appeared in England since the publication of Paradise Regained — Cain is apocalyptic — it is a revelation not before communicated to man’ (L ii 388). The opening line, ‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’, strongly suggests this fresh reading of Byron’s dramatic poem (Mary, and almost certainly also S., read Cain in MS immediately after Byron’s arrival in Pisa on 1 November 1821; see Mary Jnl i 381), with its frequent references to the recent expulsion from Eden following Eve’s temptation by the devil in the form of a serpent. That S.’s nickname among the Pisan circle was ‘the snake’ (see headnote to A snake came to pay the mastiff a visit (Longman iv 374–7, no. 408)) will have dovetailed aptly with the Byronic stimulus. Friday 25 January is described in Williams’s journal as ‘Rain — heavy during the whole day’ (Gisborne Jnl 127), and S. appears to have spent much of that day at his desk, writing a long letter to Leigh Hunt, and others to his banker, and to Horace Smith, asking him to purchase a pedal harp on his behalf intended as a gift for Jane (L ii 378–380; see headnote to With a guitar. To Jane). Jane’s 24th birthday had fallen four days earlier on 21 January, which may have stimulated S. to a more concentrated consideration of his gathering feelings for her, and he probably also used the rainy day to compose To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’), i.e. the day before he sent it to Williams. To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’) was first published by Medwin in Fraser’s Magazine vi (November  1832) 599–600 with the title ‘STANZAS BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY./TO *****’, presumably from a copy he was permitted by Jane Williams to make. This text differs in numerous accidentals and some substantive variants from the Edinburgh University Library MS. The Fraser’s version was then included in 1834, from which 1839 derives. It is possible that Jane Williams provided Mary with the several substantive corrections which appeared in 1840, and Rossetti 1870 published a text further improved by examination of the MS, to which he was granted access by Trelawny (Rossetti 1870 ii 275–6, 574). Rossetti gave the lines the title ‘To Edward Williams’, and most eds before Reiman 1977 (which states that its text is ‘based on Shelley’s holograph’ but which omits S.’s title and gives instead the first line as title, without inverted commas), and Major Works (which has ‘To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’)’) use this title. The teasing ambivalence of S.’s underlined words in the MS (ll. 18, 27) points to a deliberate indeterminacy in the addressee which is best served by S.’s own title, which recalls the practice in Thomas Moore’s lyrics. Commentators have frequently envisaged the context for To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’) as a tense domestic atmosphere in which S.’s developing relationship with the Williamses ‘had excited some degree of feminine pique. . .in the bosom of Mrs Shelley’ (Rossetti 1870 ii 574). White ii 346 similarly writes of ‘Mary’s objection to his intimacy with the Williamses’, and Bieri 604 surmises that the poem ‘apparently was written after Mary asked Shelley to limit his visits to the Williamses’ apartment’. It is however scarcely credible that Mary could have presented S. with any such ultimatum. Her own journal, and that of Williams, record prolonged daily contact between the two couples, in various combinations with others of the Pisan circle, throughout the weeks leading up to, and following, Saturday 26 January. They constantly dine together, take walks together, visit the opera, and join communally in the social life of Pisa. Furthermore, the third stanza of the poem makes

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it sufficiently plain that S.’s stated wish to attempt a relative withdrawal from intimacy with the Williamses springs from his own emotions (Mary’s closeness to Jane in the months and years following S.’s death, and her continuing affection up to 1827, also suggest the unlikelihood of any ‘ultimatum’). To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’) uses a stanza adapted by S. from ottava rima, Byron’s stanza for Don Juan. Byron read Canto V aloud during S.’s visit to him at Ravenna in August 1821 (L ii 323), and on receiving from Byron a copy of Cantos III-V (published in August 1821) two months later, S. was typically generous in his judgement: ‘It is a poem totally of its own species, & my wonder and delight at the grace of the composition no less than the free & grand vigour of the conception of it perpetually increase’ (to Byron, 21 October 1821; L ii 357). Indeed S.’s growing sense of Byron’s effortless superiority as a poet, and of the painful contrast between Byron’s enormous success as a writer and his own failure to secure a readership, receive direct expression in To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’) (see notes). S.’s adaptation of ottava rima, preserving the rhyme scheme abababcc, but shortening the third and sixth lines to a trimeter, and the seventh to a tetrameter, suggests an influence from Keats’s stanza form in the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (a ten-line stanza modified from sonnet forms with a shortened eighth line) published in the Lamia volume of 1820, which had so impressed S. (see headnote to Adonais; S. was still discussing his elegy for Keats with friends into the autumn of 1821: see letter to Horace Smith, 14 September 1821, L ii 349). Text from Edinburgh University Library MS Dc. 1 100/4 (E). Published in Fraser’s Magazine vi (November  1832) 599–600 (F); 1834; 1839; 1840; Rossetti 1870; Reiman 1977; MYRS viii 412–13 (facsimile and transcription of E); Major Works.

To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’) 1 The serpent is shut out from Paradise — The wounded deer must seek the herb no more

¶ 62.  Title. To — E. Eds have titled the poem variously, most often by giving the first line, with or without inverted commas (see headnote). 1. Paradise —] paradise — F; paradise. 1839; paradise: Rossetti 1870. The opening line obviously recalls Genesis iii 14, but the immediate stimulus was probably S.’s very recent rereading of Byron’s Cain, with its frequent references to the expulsion from Eden following Eve’s temptation by the serpent (see headnote). S.’s nickname among the Pisan circle was ‘the snake’; see headnote to A snake came to pay the mastiff a visit. 2. The belief that a wounded deer (or other animal) sought to heal itself by seeking out a particular herb derives from Aelian, Varia Historia: ‘The Cretans are excellent Archers; they shoot the Goats which feed on the tops of mountains, which being hurt, immediately eat of the herb Dittany, which as soon as they have tasted, the Arrow drops out’ (Book I ch. x); ‘Naturalists affirm that the Hart, when he would purge himself, eateth the Herb Seselis’ (Book XIII ch. xxxv), trans. Thomas Stanley, 1665 (Johnson, Rambler xlvii (1750) conflates both passages: ‘A man at once feels the pain, and knows the medicine, . . . and cures himself by unerring instinct, as the wounded stags of Crete are related by Aelian to have recourse to vulnerary herbs. But for sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature . . .’).

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In which its heart’s cure lies — The widowed dove must cease to haunt a bower 5 Like that from which its mate, with feignèd sighs, Fled in the April hour — I too, must seldom seek again Near happy friends a mitigated pain.

2 Of hatred I am proud, — with scorn content; 10 Indifference, which once hurt me, is now grown Itself indifferent. But not to speak of love, Pity alone Can break a spirit already more than bent. The miserable one 15 Turns the mind’s poison into food: Its medicine is tears, its evil, good.

Adaptations of this belief occur throughout the English literary tradition, e.g. Marlowe, Edward II ll. 1995–6: ‘the forrest Deare being struck/Runnes to an herbe that closeth vp the wounds’; Wordsworth, The Excursion xi 108–112, where the Solitary recalls the story of a man ‘crazed in brain/By unrequited love’ who ‘scaled the rocks,/Dived into caves, and pierced the matted woods,/In hope to find some virtuous herb of power/To cure his malady!’ S.’s phrasing also recalls the opening of Thomas Moore’s lyric ‘Come rest in this bosom’ from Irish Melodies: “Come rest in this bosom, my own stricken deer!/ Tho’ the herd have fled from thee, thy home is still here’. 3. heart’s cure lies —] heart-cure lies: F, 1839, Rossetti 1870. The reading ‘heart-cure’ was perhaps intended to reinforce a pun on ‘hart’. 4–6. The images of an abandoned nest, and a bird without a mate, have affinities with When the lamp is shattered and also with Archy’s song from Charles the First, A widowed bird sate mourning for her love. The ‘mate’ who ‘fled in the April hour’ ‘with feignèd sighs’ possibly relates to Godwin’s account, in Chapter viii of Memoirs of the author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), of how Mary’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft returned to London from France in April 1795 to discover she had been abandoned by her lover Gilbert Imlay. 4. bower] bower, F, 1839. 5. its mate,] it’s mate E; its mate Reiman (2002). 6. hour —] hour, F, Rossetti 1870; hour. 1839; hour. — Reiman (2002). 7. I too,] I, too, Reiman (2002), OSA. 9–11. S. was deeply wounded by the failure of Adonais to attract critical esteem, or even notice; in the 25 January letter to Hunt he commented ‘if Adonais had no success & excited no interest what incentive can I have to write?’ (L ii 382); this perceived failure stood in stark contrast with the acclaim that Byron’s work continued to attract, not least from S. himself (see headnote). 9. proud, —] proud — F. S. wrote to Hunt on 25 January (L ii 382) urging him not to ‘give Gifford or his associate Hazlitt a stripe’ in retaliation to the Quarterly Review’s review of L&C and RofI (April 1819: xxi 460–71; see headnote to Adonais) and Hazlitt’s attack on S. in his essay ‘On Paradox and Commonplace’ in Table Talk (1821). 10. which] that F, 1839. is now] now is F, 1839. 12. But] But, 1839, Rossetti 1870. Pity] pity F, 1839, Rossetti 1870. 14. Again recalling When the lamp is shattered 19–20: ‘The weak one is singled/To endure what it once possessed’. 15. food:] food, — F, 1839, Rossetti 1870.

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Therefore if now I see you seldomer Dear friends, dear friend, know that I only fly Your looks, because they stir 20 Griefs that should sleep, and hopes that cannot die. The very comfort which they minister I scarce can bear; yet I, (So deeply is the arrow gone) Should quickly perish if it were withdrawn.

4 25 When I return to my cold home, you ask Why I am not as I have lately been? You spoil me for the task Of acting a forced part in life’s dull scene, Of wearing on my brow the idle mask

16. tears,] tears — F; tears, — 1839, Rossetti 1870. its evil, good] its evil good F, 1839. Cp. Satan in Paradise Lost iv 110, ‘Evil be thou my good’, and Lucifer in Cain I i 138–140: ‘Souls who dare look the Omnipotent tyrant in/His everlasting face, and tell him, that/His evil is not good!’ 17–24. It has frequently been argued that the poem is a response to some injunction from Mary that S. limit his visits to the ‘Paradise’ of the Williams’s relationship (see headnote); but this stanza is clear that the decision to see them ‘seldomer’ originates with S.’s own state of mind. 18. Dear friends, dear friend,] Dear, gentle friend! F, 1834, 1839. Dear friends, dear friend! 1840, Rossetti 1870. See Keach, Shelley’s Style 216–9 for thoughtful commentary on the ambivalence of S.’s underlinings here and at l. 27. 19. looks,] looks Rossetti 1870. 20. die.] die: F, 1839, Rossetti 1870. 21. which] that F, 1839, Rossetti 1870. 22–4. Arrow wounds were particularly dangerous because the ligaments used to fasten the arrowhead to the shaft became loosened when wetted with blood, so that if the shaft was pulled free the arrowhead would easily dislodge. Having very rough edges (unlike bullets), all subsequent movement caused friction with the arrowhead and rapid infection. Only by surgical removal of the whole arrow could this be avoided. 22. bear;] bear — F; bear, 1839. 23. So deeply is the arrow gone, F, 1839, Rossetti 1870. 25. cold home] A clear allusion to Mary’s poor state of mind during the last months of S.’s life (see headnote). 26. lately been?] ever been. F, 1839. 27. You] You F, 1839. Again, the indeterminacy of the underlined pronoun makes its reference hover between Edward and Jane. 28. in] on F, 1839. scene,] There is a mark after scene in E which is possibly a full stop (and is so given in Reiman (2002) and Major Works), but may be an accidental mark; scene — F; scene, — 1839; scene, Rossetti 1870. 29–31. Of wearing . . . carnival] S. had recently grown pessimistic about his success as a writer, particularly in contrast with Byron, see e.g. his letter to Ollier, 11 November 1821: ‘have the goodness to send the Ms.. . .to a Printer, & the moment you get a proof, dispatch it to me. . .Lord Byron has his poems sent to him in this manner, and I cannot see that the inferiority in the composition of a Poem can affect the powers of a printer in the matter of dispatch. . .’ (L ii 365). This same letter also asks for news of the

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30 Of author, great or mean, In the world’s carnival. I sought Peace thus, and but in you I found it not.

5 Full half an hour today I tried my lot With various flowers, and every one still said 35 ‘She loves me, loves me, not.’ And if this meant a Vision long since fled — reception of Adonais: ‘I should be surprised if that Poem were born to an immortality of oblivion’; but such appeared to be the case by January 1822. The idle mask and carnival suggest Byron’s involvement in the dissipations of Venetian carnival during S.’s visit to him in Venice in autumn 1818. Masked balls were held in Pisa during the winter months, sometimes attended by S., Mary, and their friends (Mary L i 214, Mary Jnl i 395, Gisborne Jnl 130; see headnote to Fragments of an Unfinished Drama). 30. mean,] mean. F, 1839. Medwin’s alteration to the punctuation here and in the next line decisively alters S.’s sense. 31. carnival.] carnival F, 1839. 33. hour today] hour, to-day, 1839, Rossetti 1870; hour, to-day Reiman (2002). 34. said] said, F, 1839. 35. “She loves me, — loves me not.” F, Rossetti 1870; ‘She loves me — loves me not.” 1839 (1839 gives the note in F to this line: ‘See Faust’); ‘She loves me, loves me not.’ Major Works. The line is a reference to the ‘Gretchen Tragedy’ sequence in Goethe’s Faust Part I 3179–84: in the stage direction Margarete ‘pflückt eine Sternblume und zupft die Blätter ab, eins nach dem andern’ (‘plucks a star-flower, and picks off the leaves one after the other’, trans. Hayward 130), then Faust asks ‘Was soll das? Einen Strauß?’ (‘What is that for — a nosegay?’, trans. Hayward 130) MARGARETE. Nein, es soll nur ein Spiel. FAUST. Wie? MARGARETE. Geht! ihr lacht mich aus. Sie rupft und murmelt. FAUST. Was murmelst du? MARGARETE. halb laut. Er liebt mich — liebt mich nicht. FAUST. Du holdes Himmels-Angesicht! MARGARETE. fährt fort. Liebt mich — Nicht — Liebt mich — Nicht — Das lezte Blatt ausrupfend, mit holder Freude. Er liebt mich! (MARGARET. No, only for a game. FAUST. How? MARGARET. Go! You will laugh at me. (She plucks off the leaves and murmurs to herself.) FAUST. What are you murmuring? MARGARET, half aloud. He loves me — he loves me not! FAUST. Thou angelic being! MARGARET continues. Loves me — not — loves me — not — [plucking off the last leaf with fond delight] He loves me! (trans. Hayward 130–31)) 36. Vision] vision F, 1839, Rossetti 1870. Cp. S.’s letter to John Gisborne of 22 October 1821: ‘Some of us have in a prior existence been in love with an Antigone, & that makes us find no full content in any mortal tie’ (L ii 364).

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If it meant Fortune, Fame, or Peace of thought — If it meant — (but I dread To speak what you may know too well) — 40 Still there was truth in the sad oracle.

6 The crane o’er seas and forests seeks her home. No bird so wild, but has its quiet nest When it no more would roam. The sleepless billows on the Ocean’s breast 45 Break like a bursting heart, and die in foam And thus, at length, find rest.

37. If it meant Fortune, Fame, or Peace of thought —] If it meant fortune, fame, or peace of thought — F, 1839, Rossetti 1870. thought —] thought E. S. was beset by money worries towards the end of his residence in Pisa, e.g. in relation to Hunt’s constant need for financial support (see L ii 379 ff., 389) and the dire financial position of Mary’s father William Godwin; and he wrote to Claire Clairmont on 31 December 1821 describing how Mary had ‘suffered terribly from rheumatism in her head’, and how he himself had ‘suffered considerably from pain and depression of spirits’ (L ii 370). 38–9 No parenthesis in F, 1839. 38. meant —] meant, — F. 39. well) —] well) E, Reiman (2002); well: F, 1839. 40. Still] Still, F. 41–48. These lines articulate a recurrent lament of S.’s: cp. e.g. Stanzas. — April, 1814 17–20, lines themselves recalling Matthew viii 20, ‘The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head’. 41. home.] home; F, 1839, Rossetti 1870. Cp. Goethe, Faust Part I 1092–99: Doch ist es jedem eingeboren, Daß sein Gefühl hinauf und vorwärts dringt, Wenn über uns, im blauen Raum verloren, Ihr schmetternd Lied die Lerche singt; Wenn über schroffen Fichtenhöhen Der Adler ausgebreitet schwebt, Und über Flächen, über Seen, Der Kranich nach der Heimat strebt. (Yet it is the inborn tendency of our being for feeling to strive upwards and onwards; when, over us, lost in the blue expanse, the lark sings its trilling lay: when, over rugged pine-covered heights, the outspread eagle soars; and, over plain and sea, the crane struggles onwards to her home. (trans. Hayward 34)) 42. wild,] wild F, 1839, Rossetti 1870. nest] nest, F, 1839. 43. When] Whence F, 1834, 1839 (1840 corrects to When). roam.] roam; F, 1839, Rossetti 1870. 44–5. Cp. TL 155–157 and 465–467. 44. Ocean’s] Oceans E; ocean’s F, 1839, Rossetti 1870. 45. Break] Burst F, 1839 (1840 corrects to Break). foam] peace, F, 1839; foam, Rossetti 1870. 46. And thus at length find rest: 1839, Rossetti 1870.

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Doubtless there is a place of peace Where my weak heart and all its throbs will cease.

7 I asked her yesterday if she believed 50 That I had resolution. One who had Would ne’er have thus relieved His heart with words, but what his judgment bade Would do, and leave the scorner unrelieved. — These verses were too sad 55 To send to you, but that I know, Happy yourself you feel another’s woe.

63  To Jane. The invitation To Jane. The invitation and To Jane — The recollection are companion pieces closely linked by their shared inspiration in a walk taken by S. in company with Jane Williams and Mary on Saturday 2 February  1822, and recorded in Mary’s journal entry for that day: ‘Go through the Pine Forest to the sea with Shelley and Jane’ (Mary Jnl i 393; Edward Williams’s journal also records the walk, Gisborne Jnl 128). Up to the departure for Villa Magni in late April 1822 Mary records taking frequent walks with Jane alone, but only two walks with S. alone are noted, on 19 and 28 February (Mary Jnl i 398, 400). However, the 2 February walk was the only one taken by S. and the two women together, and both of the poems written to commemorate it are evidently expressive of the tensions and complex dynamics of relations between the three (see notes, and To — — (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’), ‘General Headnote to S.’s Poems to Jane Williams’). BSM xix assumes that Trelawny claims to have been present on the 2 February walk (pp. liv-lv) in his account of discovering S. engaged in drafting With a guitar. To Jane, but Trelawny’s description of his walk in the pine forest of the Cascine outside Pisa refers only to its taking place ‘on one of those brilliant spring 47–8. S. appears to imagine death as a place of respite; five months after composing this poem he wrote to Trelawny asking if he could obtain ‘the Prussic Acid, or essential oil of bitter almonds. . .I have no intention of suicide at present. . .but I confess it would be a comfort to me to hold that golden key to the chamber of perpetual rest’ (L ii 433; see headnote to Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven). 47. peace] peace, F. 48. my] my F, 1839. will] shall F, 1839 (1840 corrects to will). 49–50. Cp. Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘Letters to Imlay’ Letter LX (July 30 1795): ‘When we meet again, you shall be convinced that I have more resolution than you give me credit for. I will not torment you. If I am destined always to be disappointed and unhappy, I will conceal the anguish I cannot dissipate; and the tightened cord of life or reason will at last snap, and set me free’ (MWW vi 422). 49. her yesterday] her, yesterday, 1839. 50. resolution. One] resolution, one E. had] had F, 1839. 52. words,] words, — F, 1839, Rossetti 1870. 53. unrelieved. —] unreprieved. F, 1839 (1840 corrects to ‘unrelieved’). 54. were] are F, 1839. Cp. S.’s letter to Ollier of 10 November 1820 describing poems for inclusion in a planned volume together with J&M: ‘all my saddest verses raked up into one heap’ (L ii 246). 55. but] ‘if it weren’t for the fact that’. 56. another’s] anothers E.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-63

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mornings we on the wrong side of the Alps are so rarely blessed with’ (Recollections ch. 8; Records ch 8 is identical). February 2 is at any rate clearly too early a date for the composition of With a guitar. To Jane (see headnote). The holograph MS of To Jane — The recollection is dated ‘Feb. 2.1822’ below the title. S. made exceptionally careful and indeed beautiful separate transcriptions of the two poems, and presented them to Jane sometime between February and June 1822. These MSS were in her possession after S.’s death. They were subsequently acquired by Trelawny, and inherited by his daughter, Mrs  Laetitia Call, who in 1907 donated To Jane. The invitation to Cambridge University Library (MS Add. 4444; ‘C’) and To Jane — The recollection to the British Museum (British Library Add MS  37538 G, ff. 40–41; ‘BL’). Given that it is not known when exactly S. gave the two poems to Jane, they could in theory have been composed at any time between February and June 1822. They were, however, probably written in the days following the walk on 2 February, and the very next day, 3 February, is most likely. To Jane — The recollection begins, in contrast with the ‘Universal Sun’ of the ‘Invitation’ (l. 68), by noting that ‘the Earth has changed its face,/A frown is on the Heaven’s brow’ (ll. 7–8). Mary’s jnl entry for 3 February records ‘A mild day & night — some clouds in the sky in the morning but they clear away’ (Mary Jnl i 394). S. left Pisa with Edward Williams on 7 February to go house-hunting in La Spezia (Mary Jnl i 395) and the paired poems were probably completed by then. The poems were first published complete and together in 1840. Up to that point, however, they had shared a puzzling and confused publication history, in which Thomas Medwin played a significant part. He incorporated adapted versions of one line from To Jane. The invitation (l. 47) and eleven lines from To Jane — The recollection (ll. 41–46, 49–52 and 79) into a passage in his long poem Ahasuerus the Wanderer, published in 1823 (88–90). It is thus obvious that Medwin had ready access to the holographs, or copies of them (Jane Williams was a particular favourite of Medwin’s), in the year following S.’s death, and that he was ready to combine together lines from the two poems, and to adapt them sometimes quite freely. The passage incorporating lines from the paired poems precedes an account of a drowning which is obviously based on S.’s death, and which includes the first publication of When the lamp is shattered, as a poem discovered on the drowned corpse ‘in his garment’s inmost fold’. Medwin acknowledges in a note that these lines are not by him but ‘by a friend, now no more’, but there is no such acknowledgement of his incorporation of lines from the two Jane poems (Ahasuerus the Wanderer 96–97: in Medwin he did acknowledge the borrowing, but then in subsequent MS additions offered a tortuously confusing account of his appropriation; see Medwin (1913) 141–2). Ten years later, Medwin was also presumably responsible for the first publication of To Jane. The invitation, in a complete version derived from the holograph. Medwin marked the tenth anniversary of S.’s death in 1832 by releasing several of the poems to Jane, in Fraser’s Magazine (To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’)) and in the Athenaeum (With a guitar. To Jane, The magnetic lady to her patient, and To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’)). He continued the practice, which obviously implied a close co-operation with Jane Williams, when To Jane. The invitation appeared in the second and last issue of the very short-lived New Anti-Jacobin for May 1833; this was a singularly unShelleyan print setting, for The New Anti-Jacobin was conceived in ultra-conservative emulation of the famous original Anti-Jacobin, which had flourished under George Canning in the 1790s, and its equally Tory successor the AntiJacobin Review (1798–1821). In the New Anti-Jacobin, To Jane. The invitation is given the title ‘Lines Written in the Cascine at Pisa’, and is accompanied by a note: ‘A few lines of this poem have already appeared; but the Editor thinks the admirers of Shelley will be glad to see it published, for the first time, in its original form’ (196). This can hardly refer to the

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single line which Medwin had incorporated into Ahasuerus the Wanderer, so must refer to the original print form of the two poems, adapted and combined into a single poem published in 1824 under the title The Pine Forest of the Cascine, near Pisa (see Longman vi, no. 431/432 Appendix) with the date ‘February 2, 1822’ given below the last line. Mary still included this combined form, with the same title, in 1839, so it is clear she remained unaware of the two separate poems until presumably provided with the holographs by Jane Williams at some point after the publication of 1839, enabling her to include them in 1840, which entirely omits the amalgamated version. Rossetti subsequently incorporated a few emendations when Trelawny allowed him sight of the MSS then in his possession (Rossetti 1870 ii 575–6). For discussion of the status of the poem in 1824 entitled The Pine Forest of the Cascine, near Pisa, see its headnote. The complementary paired poems first published together in 1840 bear strong stylistic marks of having from the start been conceived in precisely that form, as a complementary pair in the manner of Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’. They are metrically quite distinct: The invitation is in seven- and eight-syllable couplets (with one triplet at ll. 57–59) recalling Lines Written among the Euganean Hills but with an emotional buoyancy suggesting Milton’s similar metre from l. 11 onwards of ‘L’Allegro’; whereas The recollection, more reflective in tone, opens with an eight-line section rhyming abcadcdb (perhaps echoing the unusual ten-line introductions to both ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’), before settling to quatrains rhyming abab and alternating eight- and six-syllable lines, grouped into five numbered sections of 12, 12, 20, 16, and 20 lines. The two poems also echo shared motifs and phrasing which contribute to a strong sense of them as paired poems, balanced in contrastive complementarity. They represent a striking new departure in S.’s lyric writing. Relaxed rhymes and long, confidently fluent idiomatic sentences sustain a conversational informality while meeting the demands of the metre with remarkable facility, but the prevailing lightness of tone is nevertheless disturbed by dark emotional undercurrents. Text from Cambridge University Library, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, MS Add. 4444 (C: by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library). Published in The New Anti-Jacobin ii (May  1833) 196–197 (NA-J), 1840, Chernaik, Reiman 1977, Major Works, MYRS viii 370–380 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

To Jane. The invitation Best and brightest, come away — Fairer far than this fair day Which like thee to those in sorrow ¶ 63. Title. LINES WRITTEN IN THE CASCINE AT PISA N-AJ; THE INVITATION 1840. For the poem’s genesis in a walk taken by S., Jane Williams, and Mary on 2 February 1822 in the pine woods of the Cascine outside Pisa, see headnote. Cp. George Tighe’s description (from his unpublished notes for a travel book, in CHPL, Shelleyana 814, vol. 5, f. 27r): Cascine ‘is a delightful spot distant about 3 miles distant from Pisa & consists of wood & lawn agreeably intermixed. The Cascine at Florence is like the plantation of a private Gentleman. This is like the forest of a Prince’. 1. In C S. first accidentally began his transcription with line 2, then crossed it out. away —] away, NA-J. 2. day] day, NA-J. 3. Which, like thee, to those in sorrow, NA-J; the NA-J punctuation (presumably Medwin’s) misunderstands the sense, which is that the effect of the ‘fair day’ on ‘the rough year just awake’ is like Jane’s effect on ‘those in sorrow’ such as S.

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Comes to bid a sweet good-morrow 5 To the rough year just awake In its cradle on the brake. — The brightest hour of unborn spring Through the winter wandering Found it seems the halcyon morn 10 To hoar February born; Bending from Heaven in azure mirth It kissed the forehead of the earth And smiled upon the silent sea, And bade the frozen streams be free 15 And waked to music all their fountains And breathed upon the frozen mountains And like a prophetess of May Strewed flowers upon the barren way, Making the wintry world appear

4. In C S. first wrote glad then cancelled it and wrote sweet above. 5. year] Year NA-J. 6. its] it’s (S.’s characteristic agrammatical apostrophe is in fact placed to the right of its in C. on] in NA-J. brake] thicket; cp. Adonais 159. 7. brightest hour] eldest flower NA-J. spring] Spring, NA-J. 8. winter wandering] Winter wandering, NA-J. 9. the] All eds (except Chernaik) follow the Mary Copybk 1 transcription of The Pine Forest of the Cascine in reading this for the; the is however perfectly clear in C (‘the brightest hour of unborn spring’ has discovered the perfect February morning). halcyon] I.e. calm and blue. ‘The halcyon (kingfisher) was supposed to build a nest on the sea in midwinter, and to ensure calm weather (‘halcyon days’) while she brooded her eggs’ (GM; for the classical sources of this belief see Aristotle, Historia Animalium v 8, Ovid, Met. 11, and Pliny, Nat. Hist. x 47). Cp. Milton, ‘Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ ll. 61–68: But peaceful was the night Wherein the Prince of Light His reign of peace upon the earth began: The winds with wonder whist, Smoothly the waters kissed, Whispering new joys to the mild ocean Who now hath quite forgot to rave, While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave. Cp. PU III iv 78–83 and note, and Epipsychidion 412 and note. 10. born;] born: NA-J. 11. Bending from Heaven, in azure mirth, NA-J. azure mirth] A  cheeringly blue sky. In Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ the goddess called Euphrosyne in heaven is known by men as ‘heart-easing Mirth’ (ll. 11–13). 12. earth] Earth, NA-J. 13. sea,] Sea, NA-J. 14. free] free, NA-J. 15. their fountains] the fountains, NA-J. 16. mountains] mountains, NA-J. 17. And, like a prophetess of May, NA-J. 18. way,] way C; way; NA-J.

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20 Like one on whom thou smilest, dear. Away, away from men and towns To the wild wood and the downs, To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress 25 Its music lest it should not find An echo in another’s mind, While the touch of Nature’s art Harmonizes heart to heart. — I leave this notice on my door 30 For each accustomed visitor — ‘I am gone into the fields To take what this sweet hour yields. Reflection, you may come tomorrow, Sit by the fireside with Sorrow — 35 You, with the unpaid bill, Despair, You, tiresome verse-reciter Care, I will pay you in the grave, Death will listen to your stave — Expectation too, be off! 20. This line falls at the bottom of the page in C, but a new section is clearly intended and all eds insert a line of space (cp. l. 46). 21. Away, away, from men and towns, NA-J. Away,] Away C. Cp. Chatterton, ‘The Invitation, to be sung by Mrs Barthelemon and by Master Cheney’ l. 1: ‘Away to the woodlands, away’. 22. There is a small mark at the end of the line in C which may, as proposed in MYRS viii 371, be ‘a small comma’ but could be a random mark; however, a comma seems necessary at this point. 23. And the silent wilderness, NA-J. 24–26. Suggesting the unhappiness in S.’s relations with Mary. 25. Its] It’s C. music] music, NA-J. 28. Harmonizes] Jane Williams’s musical talent included a beautiful singing voice. heart. —] heart. NA-J. 29–46. See Prologue in Heaven (Longman vi, no. 447), one of S.’s translations from Goethe’s Faust, 82 and note. 29. Major Works introduces quotation marks from the beginning of this line. my] the NA-J. 30. For] To NA-J. 32. hour yields.] hour yields C; season yields: NA-J; hour yields — Major Works. 34. Sorrow —] sorrow; NA-J. 35–38. The abstractions ‘Despair’ and ‘Care’ addressed in ll. 35–36 are answered in turn in ll. 37–38. 35. You,] You NA-J. Despair,] Despair C. S’s constant money worries during the last months of his life were compounded by Leigh Hunt’s need for financial support, and the dire financial position of Mary’s father William Godwin, whose correspondence with his daughter repeatedly appealed for money to save his family from ruin. 36–38. Cp. Young, Night Thoughts i 28, 32: ‘Silence and darkness! . . . Assist me: I will thank you in the grave’. 36. You,] You NA-J. verse-reciter Care,] verse-reciter Care C (MYRS viii transcribes C as ‘verse,-reciter’, but the mark before the hyphen must be a slip of the pen, as a comma after ‘verse’ is impossible); verse-reciter, Care — NA-J. 37. grave,] grave C. 38. ‘I’ll listen to your poetry when I’m dead’ (GM). stave —] stave; NA-J; stave here is in the sense ‘stanza’; cp. PB3 (Longman iii, no. 239) 618 and note. 39. off!] off, NA-J.

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40 Today is for itself enough — Hope, in pity mock not woe With smiles, nor follow where I go; Long having lived on thy sweet food At length I find one moment’s good 45 After long pain — with all your love This you never told me of.’ Radiant Sister of the day, Awake, arise and come away To the wild woods and the plains 50 And the pools where winter-rains Image all their roof of leaves, Where the pine its garland weaves Of sapless green and ivy dun Round stems that never kiss the Sun — 55 Where the lawns and pastures be And the sand hills of the sea — When the melting hoar-frost wets The daisy-star that never sets; And wind-flowers, and violets 40. enough —] enough; NA-J. 42. where] as NA-J. 43. thy] this NA-J. 44. moment’s] moment NA-J. 45. pain —] pain, NA-J. love] love, NA-J. 46. This line falls at the bottom of the page in C, but as in l. 20 above a line-break is clearly intended. 47. day,] day C; day! NA-J. 48. Awake,] Awake C. arise] arise, NA-J. Cp. Paradise Lost i 330, ‘Awake, arise, or be forever fallen’. 49. woods] wood, NA-J. 50–51. See note to To Jane — The recollection ll. 53–76. 50. And the pools, where wintry rains NA-J. The transcription in MYRS omits S.’s hyphen in winter-rains (clear in C). 51. their] this NA-J. leaves,] leaves C. 52. weaves] weaves, NA-J. 53. dun] dun, NA-J. I.e. dark-hued. 54. Sun —] sun; NA-J. 55. lawns] forest clearings. 56. sand hills] sand-hills NA-J. sea —] sea; NA-J. 57. When] All eds (and the transcription in MYRS) follow NA-J and 1840 in reading Where, but When is clear in C; S.’s description moves from the spatial ‘Where . . . Where’ of ll. 52 and 55 to the temporal ‘When . . . When’ of ll. 57 and 62. 58–60. S’s ‘daisy-star’ (which seems to be a unique coinage) presumably refers to the common daisy (Bellis perennis), which can be in flower throughout the year (including in a thaw), and whose starlike flowers are always open in sunlight. The ‘wind-flowers’ are wood anemones (from Gk. ἄνεμωνη, ἄνεμος ‘wind’) which like violets and daisies are flowers of very early spring in Italy. The violets ‘yet join not scent to hue’ because their perfume develops later. 58. daisy-star] daisy star NA-J. sets;] sets, C, Chernaik, Reiman 1977, Major Works. 59. wind-flowers, and violets] wind-flowers and violets, NA-J (Medwin’s punctuation misunderstands the sense; see note to ll. 58–60).

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60 Which yet join not scent to hue Crown the pale year weak and new; When the night is left behind In the deep east dun and blind, And the blue noon is over us, 65 And the multitudinous Billows murmur at our feet Where the earth and ocean meet And all things seem only one In the universal Sun. —

64  To Jane——The Recollection See headnote to preceding poem, To Jane. The invitation. Text from British Library Add MS 37538, ff. 40–41 (BL). Published in 1840, MYRS viii 381–391 (facsimile and transcription of MS). Now the last day of many days, All beautiful and bright as thou, The loveliest and the last, is dead. Rise Memory, and write its praise!

60. hue] hue, NA-J. yet] Written above now canc. in C (confirming the temporal sense of yet; see notes to ll. 57–60). 61. new;] new C, Reiman 1977, Major Works; new, NA-J, Chernaik. 62. In C S. first began the line Now, then cancelled it and wrote When above. 63. east] east, NA-J. blind,] blind C, Chernaik, Reiman 1977, Major Works; i.e. ‘in darkness’ (cp. Adonais 412 and note). Following this line in C are three cancelled lines: The blue And the noon like Heaven’s love/Is built around & roofed b/And the. 64. noon] morn NA-J. us] ‘Stressed, to contrast with deep east’ (GM). 66. feet] feet, NA-J. 67. earth and ocean] Earth and Ocean NA-J. 69. Sun. —] sun. NA-J.

¶ 64. Title. S. writes Feb. 2.1822 below and to the right of this title in BL; THE RECOLLECTION 1840. S.’s recollection perhaps carries a resonance of the Platonic doctrine of anamnesis. In the Meno 86b Socrates explains our intuition of the beautiful and the good by suggesting that the soul is immortal and repeatedly reincarnated, and that knowledge of the ideal is in the soul from eternity, but forgotten in the trauma of birth. To Jane — The recollection might thus imply an ideally perfect day. 1–8. This opening serves as a kind of invocation, offering a paradigm of what follows (in the manner of the Dantean epigraph to Epipsychidion), and in a distinctive pattern of rhyme which is then superseded by a regular quatrain pattern. BL has a dash under l. 8, as if to underline the prefatory nature of the opening passage, recalling the introductory verses of ‘Il Penseroso’ (see headnote). 1. days,] days; Chernaik; but, as MYRS viii 382 explains, what appears as the upper dot of a semicolon is in fact a brown stain on the paper.

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5 Up to thy wonted work! come, trace The epitaph of glory fled; For now the Earth has changed its face A frown is on the Heaven’s brow. —

1 We wandered to the pine forest 10 That skirts the Ocean foam; The lightest wind was in its nest, The Tempest in its home;

6. fled;] eds; dead; BL. A repetition of the rhyme on dead would be very uncharacteristic, and is presumably a dittography. The reading fled is found in Mary Copybk 1 and 1824 though is of uncertain authority (see headnote to The Pine Forest of the Cascine, near Pisa, Longman vi, no. 431/432 Appendix). 8. The ‘frown’ contrasts with the ‘smiled’ of To Jane. The invitation 13. 9–20. The thought, movement, and metre, alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines in quatrains rhyming abab, seems indebted to Michael Drayton, ‘The Sixt Nimphal’, from The Muses Elizium (1630) 1–20: Cleere had the day bin from the dawne, All chequerd was the Skye, Thin Clouds like Scarfs of Cobweb Lawne Vayld Heaven’s most glorious eye. The Winde had no more strength then this, That leasurely it blew, To make one leafe the next to kisse, That closely by it grew. The Rils that on the Pebbles playd, Might now be heard at will; This world they onely Musick made, Else everything was still. The Flowers like brave embraudred Gerles, Lookt as they much desired, To see whose head with orient Pearles, Most curiously was tyred; And to it selfe the subtle Ayre, Such soverainty assumes, That it receiv’d too large a share From natures rich perfumes. There is no record of Drayton in S’s reading, but he would certainly have been familiar with his work, because he is listed in Godwin’s influential letter to S. of 10 December 1812 suggesting a course of reading to include ‘some of our elder writers’: ‘Shakspeare had many contemporary dramatists, any one of which would have done for almost the best man of any other age . . . Then what illustrious poets had those times in Spenser, Drayton, and Daniel!’ (quoted from Shelley and Mary in L i 341). 11. nest] Cp. the ‘halcyon morn’ of To Jane. The invitation l. 9 and note.

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The whispering waves were half asleep, The clouds were gone to play, 15 And on the bosom of the deep The smile of Heaven lay; It seemed as if the hour were one Sent from beyond the skies, Which scattered from above the sun 20 A light of Paradise.

2 We paused amid the pines that stood The giants of the waste, Tortured by storms to shapes as rude As serpents interlaced, 25 And soothed by every azure breath That under Heaven is blown To harmonies and hues beneath, As tender as its own; Now all the tree-tops lay asleep 30 Like green waves on the sea, As still as in the silent deep The Ocean woods may be.

3 How calm it was! the silence there By such a chain was bound 35 That even the busy woodpecker Made stiller with her sound The inviolable quietness; The breath of peace we drew With its soft motion made not less

13. Cp. Milton, ‘L’Allegro’ 116: ‘By whispering winds soon lulled asleep’. 17–20. Cp. May-day Night (Longman vi, no. 440), one of S.’s translations from Goethe’s Faust, 55–8. 29–32. A holograph draft of these lines survives in Box 1 f. 64r (see headnote to The Pine Forest of the Cascine, near Pisa). 29. Now] S. first wrote And in BL, then cancelled it and wrote Now above. 30. sea,] sea BL. 31–2. Cp. OWW 39–40: ‘The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear/The sapless foliage of the ocean’. 38–46. Cp. TL 335–42: for a space The scene of woods and waters seemed to keep, Though it was now broad day, a gentle trace Of light diviner than the common Sun Sheds on the common Earth, but all the place

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40

The calm that round us grew. — There seemed from the remotest seat Of the white mountain-waste, To the soft flower beneath our feet A magic circle traced, 45 A spirit interfused around, A thrilling silent life. To momentary peace it bound Our mortal nature’s strife; — And still I felt the centre of 50 The magic circle there Was one fair form that filled with love The lifeless atmosphere.

4 We paused beside the pools that lie Under the forest bough — 55 Each seemed as’twere, a little sky Gulfed in a world below; A firmament of purple light Which in the dark earth lay More boundless than the depth of night 60 And purer than the day,

Was filled with many sounds woven into one Oblivious melody, confusing sense Amid the gliding waves and shadows dun; 42. The mountains of Carrara in the Western Apennines, showing white with their marble quarries dating from Roman times, were visible from Pisa; see note to TL 33. 45. around,] around BL. Cp. Wordsworth, ‘Lines . . . above Tintern Abbey’ ll. 95–96: ‘a sense sublime/ Of something far more deeply interfused’. 46. life.] life, Chernaik. The punctuation in BL is ambiguous; S. appears to have written a colon, then either cancelled it with a sloping line and added a stop, or replaced it with a comma written over the colon. 51. one] Chernaik has no italics. 52. S. first wrote breathless in BL, then cancelled breath and wrote life above. 53–76. S.’s elaborated image of the reflecting pools recalls Lucretius, De Re. Nat. iv 414–419: At conlectus aquae digitum non altior unum, Qui lapides inter sistit per strata viarum, Despectum praebet sub terras impete tanto, A terris quantum caeli patet altus hiatus, Nubila despicere et caelum ut videare et aperta Corpora mirande sub terras abdita cernas. (‘But a puddle of water no more than one finger deep, lying between the stones upon a paved street, offers a view downwards under the earth to as great a reach as the open heavens yawn on high, so that

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In which the lovely forests grew As in the upper air, More perfect, both in shape and hue, Than any spreading there; 65 There lay the glade, the neighbouring lawn, And through the dark green wood The white sun twinkling like the dawn Out of a speckled cloud.

5 Sweet views, which in our world above 70 Can never well be seen Were imaged in the water’s love Of that fair forest green; And all was interfused beneath With an Elysian glow,

you seem to look down upon the clouds and heaven, and you see manifest objects miraculously buried beneath the earth’.) Similar images are in Aeneid i 162–164: hinc atque hinc vastae rupes geminique minantur in caelum scopuli, quorum sub vertice late aequora tuta silent (‘On either side loom heavenward huge cliffs and twin peaks, beneath whose crest far and wide is the stillness of sheltered water’). See also the long description of Derwentwater in Southey, Letters from England (1807; ed. Jack Simmons, 1951) 238–9. Cp. S.’s description in a short prose passage in Nbk 21 p. 236 reverso (transcribed by Mary in Mary Copybk 1 p.  20, and published in Relics 89 as ‘Miscellaneous Fragments xxxvii’, and in Forman 1880 vii 145, as the first of the ‘Three Fragments on Beauty’): Why is the reflexion in that canal far more beautiful than the objects it reflects. The colours are more vivid, & yet blended with more harmony, the openings from within into the soft & tender colours of the distant wood & the intersection of the mountain lines surpass & misrepresent truth. (for a facsimile, see BSM xvi 220; this transcription differs from that in BSM xvi 221) 62. air,] air BL. 68. BL has no space between ll. 68 and 69. Line 68 is the first line on the last page of BL f. 41v, and there is a clearly deliberate mark resembling a shortened capital I above the stop after cloud. Centred under the last line of the MS at the foot of the page S. has written 5, and beneath that a line of five crosses, presumably to indicate both that the fifth section of the poem begins after the mark at the top of the page, and that the fifth section as it stands completes the poem (see Reiman 1977 for a different interpretation) 70. S. made a cancelled false start to this line in BL, which could be Can see, with possibly as or are written over see. seen] seen, Reiman 1977, Major Works. 74. Elysian] A favourite word of S.’s, it also occurs in ‘L’Allegro’ l. 147.

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75 An atmosphere without a breath, A softer day below — Like one beloved, the scene had lent To the dark water’s breast, Its every leaf and lineament 80 With more than truth expressed; Until an envious wind crept by, Like an unwelcome thought Which from the mind’s too faithful eye Blots one dear image out. — 85 Though thou art ever fair and kind And forests ever green, Less oft is peace in ————’s mind Than calm in water seen.

65  ‘Swifter far than summer’s flight’/Remembrance [A Lament] Four manuscript versions of this plangent lyric are known to have survived, each one different from the others; together they form the basis of a textual history that is tangled and elusive. S. drafted the three stanzas in pencil over five pages in Nbk 22 (ff. 6r, 7r, 8r-8v, 9r), then made some revisions to them in ink. The draft is without title: its position in the notebook is consistent with a date of composition from late December 1821 (the year assigned to the poem by Mary in 1839) to early 1822. S. made a clean transcription, also untitled, on the verso of the final printed page and the recto of the following blank page of a copy of the 1821 edition of Adonais, which is now in the Robert H. Taylor Collection of English and American Literature, Rare Book Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library (Princeton). This version of the poem (Text A) clearly derives from the revised draft, showing only such minor variations as might well have been made in transcribing. Text B, also in S.’s autograph, is written on both sides of a single sheet of paper, which was donated in 1907 to Eton College Library by Edward Trelawny’s daughter Mrs Charles F. Call (Eton). 81–84. Clearly implying Mary’s brooding presence on the walk. 81. Cp. Wordsworth, The Excursion ix 467–473: Then, with a sigh, sometimes I feel, as now, That combinations so serene and bright Cannot be lasting in a world like ours, Whose highest beauty, beautiful as it is, Like that reflected in yon quiet pool, Seems but a fleeting sunbeam’s gift, whose peace The sufferance only of a breath of air! 86. green,] green BL. 87. The name is left blank in BL; ‘Shelley’ is obviously implied, but no one is named within the body of either this poem or its companion-piece.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-65

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Entitled Remembrance, the poem was given or sent by S. to Jane Williams, as an undated note below the third stanza, reproduced with a transcription in MYRS viii 358–9, indicates: Dear Jane — 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. — The implications of this enigmatic message will be considered below. A collation of Eton with the Nbk 22 draft and Princeton warrants the following hypothesis. The text addressed to Jane Williams (Eton) appears, a few differences apart, to derive from the draft in Nbk 22 before S.’s revisions in ink were added to it. Setting aside the title Remembrance, the most important departure from the unrevised draft, is in line 20: Nbk 22 reads ‘Cypress, pansies, [rue] for me’, for which ‘Sadder flowers find for me’ is substituted, a line unique to the Eton MS. The significance of the alteration is clarified by the note to Jane Williams in which S. urges her to conceal his authorship of the song, evidently not wishing the emotional distress it exhibits to be interpreted as his own — as a lament for the unhappy state of his marriage and/or his disappointed infatuation with Teresa Viviani, or a frustrated attachment to Jane herself (see headnote to To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’)). In the Pisan circle where the song was to be sung, cypress and pansies would have recalled Adonais, published a few months previously, in which the transparent self-portrait of S. as one of the mourners for the death of the young poet of the title is represented as having his head ‘bound with pansies overblown’ and as carrying a spear ‘topped with a cypress cone’ (ll. 289–91). Furthermore, in a letter of 26 July 1822 to the painter Amelia Curran, Mary quotes ‘Pansies let my flowers be’, specifying the pansy as ‘his flower’ which she intends to have engraved on a locket to wear in S.’s memory. So not quite three weeks after S.’s death, Mary must have seen either the ink revisions in Nbk 22 or Princeton or both, though it is always possible that she had access to another copy of the poem which included S.’s revision of the draft of line 20. That revised draft line is incorporated into the text transcribed in the copy of Adonais (Princeton). By appending the poem at the end of the volume, S. elaborates on one aspect of his self-representation as mourner, ‘A Love in desolation masked’ (l. 281), so as to include the isolated anguish of the deserted lover that is portrayed in the lyric. It may be that he intended the copy of the elegy thus augmented to remain a private memento of a troubled passage in his life. A third fair copy was transcribed by Mary into Harvard Nbk 1 under the generic title ‘Song’ (cp. ‘old song’ in S.’s note to Jane Williams). As shown in MYRS v (pp. xxi-xxii, xxv, xxxvii, 90–91, 156, 174, 195), this text, together with that of The Indian Girl’s Song, are late additions to the notebook by Mary — who might have heard Jane Williams sing S.’s personal lyric. (Mary also gave the title Song to S.’s transcription of Goodnight in Harvard Nbk 1, in this case too without any evident manuscript authority.) The only variant of substance between her Harvard Nbk 1 transcription and the printed texts in 1824 and 1839 is the title, A Lament, which appears in no MS known to survive; she furnished the same title for the lyric beginning O World, O Life, O Time in 1824 and 1839, again without manuscript authority. The readings

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in Mary’s transcription of Swifter far are eclectic, having elements in common with all three of the autograph MSS. The fact that she does not adopt the title Remembrance from Eton suggests either that she found the title A Lament in another autograph copy, now lost, or that she chose not to include it for reasons of her own; see note to the title. The Eton manuscript passed from Jane Williams to Edward Trelawny who made it available to William Michael Rossetti for his 1870 edition. The text in Rossetti 1870 follows Eton closely, the major departure from it being a preference for the version of line 20 printed in 1824 and 1839 as well as in Mary’s letter of 26 July 1822, cited earlier: ‘Pansies let my flowers be’ (my in the letter and Princeton). The Princeton MS did not enter the editorial tradition until Forman 1876–7. Forman was given access to the fair copy at the end of Adonais, then in the possession of Lord Houghton (Richard Monckton Milnes), to which he accorded primary authority for its literary qualities and printed it ‘verbatim et literatim’, though supplying the title Remembrance, which Rossetti 1870 had printed before him, from Eton. Rossetti 1878 adopts several features of the Forman-Houghton text though retains others, including the title, from Eton. Woodberry, Hutchinson, and Locock 1911 all accept the title Remembrance while varying somewhat in their textual details according as they follow one MS source or another for particular readings. Accepting the argument set out earlier on the relations among the MS witnesses, the likely order of composition or transcription of the four would be: the draft in Nbk 22 — Eton — Princeton — Harvard Nbk 1. (MYRS viii 360 argues for the order Nbk 22 — Princeton — Eton — Harvard Nbk 1). The seasonal references in the draft, and its position in Nbk 22, support a date within the period late December 1821 to spring 1822. The note to Jane Williams on the Eton MS, which requires careful scrutiny, is suggestive, though not conclusive, as to the date of that version of the poem. S.’s assertion that it is ‘an old song’ is contradicted by the evidence for dating the draft; he reveals as much by coyly suggesting that although Jane might recognise it as his she should keep his authorship a secret. He would be more likely to ask ‘How are you to day’ when the Williamses were occupying their own apartment on the floor below the Shelleys’ in the Tre Palazzi di Chiesa in Pisa, from early November 1821, than after the move to Villa Magni at the end of April 1822 where the two families lived together in a very confined space. S.’s dream of ‘sailing and fishing up coral’ suggests that he is anticipating boating on the ocean following the decision in January 1822 by himself and Edward Williams, prompted by Trelawny, to have a schooner constructed (eventually named the Don Juan) which was delivered to them in Lerici on 12 May — rather than recalling the regular sailing that he, Williams, and Henry Reveley undertook on the Arno and the local canals from spring 1821 to spring 1822. Trelawny specified to the builder that the new boat was to be used for fishing as well as shooting (Gisborne Jnl 128 n. 87), and Livorno was a centre for the trade in the red coral to be found in the Mediterranean nearby (Claire Jnl 160 and Galignani’s Traveller’s Guide through Italy (1822) 593). S.’s dream also alludes to l. 14 of the poem ‘Sleep itself is turned to sorrow’. Taken together, these indications accord with the Eton version of the poem having been communicated to Jane Williams between January and May 1822, the period during which S. wrote six substantial lyrics for her: To —— ‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’; To Jane. The invitation; To Jane — The recollection; With a guitar. To Jane; The magnetic lady to her patient; To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’). Mary’s transcription of Swifter far in Harvard Nbk 1 would appear to have been made after S.’s death, as Reiman argues in MYRS v. S.’s lyric works a variation on the traditional sub-genre of the lover’s complaint, a poem or song expressing grief, pain, or indignation at the indifference, infidelity, or cruelty of a beloved person. Examples, deriving ultimately from Theocritus’ Idylls and Virgil’s Eclogues, abound in the English poetry of the Renaissance. S. himself translated part of Virgil’s 10th Eclogue (Longman ii, no. 167) which elaborates on the anguish of a lover, Gallus, deserted

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by his beloved Lycoris; he later set three lines from his translation as epigraph to J&M: ‘The meadows with fresh streams, the bees with thyme,/The goats with the green leaves of budding spring,/Are saturated not — nor Love with tears.’ Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint, published as an appendix to the Sonnets (1609), is the best-known example of the type in English, which assumes a variety of forms in more recent verse — for example in Coleridge’s A Lover’s Complaint to His Mistress (1792) or Wordsworth’s A Complaint (1807). Swifter far/Remembrance is unusual in excluding specific referential detail and all but the barest elements of narrative structure. The eight-line stanza of three or four stressed syllables rhyming aaabcccb is unique among S.’s poems. A record of substantial variants among the MS witnesses and important printings follows Text A. Text A from Princeton. Text B from Eton. Text A published in Forman 1876–7 iv 82–4 with title from Eton via Rossetti 1870; MYRS viii 366–9 (facsimile and transcription of MS). Text B published in Rossetti 1870 ii 274 with variations common to 1824, 1839, and 1840 in lines 8 and 20; MYRS viii 356–9 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

A  ‘Swifter far than summer’s flight’ Swifter far than summer’s flight — Swifter far than youth’s delight — Swifter far than happy night, Art thou come and gone — 5 As the wood when leaves are shed, As the night when sleep is fled,

¶ 65. Title. Remembrance Eton, Rossetti 1870, Rossetti 1878, Forman 1876–7; Song Harvard Nbk 1; A Lament 1824, 1839. The draft in Nbk 22, like Princeton, is untitled. Mary’s generic titles Song and A Lament attenuate the autobiographical resonance of Eton’s Remembrance. The word signifies both an act of personal recollection and that which is recollected, and S.’s accompanying personal note to Jane hints at a former intimacy between himself and her which has been suddenly ruptured and is here bitterly recalled. See note to l. 20.1–3. In Nbk 22 S. first wrote summer’s flight/ . . . youth’s delight/. . . happy night; he then altered the order of the lines to summer’s flight . . . happy night . . . youth’s delight by pencilled numerals in the margin of the nbk; Eton and Rossetti 1870 follow the revised order, which S. probably intended to be symmetrical with the order of the key words summer/night/youth in the draft of ll. 9–11. 4. thou] Locock 1911 suggests that the poem may have been inspired by S.’s disenchantment with Teresa (‘Emilia’) Viviani, citing ‘the torn leaf of a book out of date’ of S.’s note to Jane Williams as well as his assessment, in February 1821, of Epipsychidion as ‘a production of a portion of me already dead’ (L ii 262–3). 5. Nbk 22, Princeton, Forman 1876–7, Rossetti 1878; As the earth when leaves are dead Eton, Harvard Nbk 1, 1824, 1839, Rossetti 1870.

770

shelley: selected poems As the heart when joy is dead, I am left lone, . . . alone.

The swallow Summer comes again — 10 The owlet Night resumes her reign — But the wild-Swan Youth is fain To fly with thee, false as thou. — My heart each day desires the morrow; Sleep itself is turned to sorrow; 15 Vainly would my winter borrow Sunny leaves from any bough. Lilies for a bridal bed — Roses for a matron’s head — Violets for a maiden dead — 20 Pansies let my flowers be: On the living grave I bear Scatter them without a tear —

6–7. The order of the lines in Nbk 22 is: . . . joy is dead . . . sleep is fled. 6. fled] Nbk 22, Princeton, Forman 1876–7, Rossetti 1878; sped Eton, Harvard Nbk 1, 1824, 1839, Rossetti 1870. 7. joy is dead] Nbk 22, Princeton, Forman 1876–7, Rossetti 1878; joy is fled Eton, Harvard Nbk 1, 1824, 1839, Rossetti 1870. S. first wrote then cancelled ‘fled’. 8. lone, . . . alone] Princeton; lone, alone — Nbk 22, Harvard Nbk 1, 1824, 1839, Rossetti 1870, Forman 1876–7; alone, alone. Rossetti 1878; alone, — alone — Eton. The sense includes both ‘solitary’ and ‘lonesome’. 10. her reign] Nbk 22, Princeton, Eton, 1824, 1839, Rossetti 1870, Rossetti 1878; his reign Forman 1876– 7, MYRS viii (misreading Princeton). 11. Youth] A  mark after Youth in the Princeton MS  may be a comma. Youth, Nbk 22; Youth Eton, Harvard Nbk 1. 13. the morrow] Nbk 22, Princeton, Harvard Nbk 1, 1824, 1839; tomorrow Eton, Rossetti 1878; to-morrow Rossetti 1870. Cp. One word is too often profaned ll. 13–16: ‘The desire of the moth for the star,/ Of the night for the morrow,/The devotion to something afar/From the sphere of our sorrow?’ Also Where art thou, beloved tomorrow? (Longman iii 546–8, no. 339) ll. 1–6. 17–19. S. first drafted the lines in the order 19–17–18, then indicated the 17–18–19 order, followed by both Eton and Princeton, by numerals in the margin. 19. Recalling Laertes’ words at Ophelia’s burial in Hamlet V i 231–3: ‘Lay her i’ th’ earth/And from her fair and unpolluted flesh/May violets spring’. 20. Pansies let my flowers be] Princeton, Forman 1876–7, Rossetti 1878; Pansies let my flowers be Nbk 22; Pansies let my flowers be Harvard Nbk 1, 1824, 1839, Rossetti 1870; Sadder flowers find for me Eton. The original draft line read: ‘Cypress, pansies, [rue] for me’. Mary’s letter of 26 July 1822 (Mary L i 240–41) identifies the flower in question as the Wild Pansy or Heartsease, an emblem of remembrance. Traditionally a love-charm, it functions as such (under one of its popular names, Love-in-Idleness) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream II. In addition to the present poem, Mary’s letter cites S.’s An Ode, Written, October, 1819, before the Spaniards had recovered their Liberty (Longman iii 162–8, no. 244): ‘But let not the pansy among them be;/Ye were injured — and that means memory’ (Text A ll. 34–5). 21. living grave] A Byronic motif: see The Bride of Abydos l. 612; The Prisoner of Chillon l. 114; The Two Foscari III i 81.

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Let no friend, however dear, Waste one hope, one fear for me.

B Remembrance Swifter far than summer’s flight, Swifter far than happy night, Swifter far than youth’s delight Art thou come and gone — 5 As the earth when leaves are dead — As the Night when sleep is sped — As the heart when joy is fled I am left alone, — alone — The swallow Summer comes again — 10 The owlet Night resumes her reign — But the wild-swan Youth is fain To fly with thee, false as thou — My heart today desires tomorrow — Sleep itself is turned to sorrow — 15 Vainly would my Winter borrow Sunny leaves from any bough. Lilies for a bridal bed, Roses for a matron’s head, Violets for a maiden dead, — 20 Sadder flowers find for me. On the living grave I bear Scatter them without a tear; — Let no friend however dear Waste a hope, a fear, for me.

66  ‘When the lamp is shattered’ [Lines] Composed probably in late March or early April  1822. S.’s rough draft of When the lamp is shattered is in Nbk 18, pp.  159–157 reverso and 155–154 reverso (for a facsimile and transcription, see BSM xix 290–293 and 296–301), where it is interleaved with drafts for Fragments of an Unfinished Drama (Longman vi, no. 436) for which it was probably intended. There are two holograph fair copies, one in the University of Glasgow Library (MS. Gen. 505/34; G) and one in the British Library (Add MS 37232, 24. one hope, one fear for me] Princeton, Harvard Nbk 1, 1824, 1839, Forman 1876–7; one hope one fear for me Nbk 22; a hope, a fear, for me Eton, Rossetti 1870, Rossetti 1878.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-66

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f. 75; BL), both of which are reproduced in facsimile with transcriptions alongside in MYRS viii 417–432. There is also a transcription in Mary Copybk 1 pp. 1 and 3–4. A version of the poem, in rearranged order and with some lines omitted, was published in Medwin’s Ahasuerus the Wanderer (1823) pp. 96–97 (A; see headnote to To Jane. The invitation). The draft in Nbk 18, much-cancelled and with numerous attempts recognisable as emergent lines of the finished poem, seems to represent the origin of the lyric. The transcript in Mary Copybk 1 is almost certainly based on Nbk 18, particularly as the four lines beginning The rude wind is singing (Longman vi, no. 438) are amidst the drafts for When the lamp is shattered, and Mary originally included them in her transcript as a quatrain of that poem (though she seems later to have decided otherwise, as in contrast with the other quatrains derived from the draft, which are numbered in roman, she has marked The rude wind lines with a cross, and given an arabic number 9 above them; see headnote to The rude wind is singing, and BSM ii 10–11). G is one of the MSS given by S. to Jane Williams, and like other such poems it passed at some point into Trelawny’s possession, then after his death was owned by his daughter Laetitia Call, who donated it to the University of Glasgow in 1907. However, G differs markedly from the very carefully written and punctuated copies of poems presented by S. to Jane in the spring of 1822. It is probably worked up from the rough draft in Nbk 18, and is written out fair but with almost no punctuation on the two inner pages of a bifolium created from a single leaf folded once (see MYRS viii 417–424), and with two lines corrected in transcription (see notes). It also lacks the fourth stanza, which was probably on a lost separate leaf. The third stanza is headed ‘second part’ in S.’s hand, which as GM argues (‘Shelley’s Lyrics’, in The Morality of Art: Essays Presented to G. Wilson Knight (1969) 195–209; for discussion of this poem see 206–209) strongly suggests that the poem was intended as a song for two voices, and was very probably to be set in the play, now known as Fragments of an Unfinished Drama, on which S. was working in adjacent pages of the same notebook. It seems a reasonable surmise that G was given to Jane not as an expression of S.’s conflicted feelings for her, but in a more workmanlike spirit was provided to be set to music for performance in the drama. GM persuasively conjectures that the lyric was intended to follow the cue of O sweet echo wake at l. 5 of the Fragments of an Unfinished Drama. S.’s transcription onto the inner pages of the bifolium possibly suggests that the MS was intended for Jane to work from with the text open (e.g. on a music stand), obviating the need for her to turn a page while playing an instrument, a surmise that could also explain a second such sheet (now lost) containing the fourth stanza. G may, as Michael O’Neill argues, represent an intermediate fair copy between Nbk 18 and BL, but it is also possible that both G and BL derive from the draft. BL is complete in S.’s best fair copy hand, and carefully punctuated (Michael O’Neill suggests a possibility that BL is written on a leaf torn from Nbk 18, but this seems unlikely; see MYRS viii 425). It is not known what the purpose of BL was to have been, but it presumably remained in Mary’s possession after S.’s death, as it is the basis of the poem as it was first printed complete in 1824. It is odd that Mary Copybk 1 contains what must have been a very difficult attempt to construct the lyric from the Nbk 18 rough draft, when she had access to BL, but she probably simply did not discover S.’s fair copy until after she made her transcription in Mary Copybk 1. There remains the puzzling circumstance that Medwin incorporated a version of the poem in Ahasuerus the Wanderer, published in 1823 and therefore predating its publication in 1824, in a text which suggests that Medwin had access, if not directly to BL, then to readings supplied by someone who did have access to it. Medwin’s version omits ll. 17–20 and 29–32, and transposes ll. 21–24 and 25–28, and it has been argued that

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its source is a different version by S. of the poem (see Forman in Medwin (1913) 491–492). A agrees with BL in three readings, and with G in one (which is not conclusive; see notes), and it is simplest to hypothesize, with BSM xix p. xlviii, that Medwin used G, or a copy of it, corrected from BL, and then rearranged and otherwise altered in his characteristic fashion (though Medwin’s version of l. 25 could be understood as a clarification of the ambiguous pronoun thee; see note). It is suggestive that the three A readings which agree with BL exactly correspond with the corrections entered in an unknown hand in G, ‘tones’ for ‘notes’ (l. 6), ‘through’ for ‘in’ (l. 14), and ‘dead’ for ‘lost’ (l. 16), which argue for correction of G from BL through some agency. Medwin is very unlikely to have had access to Nbk 18, or directly to BL, given Mary’s distrust and dislike of him, but he was close to Jane Williams, and Jane may well have corrected her copy (i.e. G) from information supplied by Mary at some point in 1823 prior to the printing of Ahasuerus the Wanderer in that year. It is clear that Jane shared other of her presentation copies from S. with Medwin (see e.g. headnotes to To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’), To Jane. The invitation, To Jane — The recollection, and The magnetic lady to her patient). When the lamp is shattered opens with a series of parallel statements offering a structural symmetry which suggests something like formal logic, a clear-headedness reinforced by emphatic metrical regularity and strong rhymes. But this syllogistic clarity is completely undercut by the actual obscurity of the formulations, with their ambivalent syntax and opaque similitudes. The effect deepens in the third stanza, where tenor and vehicle become tangled, and the grammar ambiguous. The tone shades into bleak clarity in the final stanza. The poem is a striking example of the suggestive power of S.’s late lyric style, combining charged emotional intensity with an ironically contrastive confidence and certainty in formal artistry. Its probable connection with Fragments of an Unfinished Drama is impossible to develop, as that work is too incomplete to support speculation, but as BSM xix p. xlvii notes the lyric’s content is ‘close in spirit to the drama, and counterparts to its images of storm, shipwreck, winter, rafters, roof and echo can be found in the play’. GM notes an influence from the episode of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius’s Latin ‘novel’ Metamorphoses (better known as The Golden Ass). S. admired Apuleius; see e.g. his review of Peacock’s Rhododaphne, where he praises ‘the impassioned and elegant pantomime of Apuleius’ (Prose Works 285), and cp. L i 542, to Hogg, 8 May 1817: I am in the midst of Apuleius — I never read a fictitious composition of such miraculous interest & beauty. — I think generally, it even surpasses Lucian, & the story of Cupid and Psyche any imagination ever clothed in the language of men. Mary was working on a translation of the Cupid and Psyche episode in November 1817 (Mary Jnl i 182–3; see also SC viii 738). GM observes of the narrative situation implied in the third stanza of When the lamp is shattered that in Apuleius’s version of the story Cupid and Psyche are happily married, mingling nightly in a love-nest built by Cupid himself with ivory rafters; Psyche entertains her treacherous sisters with lute and song; a spilt lamp is the cause of Cupid’s flight (in Mrs Tighe’s well-known version the lamp is shattered: “. . . from her trembling hand extinguished falls/The fatal lamp” [Mary Tighe, Psyche (1805) ii 240–41]); he leaves Psyche’s bed as a feathered god every morning, and at last deserts it for good; Psyche is then exposed, half-naked, to Venus’s mocking laughter and is tormented by the passions of Anxiety and Sorrow; but in the end the lovers are reunited — as no doubt they were in Shelley’s play [i.e. the Unfinished Drama].

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GM also notes that ‘the bittersweet atmosphere of Faust and The Tempest . . . haunts the context of When the lamp is shattered’. Text from British Library, Add MS 37232, f. 75 (BL). Published in Thomas Medwin, Ahasuerus the Wanderer (1823) 96–97, omitting ll. 17–20 and 29–32, and transposing ll. 21–24 and 25–28 (A); 1824 (from BL, entitled ‘Lines’); 1839; 1840; MYRS viii 428–431(facsimile and transcript of BL and University of Glasgow Library MS. Gen. 505/34 (G)): Glasgow MS cited in the notes by permission of University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections). ‘When the lamp is shattered’

5

When the lamp is shattered The light in the dust lies dead — When the cloud is scattered The rainbow’s glory is shed — When the lute is broken Sweet tones are remembered not — When the lips have spoken Loved accents are soon forgot. As music and splendour

¶ 66.  Title. Lines 1824, 1839. 1–24. G has no punctuation except for BL’s dashes in ll. 12 and 13, and a dash in l. 20 for BL’s full stop. 1–10. ‘The light is inseparable from the “dust” of which the physical lamp is composed, and perishes with it; the glory of the rainbow is the cloud, and is shed with the cloud’s waterdrops; music and lute are annihilated together’ (GM). 1. In the first line of G S. first wrote lut canc. then continued with lamp, then first wrote broken, cancelled it and wrote shattered; as MYRS viii notes this suggests S. was copying from Nbk 18, where the layout of S.’s rough draft could explain the mistake. 2. dead —] dead; A, 1840. 3. scattered] scattered, A, 1839, 1840. 4. shed —] shed. A, 1824, 1839; shed; 1840. The poem is arranged in quatrains in A (as it is in Mary Copybk 1), so this line completes the first quatrain. 5–6. Cp. S.’s On a Future State in Nbk 6 pp. 145–143 reverso: ‘The common observer [. . .] contends in vain against the persuasion of the grave, that the dead indeed cease to be [. . .] The organs of sense are destroyed & the intellectual operations dependent on them have perished with their sources [. . .] When you can discover where [. . .] the fresh colours of the faded flower abide, or the music of the broken lyre, seek life among the dead.” (facsimile of MS in BSM xv 144, 146; independent transcription, minimally tidied) 5. lute] The draft in Nbk 18 p. 158 reverso and again on p. 159 reverso has harp for lute, with the more finished version on p. 159 reverso cancelling harp and writing lute above. This suggests that the lyric was initially drafted after S. conceived his scheme to procure a harp for Jane Williams, and that his revisions followed his decision to give her a guitar instead; see headnote to With a guitar. To Jane. broken] broken, A, 1824, 1839, 1840. 6. In G S. first wrote Sweet music is soon forgot, then cancelled all but the first word and wrote notes are remembered not above. tones] notes G. In G an unknown hand has written tones in pencil beneath music canc. which has notes written immediately above it. not —] not; A, 1824, 1839, 1840. 7. spoken] spoken, A, 1839, 1840. 8–9. There is a line between these two lines marking the end of the first stanza in BL.

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10 Survive not the lamp and the lute, The heart’s echoes render No song when the spirit is mute — No song — but sad dirges Like the wind through a ruined cell 15 Or the mournful surges That ring the dead seaman’s knell. Where hearts have once mingled Love first leaves the well-built nest — 11–16. ‘The heart cannot sing — respond emotionally — when the signal to which it resonates, the spirit of love, is “mute”; it can only echo, passively and hollowly the noises of wind and water’ (GM). 11. heart’s] heart A. 12. mute —] mute. A; mute: — 1824, 1839; mute, — 1840. 13. No song, but sad dirges, A. No song but sad dirges, 1824, 1839, 1840. 14. through] in G; in G an unknown hand has written through beneath in in pencil. A reads through. cell] cell, A, 1824, 1839, 1840. Chernaik 158 suggests an echo in this line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 l. 4: ‘Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang’. 15–16. Cp. Ariel’s song in The Tempest I ii 396–402: Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: 16. dead] lost G; in G an unknown hand has written dead beneath lost in pencil. 17–24. ‘By first leaving the nest, the winged form of Love suggests a fledgling (genuine love is a result as well as a cause of “mingling”). This stresses the contrasting images of raven and eagle [see ll. 25–32], because the raven was supposed to evict its young from the nest and abandon them, whereas the eagle is famous for the care it takes of its own young. Golden eagles, as Shelley would know, mate for life, and their nest is permanent, literally cradle, home and bier’ (GM). 17–20. Omitted in A. 17. Where] A crux: the line is not in A, but all eds from 1824 on read When. In Nbk 18 S. apparently wavered between Where and When, both alternatives being cryptically cancelled and over-written (see BSM xix 296–297, and commentary on 331); Mary Copybk 1 reads When (copying from Nbk 18); G is read by Chernaik as ‘Where’, and by O’Neill as ‘When’ (MYRS viii 422–424, which notes the disagreement with Chernaik), though as BSM xix observes ‘the ending [of the word] is more open than [S.’s] typical final — n’. BL is more doubtful (O’Neill does not comment on his reading ‘When’ in MYRS viii 427), but is still open to question even given S.’s neatest fair-copy hand. ‘The first word of part two [in G] is not ‘When’ but ‘Where’, so these two lines [ll. 17–18] are a simple inversion: Love leaves the nest where hearts once mingled’ GM (see headnote). mingled] mingled, 1839, 1840. 18. Chernaik 161 notes that the image of Love dwelling in the heart, as a bird in the nest, is common in Italian love poetry, citing Cavalcanti, Ballata xii, Tasso, Sonnet 2, and Guinicelli’s Canzone ‘Al cor gentil, ripara sempre Amore’. However, S.’s nest imagery, and its development at l. 30 to an ‘eagle home’, may have been influenced by recent reading in the Book of Job. S.’s notes on Job in Nbk 18, p. 160 reverso immediately precede the rough draft of When the lamp is shattered and may well have been made in preparation for a dramatic treatment (see BSM xix pp. xlv-xlvi for interesting commentary). Imagery of nests, and of eagles, is relatively common throughout the Bible, but they are brought

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The weak one is singled 20 To endure what it once possessed. O Love! who bewailest The frailty of all things here, Why choose you the frailest For your cradle, your home and your bier? 25 Its passions will rock thee As the storms rock the ravens on high — Bright Reason will mock thee Like the Sun from a wintry sky — From thy nest every rafter together in Job xxxix 26–29: ‘Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom, and stretch her wings towards the south? Doth the eagle mount up at thy command, and make her nest on high? She dwelleth and abideth on the rock, upon the crag of the rock, and the strong place.’ nest —] nest, 1824; nest; 1839, 1840. 19–20. ‘The weak one is the weak heart, and applies to either sex. The paradoxes (one is singled, the weak one must endure), and the pun (singled, “picked on”, “divorced”), lead to the ambiguities of To endure what it once possessed, which could have secondary meanings of “to make indifferent that which it once fascinated”, and “to imprison what it once owned by right”, and to the major paradox that Love is now confonted with: why does one who laments frailty, transience, choose to nest in the frailest of all things, the human heart?’ (GM). 20. it] The t is written over s in BL. 21–28. In A ll. 21–24 are transposed with ll. 25–28. 21. O Love!] O love! A; O, Love! 1824, 1839. 22. here,] A, 1824; 1839, 1840, Chernaik; here BL, Major Works. 23–24. choose] chose G, A (chose may be S.’s slip in transcription, and easy to miss). home] home, 1839. bier?] 1824, 1840, Chernaik, Major Works; bier! A; A has an asterisk after bier (which is the last word of the A version) directing the reader to a note at the foot of the page: ‘These stanzas are by a friend, now no more. Alas! Poor Lycidas!/It was that fatal and perfidious bark,/Built in the eclipse, and rigg’d with curses dark,/That laid so low that sacred head of thine!’ [misquoted from Lycidas 100–102]. 25. Thy passions have rocked thee A. thee] thee, 1839. The referent of ‘thee’ is ambivalent; ‘Love’ seems likeliest, but the speaker may refer to an unspecified addressee. 26. high —] high; A, 1840; high: 1824, 1839. 27–28.Bright reason has mock’d thee,/Like the sun from the wintry sky. A. Bright reason will mock thee,/Like the sun from a wintry sky. 1824, 1839, 1840. 29–32.Omitted in A. Cp. Timon of Athens IV iii 260–265: The mouths, the tongues, the eyes, and hearts of men At duty, more than I could frame employment; That numberless upon me stuck, as leaves Do on the oak, have with one winter’s brush Fell from their boughs, and left me open, bare For every storm that blows See also A fresh fair child stood by my side, S.’s translation of part of Brunetto Latini’s Il Tesoretto 41–4 (no. 418): Between desire and fear, thou wert A wretched thing, poor heart . . . Sad is the life of him who bears thee in his breast, Wild bird for that weak nest

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30 Will rot, and thine eagle home Leave thee naked to laughter When leaves fall and cold winds come.

67  ‘One word is too often profaned’ [To ——] Written probably in April 1822. The sole source of One word is too often profaned is a transcription in Mary Copybk 1 p. 15. The MS from which Mary made her copy is unknown, but GM speculated that the now-lost document could possibly have been a leaf torn from Nbk 18, ‘around p. 147’, i.e. amid S.’s rough draft of the Fragments of an Unfinished Drama (Longman vi, no. 436); see Irving Massey’s note in BSM ii 224 quoting correspondence with GM, and the detailed discussion in BSM xix pp. xxix and xlix. GM’s surmise, which is supported by the fact that there is a stub with a cut edge between p. 151 reverso and p. 152 reverso in Nbk 18 (see BSM xix 286) was prompted by his observation that One word is too often profaned might be understood as ‘glossing’ the Unfinished Drama, ll. 42–47:



You also loved — Indian Lady

But you said

Loved? O I love. —

Methinks This word of love is fit for all the world, And that for gentle hearts another name Should speak of gentler thoughts [] the world owns. — I have loved — A relationship between S.’s lyric and his drama is credible and invites comparison with the textual situation of When the lamp is shattered. Both poems could easily have been written out neatly with a mind to their being set to music by Jane Williams for performance by her and others in the drama (see headnotes to Fragments of an Unfinished Drama, and When the lamp is shattered). Both One word is too often profaned and When the lamp is shattered are evidently powerful and affective as free-standing lyrics, but their probable origin in a dramatic context cautions against assuming any identifiable directly personal Shelleyan resonance. The poem’s atmosphere is nevertheless suggestive of S.’s developing relationship with Jane Williams, and the repeated profaned/profane of its opening lines recalls the note accompanying the holograph fair copy of To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’) presented to Jane Williams: I sate down to write some words for an ariette which might be profane — but it was in vain to struggle with the ruling spirit (see headnote).

31. thee] the 1824, 1839 (corrected in 1840). laughter] laughter, 1824, 1839, 1840.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-67

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One word is too often profaned was first published in 1824 with the title ‘To — ’, in a version correcting a small number of transcription errors in Mary Copybk 1, presumably from Mary’s now-lost holograph MS source (see notes). The lyric is in S.’s distinctive late manner, articulating a concentrated intensity of feeling tempered by elegant formal control. The direct simplicity of its alternating 8- and 6-syllable lines is troubled by subtle variations of metre, with the anapaestic movement lightly heightened by the faltering movement of l. 9 and a slight lengthening of the final four lines. Text from 1824. Published in 1824 200; BSM ii 32–3 (facsimile and transcription of Mary Copybk 1). ‘One word is too often profaned’ One word is too often profaned For me to profane it, One feeling too falsely disdained For thee to disdain it. 5 One hope is too like despair For prudence to smother, And Pity from thee more dear, Than that from another. 10

I can give not what men call love, — But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And the Heavens reject not? The desire of the moth for the star,

¶ 67.  Title. 1824 gives the title as ‘To — ’. 1–3. One word . . . one feeling] I.e. love; for a possible connection with Fragments of an Unfinished Drama, see headnote. 3. One feeling too often disdained for thee to disdain it; Mary Copybk 1. Mary’s careless transcription runs the third and fourth lines together, before copying out For thee to disdain it. again as l. 4; her repetition of often (for falsely) from l. 1 is presumably also a transcription error. 1824 corrects ll. 3–4. 5. despair] dispair, Mary Copybk 1. 7. And Pity [more dear canc.] from thee more dear Mary Copybk 1. dear] dear, 1824. 9. love, —] Mary Copybk 1; love, 1824. 12. not?] not, 1824; Mary Copybk 1 has the question-mark here and a full stop at the end of the poem. It is a matter for judgement whether the last four lines are inflected interrogatively, or as a statement. 13–14. The desire of the moth for the star suggests The Woodman and the Nightingale (Longman iv 54–61, no. 377) 24–32: And every silver moth fresh from the grave, Which is its cradle, flutters below, Aspires (like one who loves too fair, too far) To be consumed within the [purest] glow Of one serene and unapproachèd star, As if it were a lamp of earthly light, Unconscious, even as wiser lovers are,

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Of the night for the morrow, 15 The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow.

68  With a Guitar. To Jane Jane Williams possessed an attractive singing voice and was an accomplished musician, proficient on the harp, guitar, and piano (for detailed discussion of S.’s relationship with Jane Williams, including the appeal for him of her musical talent, see To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’), ‘General Headnote to S.’s Poems to Jane Williams’). In Pisa, however, she had the use only of ‘a very bad piano’ (Mary L i 221). On Friday 25 January 1822 S. wrote to Horace Smith, then staying at Versailles, asking him to purchase a harp: Will you not think my exactions upon your kindness interminable if I ask you to execute another commission for me? It is to buy a good pedal harp without great ornament or any appendage that should unnecessarily increase the expense, but good; nor should I object to it being second hand if that were equally compatible with it’s being dispatched immediately. Together with the Harp I should wish for 5 or 6 napoleons’ worth of harp music, at your discretion. I do not know the price of harps at Paris, but I suppose that from 70 to 80 guineas would cover it; and I trust to your accustomed kindness, as I want it for a present, to make the most immediate advance, as if I were to delay, the grace of my compliment would be lost. — Do not take much trouble about it, but simply take what you find if you [half a line cancelled] are so exceedingly kind as to oblige me — (L ii 378) The ‘present’ was evidently intended for Jane Williams, who had celebrated her 24th birthday on the preceding Monday, 21 January (S.’s letter to Smith was written on the same day,

Itself how low, how high beyond all height The Heaven where it would perish! Cp. also PU (no. 195) II iii 62–71 (and note): While the sound whirls around, Down, down! As the fawn draws the hound, As the lightning the vapour, As a weak moth the taper; Death, Despair; Love, Sorrow; Time both; to-day, to-morrow; As steel obeys the Spirit of the stone, Down, down! 16. sorrow.] sorrow? 1824.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-68

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25 January, that he probably wrote the first of his poems to Jane, To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’); (see headnote). Smith received S.’s letter on 7 February (in L ii 379 Jones records it as endorsed ‘Reced 7 July’ but this is obviously an error), and he replied on 19th, declining to carry out the commission, as is clear from S.’s letter to Claire Clairmont of 24 March in which he explains that he has no money with which to assist Claire in her wild scheme to kidnap her daughter Allegra from the convent where Byron had sent her: ‘So far from being ready to lend me 3 or 400 pounds, Horace Smith has lately declined to advance 6 or 7 napoleons for a musical instrument which I wished to buy for Jane at Paris’ (L ii 400). Smith’s letter to S. of 19th February is lost, but it would have arrived with S. at Pisa by around 1 March (S.’s letter to Smith of 25 January took 13 days to arrive). When S. finally replied to this letter, on 11 April, he confirmed that the plan to purchase an instrument had been carried out: ‘I have contrived to get my musical coals at Newcastle itself ’ (L ii 412). S.’s belated birthday present to Jane was not a harp, but a guitar. The instrument was ‘a local guitar, nearly new, in a coffin-like box’ (Shelley’s Guitar 176). The Pisan guitar, with pine sounding-board, was preserved (apparently unplayed after S.’s death) by Jane Williams and passed on her death to Mrs Prudentia Lonsdale, her daughter by Thomas Jefferson Hogg. After she died, it was purchased by her grandson W. Williams, who subsequently sold it to Edward Silsbee on condition that it remain in Britain. Silsbee presented the guitar to the Bodleian Library in 1898 (Shelley Relics 1; see Shelley’s Guitar ix-x and 176). There are photographs of the guitar in Joan Rees’ Shelley’s Jane Williams (1985) facing p. 162, and on the front and back covers and frontispiece of Shelley’s Guitar. These circumstances would suggest that the main composition period of With a guitar fell between the beginning of March, by when S. had probably heard from Smith that he was not prepared to buy a harp in Paris, and 11 April, when he informed Smith that he had made a different arrangement. It is also evident that the second part of the poem, from l. 43 to the end, depends centrally on the image of a spirit imprisoned within a guitar. It is interesting to note that in the rough draft in Nbk 18 of When the lamp is shattered, which probably dates from late March or early April 1822, S. at some stage altered harp to lute (Nbk 18 p. 159 reverso; see BSM xix 300–1 and headnotes to Fragments of an Unfinished Drama (Longman vi, no. 436) and When the lamp is shattered. However, S. may well have been developing some form of the poem from an earlier date. Mary’s journal for 14 February records a (misquoted) line from Ariel’s song in The Tempest (I ii 403), ‘Nothing of us but must suffer a sea-change’ (Mary Jnl i 397). Writing a year later to Maria Gisborne she recalled how ‘a year ago, T————y came one afternoon in high spirits with news concerning the building of the boat — saying — oh — we must all embark — all live aboard — “We will all suffer a sea-change,” and dearest Shelley was delighted with the quotation — saying that he wd have it for the motto of his boat — ’ (Mary L i 334). The Tempest is a powerful presence in S.’s writing of spring 1822 (see headnotes and notes to Fragments of an Unfinished Drama and When the lamp is shattered) and is obviously fundamental to the conception of With a guitar. Ariel was his preferred name for the boat in which he was to drown with Edward Williams (though Byron, to S.’s intense irritation, had the name Don Juan printed on the sail; see Mary L i 170–1 n.), and Ariel together with Miranda and Ferdinand are the principals of his poem. It is plausible that the conceit of a tree-spirit imprisoned within an instrument made from its wood, like Ariel imprisoned in a pine tree (see ll. 43 ff. and notes), was prompted by a new preoccupation with The Tempest dating from Trelawny’s involvement in the scheme for a boat from mid-February. BSM xix goes further, and considers the possibility that Trelawny’s famous account of discovering S. at

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work on the draft of With a guitar alone in the woods of the Cascine outside Pisa refers to the walk of 2 February 1822 which is commemorated in To Jane. The invitation and To Jane — The recollection. This particular surmise seems unlikely. There is no question that the walk on February  2 involved only S., Jane, and Mary (see headnote to To Jane. The invitation), and indeed Trelawny’s accounts do not suggest he was present on that walk, merely stating that his encounter with S. was on ‘one of those brilliant spring mornings we on the wrong side of the Alps are so rarely blessed with’ (Recollections ch. viii; Records ch viii is identical). This is easily reconciled with any fine day in February or March for the expedition on which he found S. writing verses on a guitar. I picked up a fragment, but could only make out the first two lines: — Ariel, to Miranda take This slave of music. It was a frightful scrawl; words smeared out with his finger, and one upon the other, over and over in tiers, and all run together in most ‘admired disorder:’ it might have been taken for a sketch of a marsh overgrown with bulrushes, and the blots for wild ducks; such a dashed off daub as self-conceited artists mistake for a manifestation of genius. On my observing this to him, he answered, ‘When my brain gets heated with thought, it soon boils, and throws off images and words faster than I can skim them off. In the morning, when cooled down, out of the rude sketch as you justly call it, I shall attempt a drawing. (Recollections ch. viii) Trelawny’s description of S.’s MS suggests a first draft similar e.g. to most of the surviving drafts of TL. A  rough draft of the opening twelve lines of With a guitar does survive in Nbk 18 p. 105 reverso (see BSM xix 204–205 for a facsimile and transcription), but it does not resemble the kind of chaotic preliminary drafting suggested by Trelawny’s description: ‘Scholars have long observed that the draft fragment does not tally with Trelawny’s rushy marsh. But it does look like a second draft . . . and could well be Shelley’s projected “drawing” from a “sketch” ’ (BSM xix p. liv). Trelawny’s statement that he ‘picked up a fragment’ might also suggest that the rough draft he saw was on loose sheets rather than in a notebook. BSM xix p. liv notes that the draft of the opening of With a guitar is followed by three lost leaves whose six sides could have accommodated the rest of what would have been an intermediate draft of the whole poem, and might further suggest that S. was taking care to keep the composition of his poems to Jane entirely away from Mary’s eyes. The discussion in BSM xix of the composition period of With a guitar considers the possibility that Trelawny’s account of S. at work on the poem dates from 2 February, or even earlier, and separately speculates that S.’s request to Horace Smith to purchase a harp in Paris could be understood not as a serious wish to secure an instrument for Jane, but a ruse to raise money (BSM xix pp. lv, lxxxi). But it is not clear how S. could have raised cash from the proposal, and it is anyway obvious that he did intend to purchase an instrument. His original request to Smith also included music for the instrument, at very slight cost, which does not make sense in the context of a pretext for raising capital. It is true that S. was short of money at the time, but that is more probably an explanation for his downplaying to members of his circle of the true cost of buying an instrument for Jane (his letter to Claire Clairmont of March 24 speaks of ‘6 or 7 napoleons for a musical instrument

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which I wished to buy for Jane’, a far smaller sum than the ‘70 to 80 guineas’ he mentions to Smith; L ii 400). One possibility is that S. started work on the poem some time, and perhaps soon, after Jane’s birthday on 21 January, with a conception involving the gift of an instrument, and the idea of the spirit Ariel reincarnated in S.’s body. Subsequently, on hearing from Smith by early March that no harp would be coming from Paris, S. proceeded in March to buy a guitar locally (Trelawny claimed to have accompanied S. to Leghorn to make the purchase; see Rossetti 1870 ii 576), and to develop the related image of a tree-spirit reincarnated in a guitar made from the wood of the tree, incorporating new knowledge of the construction of the guitar from pine. As Mary’s account of Jane having access only to ‘a very bad piano’ is in a letter dated 5 March, the gift, together with its poem, must have been presented after that date, but presumably before 11 April when S. confirmed to Smith that he had acquired a different instrument. Mary complains to Maria Gisborne in a letter dated 7 March that they are particularly short of money due to ‘two or three circumstances’, which could imply some outlay on exceptional items at the start of the month (Mary L i 221; this same letter mentions some ridiculous verses recently sent by Taaffe ‘on the occasion of a young ladys birthday’, Mary L i 223). Jane was certainly playing her instrument regularly through the final weeks at Villa Magni; S. wrote to John Gisborne on 18 June extolling the pleasures of the new boat: ‘we drive along this delightful bay in the evening wind, under the summer moon, until earth appears another world. Jane brings her guitar . . .’ (L ii 435). Bieri 620 associates S.’s gift to Jane with a short undated note by Edward Williams found in the pocket of one of S.’s unused engagement diaries (MS. Shelley adds. c.12 f. 24r; reproduced in Shelley’s Guitar 178): My dear S — Jane begs me to say that she can only answer your kindness in person. As for my movements I am going to shoot this Evening — that is, I feel that I must parade you at 10 paces if you go on thus — if you will call yourself or send your second we will point out the ground. Bieri argues that this (presumably) mock challenge to a duel was prompted by S.’s gift to Jane (Williams’s if you go on thus seems to suggest the latest episode in a series). If so, then the poem’s composition would be dateable to earlier than 24 March; that was the day of the notorious altercation between S., Byron, and their party with an Italian dragoon which generated considerable short- and long-term problems, and after which the frequent shooting parties with Byron came to an end. There is, however, no certainty that S.’s kindness to Jane in the undated note refers to the gift of a guitar. S.’s alteration of harp to lute in the draft of When the lamp is shattered in Nbk 18 could be argued to support a date for With a guitar to late March or early April, as When the lamp is shattered was probably conceived as a lyric to be set to music for inclusion in the Unfinished Drama that S. was attempting to work up in early April (see headnote). The holograph of With a guitar is written very neatly, and carefully punctuated, on a sheet of paper which has been folded vertically and horizontally to make a one-quire booklet of four leaves (i.e. eight pages). The poem covers the first three pages, with the second page containing ll. 19–59 in double column. Analysis of the paper dates it to spring 1822 and suggests hand-delivery (see BSM xxi 532). The paper is closely similar to that of Mary’s

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letter to Maria Gisborne of 7 March, and the same paper is also used for the fair copy of S.’s translation May-day Night probably made in April (see BSM xxiii 67, and headnote to no. 440, Longman vi). S. presumably gave the MS to Jane with the instrument in March or early April (or possibly at some later date), and it remained in her possession after his death. It is clear that Thomas Medwin was granted access to the MS once Jane had returned to England in September 1822, as he published ll. 43–90, omitting the references to Jane in the title and final line, in The Athenaeum cclx (20 October 1832) 680 as one of the several poems that appeared through his agency in the year marking the tenth anniversary of S.’s death. The opening ll. 1–42 appeared the following year in Fraser’s Magazine vii (January 1833) 79, under the title ‘To A. B., with a Guitar’, presumably again through Medwin’s agency, although it has been suggested that Medwin’s inclusion of only ll. 43–90 in Medwin (1833) might indicate that he was not responsible for the lines first published in Fraser’s Magazine (see BSM xix pp. lv, lxxxii, and BSM xxi 532–533). However, in a MS note on his personal copy of Medwin Medwin virtually asserts that he was responsible for both the Athenaeum and Fraser’s publications (see Ernest J. Lovell, Captain Medwin (1962) 328 and note), and also confirms that Mary Shelley was not aware of the Fraser’s text when preparing 1839, where she prints the Athenaeum text, and like Medwin, omits Jane’s name. Medwin’s texts differ in various respects from Jane’s holograph, but not in ways that suggest a different source. With a guitar is printed complete, and obviously from Jane’s MS, in 1840, presumably because Jane provided Mary with corrections from the MS after the publication of 1839, as she probably also did in the case of other of S.’s poems presented to her in secret; she nevertheless still omitted reference to Jane in the title (‘To a Lady; with a Guitar’ in 1840) and in the last line (cp. her failure to correct Medwin’s version of The magnetic lady to her patient at l. 42, where Jane is also named in the MS). At some point Jane’s MS was acquired by Trelawny, who showed it to Rossetti as the basis for his emended text in Rossetti 1870, which for the first time gave the correct title, and restored ‘Jane’ in the last line (for the Athenaeum’s ‘friend’: Rossetti 1870 ii 286–288, 576–577). On Trelawny’s death the MS passed to his daughter Mrs Laetitia Call, who in turn presented it to the Bodleian Library in 1907 (MS Shelley adds. e. 3, ff. 1–3r). With a guitar. To Jane is amongst the most subtle and sophisticated of S’s late lyrics, suggesting, as do the Jane poems as a group, an influence from English Renaissance poetry. Richard Cronin (Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts 243–5) has noted the poem’s affinity with the courtly tradition of poems which accompany and explain a gift to the poet’s mistress, in the work of such poets as Robert Herrick and John Donne (cp. e.g. Herrick’s ‘A Ring Presented to Julia’, and Donne’s ‘A Jet Ring Sent’). The poem’s allusions to The Tempest are reinforced by its metre, which, as with To Jane. The invitation and To Jane — The recollection, is that of Prospero’s Epilogue to the play; there are also strong metrical affinities with the final Spirit’s song in Milton’s Comus 975–1022. The poem’s ambiguous voice, whereby S. speaks in the person of Ariel as to Miranda, but with a clear reference throughout to his relationship with Jane and Edward Williams, and Mary, enables a teasing directness moderated by the implied dramatic distance. There is also a playful pattern of relaxedly erudite allusion to Pythagorean and Platonic doctrines of metempsychosis, and of the mediation for humans of the Universal harmony through the agency of music (see notes). Thus S. is the reincarnation of the spirit Ariel (and Jane and Edward the reincarnations of Miranda and Ferdinand), as the spirit of the guitar is the reincarnation of the spirit that inhabited the tree from which it is made. These identifications are made to elide for the reader as S. further implies a parallel between the guitar’s responsiveness to a skilful musician, and his

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own responsiveness under the stimulus of Jane, which serves as an image for the poet’s relation to his audience. Text from Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 3, ff. 1r -3r (B). Published in The Athenaeum cclx (20 October 1832) 680 (ll. 43–90, title ‘With a Guitar’; A), this version reprinted in Medwin (1833); Fraser’s Magazine vii (January 1833) 79 (ll. 1–42, title ‘To A. B., with a Guitar’; F); 1839 (from A); 1840 (from B, title ‘To a Lady; with a Guitar’); Chernaik; BSM xxi 432–7 (facsimile and transcription of fair copy); BSM xix 204–5 (facsimile and transcription of ll. 1–12 draft). With a guitar. To Jane Ariel to Miranda; — Take This slave of music for the sake Of him who is the slave of thee; And teach it all the harmony, 5 In which thou can’st, and only thou, Make the delighted spirit glow, ’Till joy denies itself again And too intense is turned to pain; For by permission and command 10 Of thine own prince Ferdinand ¶ 68.  Title. WITH A GUITAR A; To A. B., WITH A GUITAR F (there is a note at the bottom of the page in F: ‘A. B., the lady to whom these agreeable and melodious verses are addressed, is still alive. We therefore withhold her name’); TO A LADY; WITH A GUITAR 1840. 1–3. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest Ariel is a spirit who had been imprisoned for twelve years in a ‘cloven pine’ by the witch Sycorax; when Prospero used his ‘art’ to free him, Ariel became his servant (Tempest I ii 264–294; Prospero refers to Ariel as his ‘slave’ at l. 406). S. is identified with Ariel; Miranda (daughter of Prospero) is Jane Williams, and Ferdinand (son of Alonso, King of Naples) is Edward Williams. See headnote for the resonance of The Tempest during the last months of S.’s Pisan circle. 1. The names are not italicised in F or 1840. 2–3. The guitar is a slave to its musician; Ariel is slave to Prospero, and thus also to his daughter Miranda, but the ambiguity of voice allows for a possibility that S. is Jane’s emotional slave. 2. music] music, 1840. 3. him] him, 1840. thee;] thee, F. 4–8. Here as later in the poem (see notes to ll. 43, 75–78) S. touches lightly on the Pythagorean doctrine (mediated through Platonic accounts in Timaeus and in the ‘Myth of Er’ in Republic) of a harmony in the ‘tuning’ (Gk. ἁρμονία) of the Universe (i.e. a chord comprising the sounds emitted by the sun, moon, planets, and fixed stars) which corresponds to a potential harmony inside the human being, that is obstructed by gross matter but may be accessed through music. 4. And of the ardent [written above hidden canc.] harmony Nbk 18. 7. Till pleasures [hides canc. written above joy denies canc.] itself again Nbk 18; S reinstated his original draft in B. again] again, F, 1840. 8. And, too intense, is turned to pain; F; And, too intense, is turned to pain. 1840. 9–10. Implying that Edward Williams, identified with Ferdinand, has not only granted S. permission to give the guitar to Jane, but has told him to do so (see headnote). 9. For] For, F. 10. own] S. first wrote good in Nbk 18 then cancelled it and wrote own above. prince Ferdinand] Prince Ferdinand, F, 1840.

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Poor Ariel sends this silent token Of more than ever can be spoken; Your guardian spirit Ariel, who From life to life must still pursue 15 Your happiness, for thus alone Can Ariel ever find his own; From Prospero’s enchanted cell, As the mighty verses tell, To the throne of Naples he 20 Lit you o’er the trackless sea, Flitting on, your prow before, Like a living meteor. When you die, the silent Moon In her interlunar swoon

11. silent token] I.e. silent until made expressive by Jane’s playing. 12. Of love, that never can be spoken. F. 13. Your guardian spirit, Ariel, who, F. spirit] spirit, 1840. 14. From life to life, F. S. plays with the concept of reincarnation throughout the poem; he is born again as Ariel, who was himself formerly imprisoned in a pine tree, just as was the guitar, fashioned from pine wood. S. in the poem thus identifies also with the guitar, making his gift to Jane a symbol of himself as the giver. Pythagoreanism, mediated through Platonic texts, promoted the doctrine of metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls which, themselves immortal, live in successive physical incarnations. The ideas would have been long familiar to S., but perhaps newly interesting in light of the Anglo-Indian background of his immediate circle in Pisa, who may have discussed reincarnation in Hinduism; cp., e.g., Medwin’s ‘The Pindarees’ in his Sketches in Hindoostan with Other Poems (1821) (which S. helped Medwin to get published), p. 67: For I was taught to love and spare The inhabitants of earth and air; To view beast, insect, bird, and tree, As spirits in captivity; Medwin’s note to these lines (p. 93) reads ‘The belief in Metempsychosis is universal’. S.’s Fragments of an Unfinished Drama also appears to involve ideas of reincarnation. 15. happiness,] happiness; — F. 16. own;] own. F, 1840. 17–20. In The Tempest V i 317–321 Prospero instructs Ariel to guide the ship of those shipwrecked on the island back to Naples. 21. on,] on F. 23–30. S. again plays with the idea of reincarnation (see note to l. 14). 23–26. Bieri 620 suggests a reference to Mary in these lines, invisible and in a swoon because of ‘her pregnancy and its eclipse on sexual relations’. For S.’s association of Mary with the moon see Epipsychidion 281 and note. 23. Moon] moon, F; Moon, 1840. 24. swoon] swoon, F, 1840. interlunar] Jane’s birthday was on 21 January, and there was a new moon on 23 January, perhaps supporting the possibility that S.’s poem originated with the idea of a birthday

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25 Is not sadder in her cell Than deserted Ariel; When you live again on Earth Like an unseen Star of birth Ariel guides you o’er the sea 30 Of life from your nativity; Many changes have been run Since Ferdinand and you begun Your course of love, and Ariel still Has tracked your steps and served your will. 35 Now, in humbler, happier lot This is all remembered not; And now, alas! the poor sprite is Imprisoned for some fault of his In a body like a grave. — gift; however, there was also a new moon on 23 March, within the likeliest composition period for the poem (see headnote). Cp. Milton, Samson Agonistes 86–9: The sun to me is dark And silent as the moon, When she deserts the night Hid in her vacant interlunar cave. 25. sadder] S. first wrote darker in B, then cancelled it and continued the line with sadder. 26. Ariel;] Ariel. F. 27–39. On reincarnation cp. Hellas 201–210: But they are still immortal Who, through birth’s orient portal And death’s dark chasm hurrying to and fro, Clothe their unceasing flight In the brief dust and light Gathered around their chariots as they go; New shapes they still may weave, New Gods, new laws receive, Bright or dim are they as the robes they last On Death’s bare ribs had cast. 27. Earth] earth, F, 1840. 28. Star] star F, 1840. birth] birth, F. The reference to a ‘Star of birth’ also suggests the possibility of a birthday poem (see note to l. 24); both Western and Hindu astrological traditions affirm the strong influence of birth stars (Jane’s was Aquarius). 30. nativity;] nativity. F, 1840. 31. run] run, F. 34. steps] steps, F. will.] will; F. 35. Now,] Now 1840. lot] lot, F. 38. Imprisoned] Imprison’d, F. his] his, F. 39. grave. —] grave; — F; grave — 1840. The line suggests S.’s continual suffering from a range of bodily ailments, notably a persistent pain in his side which was treated by Vacca in Pisa (see, e.g., L ii 229,

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40 From you, he only dares to crave For his service and his sorrow A smile today, a song tomorrow. The artist who this idol wrought To echo all harmonious thought 45 Felled a tree, while on the steep The woods were in their winter sleep Rocked in that repose divine On the wind-swept Apennine; And dreaming, some of autumn past

‘I am tormented beyond all expression by nephritic pains’, and headnote to The magnetic lady to her patient). Ariel’s current imprisonment in a body like a grave possibly suggests the distinctly coffin-like case containing the Pisan guitar given by S. to Jane together with the poem (see the illustration on the outside back cover of Shelley’s Guitar). Cp. S.’s description, in a letter to Peacock dated October 8 1818, of Venetian gondolas: ‘I can only compare them to moths of which a coffin might have been the chrysalis’ (L ii 42). 40. you,] you F. crave] crave, F, 1840. 41. sorrow] sorrow, F, 1840. 42. today . . . tomorrow] to-day . . . to-morrow F. 43–8. Cp. Leigh Hunt, Imagination and Fancy (1844; ed. Edmund Gosse, 1907) 295–6: ‘This is a Catullian melody of the first water. The transformation of the dreaming wood of the tree into a guitar was probably suggested by Catullus’s Dedication of the Galley,—a poem with which I know [S.] was conversant, and which was particularly calculated to please him; for it records the consecration of a favourite old sea-boat to the Dioscuri. The modern poet’s imagination beats the ancient; but Catullus equals him in graceful flow: and there is one very Shelleian passage in the original’; Hunt then quotes Catullus, Carm. iv 10–12: Ubi iste, post phaselus, antea fuit Comata silva: nam Cytorio in jugo Loquente saepe sibilum edidit coma. (‘where she who was afterwards a pinnace was formerly a leafy forest: for on the height of Cytorus she often rustled with talking leaves’) Hunt translates:

For of old, what now you see A galley, was a leafy tree On the Cytorian heights, and there Talk’d to the wind with whistling hair.

43. idol] From Gk. εἴδωλον, ‘image, phantom’, such as the delusive shadows cast on the wall in Plato’s Myth of the Cave in Republic; the guitar is an earthly image representing the higher reality of ‘all harmonious thought’ (see note to ll. 4–8). S. uses the word in his translation May-day Night (Longman vi, no. 440) 393. There is a draft of the opening of With a Guitar on p. 105 reverso of Nbk 18, just a few pages after the end of the draft of the May-day Night translation. wrought] wrought, A. 44. thought] thought, A, 1840. 46. sleep] sleep, A, 1840. 49. dreaming,] dreaming A. past] past, A, 1840.

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50 And some of spring approaching fast, And some of April buds and showers And some of songs in July bowers And all of love, — and so this tree — O that such our death may be — 55 Died in sleep and felt no pain To live in happier form again, From which, beneath Heaven’s fairest star, The artist wrought this loved guitar, And taught it justly to reply 60 To all who question skilfully In language gentle as thine own; 50. spring] Spring A. 51. showers] showers, A, 1840. 52. bowers] bowers, A, 1840. 53–56. Cp. Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ ll. 55–6: ‘Now more than ever seems it rich to die,/To cease upon the midnight with no pain’. 53. And all of love; and so this tree, — A, 1840. 54. may] S. first wrote should in B then cancelled it and continued the line with may. be —] be! — A, 1840. 55. sleep] sleep, A, 1840. pain] pain, A, 1840. 56. again,] again; A; again: 1840. This line continues the reincarnation motif. 57. Heaven’s fairest star] The planet Venus (Goddess of Love), visible in the West after sunset. 58. this] that A. 59–61. The guitar is expressive of its experience in a previous existence (as a tree), described in ll. 63–78, if played by a skilled and sympathetic musician. Cp. Hymn to Mercury (Longman iii, no. 336) 638–52: come take The lyre — be mine the glory giving it — Strike the sweet chords, and sing aloud, and wake Thy joyous pleasure out of many a fit Of trancèd sound — and with fleet fingers make Thy liquid-voicèd comrade talk with thee, — It can talk measured music eloquently. Then bear it boldly to the revel loud, Love-wakening dance or feast of solemn state, A joy by night or day — for those endowed With art and wisdom who interrogate It teaches, babbling in delightful mood, All things which make the spirit most elate, Soothing the mind with sweet familiar play, Chasing the heavy shadows of dismay. 59. it] Apparently written over is in B. reply] reply, A, 1840. 60. skilfully] skilfully, A, 1840. Cp. Plato, Phaedo 73, on a proof of pre-existence: ‘men, when questioned, if one questions them properly, of themselves describe things as they are: however, if they had not innate knowledge and right reason, they would never be able to do this’. 61. thine] its A.

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Whispering in enamoured tone Sweet oracles of woods and dells And summer winds in sylvan cells; 65 For it had learnt all harmonies Of the plains and of the skies, Of the forests and the mountains, And the many-voicèd fountains, The clearest echoes of the hills, 70 The softest notes of falling rills, The melodies of birds and bees, The murmuring of summer seas, And pattering rain and breathing dew And airs of evening; — and it knew 75 That seldom heard mysterious sound,

62. enamoured] S. first wrote ea in B then cancelled it and continued the line with enamoured. 63. dells] dells, A, 1840. 64. cells;] cells B, Chernaik, Reiman (1977). 68. fountains,] fountains; A, 1840. 73. rain] rain, A, 1840. dew] dew, A, 1840. 74. evening; —] evening; A, 1840. 75–78. In its previous existence the guitar has heard the Universal harmony of the sun, moon, planets (including Earth), and fixed stars, which humans can experience, in spite of their gross materiality, through the medium of music (see note to ll. 4–8). The idea was developed in post-Platonic commentary as the ‘music of the spheres’; cp. e.g. Cicero, De Re Publica VI xviii: Pray what is this sound that strikes my ears in so loud and agreeable a manner? . . . It is that which is called the music of the spheres, being produced by their motion and impulse; and being formed by unequal intervals, but such as are divided according to the most just proportion, it produces, by duly tempering acute with grave sounds, various concerts of harmony. For it is impossible that motions so great should be performed without any noise; and it is agreeable to nature that the extremes on one side should produce sharp, and on the other flat sounds. For which reason the sphere of the fixed stars, being the highest, and being carried with a more rapid velocity, moves with a shrill and acute sound; whereas that of the moon, being the lowest, moves with a very flat one. As to the Earth, which makes the ninth sphere, it remains immovably fixed in the middle or lowest part of the universe. But those eight revolving circles, in which both Mercury and Venus are moved with the same celerity, give out sounds that are divided by seven distinct intervals, which is generally the regulating number of all things. This celestial harmony has been imitated by learned musicians, both on stringed instruments and with the voice, whereby they have opened to themselves a way to return to the celestial regions, as have likewise many others who have employed their sublime genius while on earth in cultivating the divine sciences. In the post-classical era the concept was Christianised, e.g. in Dryden’s ‘Song for St Cecilia’s Day’ as ‘The diapason [i.e. octave] closing full in man’ (l. 15). Cp. Epipsychidion 86 and note. 75. seldom heard] seldom-heard A, 1840.

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Which, driven on its diurnal round As it floats through boundless day Our world enkindles on its way — All this it knows, but will not tell 80 To those who cannot question well The spirit that inhabits it: It talks according to the wit Of its companions, and no more Is heard than has been felt before 85 By those who tempt it to betray These secrets of an elder day. — But, sweetly as its answers will Flatter hands of perfect skill, It keeps its highest holiest tone 90 For our beloved Jane alone. —

69  The magnetic lady to her patient The sole source for The magnetic lady to her patient is a very careful holograph given, or sent, under cover to Jane Williams. This MS (A) was at some point acquired by Trelawny, and on his death was inherited by his daughter Laetitia (Mrs Charles F. Call), who donated

76. on] in A. round] round, A, 1840. diurnal round] The daily axial revolution of the Earth: cp. Wordsworth, ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ ll. 5–8: No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees, Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course With rocks and stones and trees. 77. day] day, A, 1840. boundless day] The Earth is always in the full light of the Sun as it moves through space. 78. way —] way. 1840. 79–86. The music of the guitar is only as good as the skill of the musician playing it; there is an implied analogy with S.’s own relation as a poet to his audience, here confined to Jane and Edward Williams. 81. it:] it. A; it; 1840. 82–83. Perhaps echoing Falstaff in Henry IV Part 2 I ii 10–12: ‘I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.’ Cp. also I ii 187–190: ‘[Chief Justice] Well, God send the Prince a better companion! [Falstaff] God send the companion a better Prince!’ 82. S. at first mistranscribed this line without to in B, then inserted it with a caret. 83. companions,] companions; 1840. 84. before] before, A. 85. By] To A. 86. day. —] day; A; day. 1840. 87. But,] But A. 89. highest] highest, A, 1840. tone] tone, A. 90. For one beloved friend alone. A, 1840.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-69

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it in September 1907 to the University Library, King’s College, Aberdeen (MS 937); there is another MS copy of the poem in Trinity College Library, Dublin (TCD MS 7762–72/2231; written in an unknown hand, it has no textual authority: see MYRS viii 402–8). Written in A in S.’s hand on a cover sheet is To Jane./Not to be opened unless you are/alone, or with Williams. This folded sheet enclosed a bifolium, of the same paper type, containing the poem written on both sides of the first leaf. At the top of the recto of this leaf, above the title The magnetic lady to her patient, S. wrote, in an ink similar to that of the address on the cover sheet, For Jane & Williams alone to see. (There are short horizontal lines between these words and the title, between the title and the first stanza, and between the first and second stanzas (on the recto of the leaf), but not between the third and fourth or the fourth and fifth stanzas on the verso). The MS is undated, and it is not known when S. wrote the poem, or when he sent it to Jane Williams, but it almost certainly belongs to the period from mid-January to late June 1822 (probably early April, as suggested), during which time his attraction to Jane was strengthening. The injunction to secrecy suggests S.’s similar anxiety in sending To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’) to the Williamses in January, and it is obvious that in both cases S.’s concern was to ensure that Mary should not learn of the poems he was writing and presenting to Jane. The magnetic lady to her patient is a dialogue in which a male ‘patient’ is treated by ‘animal magnetism’ (i.e. hypnosis) for physical and mental affliction, by a woman named Jane. The episode may well be imaginary, but there is evidence that it is based on personal experience. The frank and relaxed intimacy of the exchange suggests a relationship that has progressed far beyond preliminaries, and the episode, if based in fact, could have taken place as late as June at Villa Magni. A more probable date, however, is in the first half of April, following a sudden return, after a period of improved health, of S.’s longstanding problem with a sometimes agonising pain in his side which was attributed to kidney stones. He was suffering in December  1821, as he wrote to Claire Clairmont on December  11, ‘These late days I have been unable to ride — the cold towards sunset is so excessive & my side reminding me that I am mortal’ (L ii 367–8). S. was much improved by mid-January, remarking in a letter to John Gisborne of January 12, ‘One thing I rejoice to hear, “that your health is better”. So is mine’ (L ii 376). But by the end of March the pain had returned: ‘After a long truce, my side has declared war against me; and I suppose I must wait for the general pacification between me and my rebel faculties before it will be quiet for good’ (to Claire Clairmont, 31 March 1822; L ii 403). Ten days later his tone had grown darker: ‘I am not well. My side torments me; my mind agitates the frame which it inhabits, and things go ill with me — that is within — for all external circumstances are auspicious’ (to Claire Clairmont, 10 April 1822; L ii 404). Medwin recalled that After my departure from Pisa, [S.] was magnetised by a lady, which gave rise to the beautiful stanzas entitled The Magnetic Lady to her Patient, and during which operation, he made the same reply to an inquiry as to his disease, and its cure, as he had done to me, — “What would cure me would kill me,” — meaning lithotomy [i.e. surgery to remove kidney stones]. (Medwin (1913) 270) In context, Medwin’s reference would appear to be to his ‘departure from Pisa’ on 27 February 1821, at which time S. had known Jane Williams for less than five weeks, which is barely compatible with the manifest intimacy of the dialogue in The magnetic lady to her patient.

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Medwin may however have conflated his first ‘departure’ from Pisa with his second, around 16 March 1822, when he left to travel to Rome (Medwin (1913) 379). That would fit with the recurrence of S.’s pain in the side at the end of March 1822, and is a more credible period for the exchange between patient and hypnotist recorded in the poem. Edward Williams’s note to S. discussed in the headnote to With a guitar. To Jane, with its (presumably) mock challenge to a duel with S. ‘if you go on thus’, i.e. sending poems about his feelings for Jane secretly to Jane or to Jane and Williams, is undated but probably written in early April, in which case The magnetic lady to her patient could well have been one in a recent series of such communications. Jane Williams had the MS of The magnetic lady to her patient in her possession at S.’s death, and she must subsequently have allowed Medwin full access to it as the poem’s first publication was by Medwin in The Athenaeum ccl (11 August 1832) 522–3. Medwin there implies that he was reproducing the poem from memory because he introduces it as one ‘of which I remember some of the stanzas’, but it is certain that he was in fact working from the MS. The poem is given complete, although with four substantive errors, added punctuation (including some pointing, which in typical Medwin fashion misunderstands S.’s sense: see notes), but, most tellingly, an invented line replacing the line in which S. names Jane as the Magnetic lady, perhaps suggesting that the Athenaeum version was produced under her approval, Mary still in 1832 being unaware of the existence of the poem. Medwin published a slightly revised text in Medwin (1833), on which Mary based her text in 1839. It is highly probable that Mary’s revised text in 1840 was informed by corrections supplied by Jane Williams herself (as presumably were the texts of other poems in 1840; e.g. see headnote to To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’)), though Medwin’s substituted line concealing the name Jane remains uncorrected. Rossetti 1870 first printed l. 42 of The magnetic lady to her patient correctly, Rossetti having been allowed sight of the MS by Trelawny, (Rossetti 1870 ii 575). Rossetti 1870 also corrected ‘chased’ to ‘charmed’ in l. 16 from the MS. In his ‘Memoir of Shelley’ in The Athenaeum ccl (11 August 1832) 522 Medwin explained the context of the poem as follows: Shelley was a martyr to a most painful complaint, which constantly menaced to terminate fatally, and was subject to violent paroxysms, which, to his irritable nerves, were each a separate death. I had seen magnetism practised in India and at Paris, and at his earnest request consented to try its efficacy. Mesner [sic.] himself could not have hoped for more complete success. The imposition of my hand on his forehead instantaneously put a stop to the spasm, and threw him into a magnetic sleep, which, for want of a better word, is called somnambulism. Mrs. Shelley and another lady were present. The experiment was repeated more than once. During his trances I put some questions to him. He always pitched his voice in the same tone as mine. I inquired about his complaint, and its cure — the usual magnetic inquiries. His reply was — “What would cure me, would kill me,” (alluding probably to lithotomy). I am sorry I did not note down some of his answers. Animal magnetism is, in Germany, confined by law to the medical professors; and with reason — it is not to be trifled with. Medwin had himself been ‘magnetised’ by Jane Williams when they had been living in the same house in Geneva in 1819 (Mary Jnl i 342 n. 4). Medwin’s reference to the presence of ‘another lady’ when he hypnotised S. is to Claire Clairmont, who like Mary records the

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episode in her journal as having taken place on Friday 15 December 1820 (Claire Jnl 196, and Mary Jnl i 342, and see also headnote to Fiordispina (Longman iv 62–74, no. 378); the Williamses did not arrive in Pisa until January 1821). Medwin also states, in his later and somewhat different account of the episode in 1847 (see Medwin (1913) 269–70) that before being hypnotised by him, S. ‘had never previously heard of Mesmerism’. This claim, however, cannot be true. The theory and practice of ‘animal magnetism’ was widely current in the culture of Britain and Europe throughout the decades following its development by Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer (1734–1815). During the 1770s, first in Germany and then, amongst fashionable French society, in Paris from 1778, Mesmer practised various therapies predicated on the theory that humans participated in a natural energetic transference that occurred between all animated and inanimate objects, which he termed ‘animal magnetism’ (subsequently often referred to as ‘mesmerism’; ‘hypnotism’ was first proposed in 1843 as a term for the therapeutic technique derived from it). This interaction took place via the medium of a universal ‘fluid’ permeating all matter, and purportedly having affinity or identity with other phenomena themselves at that time attracting increasing scientific and popular interest, including electricity, magnetism, light, and gravity. Mesmer claimed that he had developed a method to channel the movement of this fluid as a means to cure various ailments. The practice and its underpinning theory challenged contemporary medical authority and, in its consequent potentially ‘levelling’ effect, came to be associated with radical politics, and in particular with the energies unleashed by the French Revolution (see Roy Porter, ‘ “Under the Influence”: Mesmerism in England’, History Today xxxv (1985) 22–29, Paul Dawson ‘ “A sort of natural magic”: Shelley and Animal Magnetism’, K-SR i (1986) 15–34, Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of Enlightenment in France (1968), Nigel Leask, ‘Shelley’s “Magnetic Ladies”: Romantic Mesmerism and the Politics of the Body’, in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780–1832, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale (1992) 53–78, and Tim Fulford, ‘Conducting the Vital Fluid: The Politics and Poetics of Mesmerism in the 1790s’, SiR xliii (2004) 57–78)). S. is certain to have been familiar with these ideas, not least because there is an extended account of the work of a leading British ‘mesmerist’, John Boniot de Mainauduc (1750–97) in Robert Southey’s Letters from England, 3 vols (1807) Letters LI and LII, ii 304–49, which S. knew well; Medwin himself recalls ‘the very harrowing effect which Southey’s Don Espriello’s Letters produced on him in 1810 or 1811’ (Medwin (1913) 190), and Letters from England is itemised as amongst S.’s reading again in Mary’s reading list for 1815 (Mary Jnl i 91). Southey’s account of Mainauduc’s approach to mesmerism (in the assumed character of his book’s supposed Spanish Catholic author, Don Espriella) is contemptuously dismissive, owing to what is characterised as the irreligious presumption of Mainauduc’s claims. The Letters on Mainauduc follow a Letter on ‘Quack Medicines’, and Southey begins Letter LII by deriding the ‘prodigious quackery’ of mesmerism. But S. would have been fascinated by Southey’s account of Mainauduc’s conviction in an underlying unity flowing through all matter; cp., e.g. S. in A Refutation of Deism (1814), where his vocabulary suggests the terminology of animal magnetism: Matter, such as we behold it, is not inert. It is infinitely active and subtile. Light, electricity and magnetism are fluids not surpassed by thought itself in tenuity and activity: like thought they are sometimes the cause and sometimes the effect of motion; and, distinct as they are from every other class of substances, with which we are acquainted, seem to possess equal claims with thought to the unmeaning distinction of immateriality. (Prose Works 116)

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S. may also have recalled in particular one example given by Southey of mesmerism’s supposed therapeutic efficacy, in its potential to obviate the need for surgical treatment of kidney stones; Southey explains how in mesmerism the operator’s own emanations become for him invisible fingers, which penetrate the pores, and are to be considered as the natural and only ingredients which are or can be adapted to the removal of nervous, or any other affections of the body. Instead therefore of lithotomy the stone may thus be cured without danger or pain. This invisible power must be applied to the juices which circulate in the vicinity of the stone: and they must be conducted to the stone and applied to its surface, that the stone may be soaked in them for the purpose of dissolving the gum which makes the particles of sand cohere. (Letters from England ii 327) It seems clear that S. was susceptible to hypnotism. Medwin’s curious late novel Lady Singleton; or, the World as It Is, 3 vols (1843) has a brief portrait of S., in an image already anticipating the Victorian stereotype: I crossed the Alps, and found Shelley at the baths of Lucca. The great poet’s animal magnetic sensibility is well known; and it had been, if possible, increased by a late visit to the Prato Fiorito, where he had fainted by the excess of sweetness of the Jonquils — that carpets that enamelled mead. (iii 49: Medwin draws in this passage on his account of S.’s residence at Bagni di Lucca in 1818, Medwin (1913) 198. Cp. Epipsychidion 450–2 and note) Medwin states that S.’s experiments with animal magnetism were repeated ‘more than once’, although S. was wary of the vulnerability to unguarded disclosure that went with being ‘mesmerised’. Claire’s journal entry records that after being hypnotised, S. ‘begs them not to ask him more questions because he shall say what he ought not’ (Claire Jnl 196); this nervousness may well be in play in The magnetic lady to her patient, which like other of the poems to Jane plays teasingly on the presence of unarticulated tensions (see To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’), ‘General Headnote to S.’s Poems to Jane Williams’). The magnetic lady to her patient, like the poems to Jane as a group, offers a subtle combination of intimate disclosure with unobtrusive but highly skilled artistic control. The voices in its dialogue are authentically conversational and relaxed, with an explicitness that, as Chernaik 164 notes in sharply insightful commentary, effects ‘a tone of affectionate raillery and wholly disinterested tenderness’ that is ‘part of its charm’. The poem’s unguarded quality is achieved with great assurance and fluency within a demanding formal discipline: each nine-line stanza uses a syllabic pattern 8/6/6/8/6/8/8/8/2 with a basic iambic pulse, and rhyming abacbdbcd, the formal parameters working together to create the feeling of a complicated emotional situation carefully negotiated, especially given S.’s numerous small variations within the patterns, including shortened and lengthened lines, and artfully placed substitutions of metrical feet. Text from Aberdeen University Library, MS  937 (A: courtesy of the University of Aberdeen); indentation inferred from the (inconsistent) MS.

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Published in The Athenaeum ccl (11 August 1832) 522–3 (Ath); Medwin (1833) 120–122; 1839 iv 161–2; 1840 304–5 (ll. 1–41 and 43–45); Rossetti 1870 ii 280–1 (complete); MYRS viii 398–401 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

The magnetic lady to her patient ‘Sleep, sleep on, forget thy pain —   My hand is on thy brow,   My spirit on thy brain, My pity on thy heart, poor friend; 5   And from my fingers flow The powers of life, and like a sign Seal thee from thine hour of woe,

¶ 69. Title. The initial m of magnetic in A may be a majuscule. S.’s title plays on the ambiguity of ‘magnetic’, i.e. both hypnotising and powerfully attractive; S. read Ben Jonson’s The Magnetick Lady, or Humours Reconciled (1640) on 29 June 1818 (Mary Jnl i 216). 1–45. S. uses double quotation marks throughout in the A text, in ll. 1, 10, 19, 28, 37 (2), 38 (2), 39, 40, 41 (2), 42, 43, 44, and 45. Ath, Medwin (1833) and 1839 have no quotation marks, but 1840 introduces double quotation marks which nearly replicate those in A. 1. Sleep on! Sleep on! Forget thy pain: Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839. Medwin (followed by Mary in 1839) added an extra syllable to bring the line into conformity with the poem’s metre, which in each 9-line stanza has a syllable count of 8/6/6/8/6/8/8/8/2; but there is constant variation from this pattern (e.g. the shortened l. 7 in this opening stanza). The MS reading was restored in 1840. Michael O’Neill notes that Sleep, sleep on ‘reveals a poet with a sure ear for the intimacies of affectionate speech’ (MYRS viii p. xxii). 2–6. The Magnetic lady is using the conventional techniques and language of ‘mesmerism’ to hypnotise her patient: physical touch, allowing an interchange of the universal ‘fluid’ (one form of the medium also considered responsible for magnetism, electricity, and gravity) between therapist and subject, whose ‘spirits’ thus mingle (see headnote); for the ‘universal fluid which penetrated all bodies animate or inanimate’, see Franz-Anton Mesmer, Le Magnétisme Animal (1779), ed. Robert Amadou (1971) 51–4. Medwin’s account of hypnotising S. in Pisa describes how ‘the imposition of my hand on his forehead, instantly put a stop to his spasms, and threw him into a deep slumber, which for want of a better name has been called somnambulism’ (Medwin (1913) 269). The reversal of roles in S.’s poem, with a male subject ‘mesmerised’ by a woman, would have appeared daringly radical, as a chief objection to the practice in Britain was the indelicacy of a lady being physically touched by a stranger, and then placed in a potentially highly vulnerable lack of conscious awareness. 2. brow,] brow A. 3. brain,] brain A, Major Works; brain; Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839, 1840. 6–7. S. appears to allude to the biblical sign which serves as a seal to protect from evil, as in Revelation vii 2–3: ‘And I saw another angel ascending from the east, having the seal of the living God: and he cried with a loud voice to the four angels, to whom it was given to hurt the earth and the sea, Saying, Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads’. The mark of Cain was a seal to protect him from harm, as in Genesis iv 15: ‘And the Lord said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him’. 6. sign] sign, Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839, 1840. 7. woe,] woe: Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839, 1840.

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10 ‘Sleep, sleep, sleep on, — I love thee not —   Yet when I think that he   Who made and makes my lot As full of flowers, as thine of weeds,   Might have been lost like thee, — 15 And that a hand which was not mine Might then have charmed his agony As I another’s . . . my heart bleeds For thine. ‘Sleep, sleep, and with the slumber of 20   The dead and the unborn . . .   Forget thy life and love; Forget that thou must wake; — forever   Forget the world’s dull scorn. — Forget lost health, and the divine 8–9. As Chernaik 164 notes, ‘Jane is made to say at least three or four times that she pities Shelley but cannot love him’. 10–18. The lady’s sympathy for her patient is heightened by imagining her own lover in his situation. 10. Sleep on! Sleep on! I love thee not Ath; Sleep on! Sleep on! I love thee not; Medwin (1833), 1839; Sleep, sleep on! I love thee not; 1840. on, —] S.’s punctuation in A is partially obscured by over-inking, but seems to be a (blotted) comma followed by a (short) dash, as in l. 14. 11. Yet] But Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839, 1840. he] he Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839; the pronoun refers to Jane’s common law husband Edward Williams (envisaged by S. as, with Jane, the poem’s private audience; see headnote). 13. flowers,] flowers Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839. 14. thee, —] thee; Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839, 1840. 15. mine] mine, Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839. 16. charmed] chased Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839, 1840. The perpetuation of Medwin’s error in 1840 is odd, as charmed is clear in A (see headnote); the correct reading was first printed in Rossetti 1870. 17. another’s . . . ] anothers . . . A (the second and third suspension points appear joined, or possibly cancelled, by a line); another’s — Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839, 1840, Chernaik. 19–20. Cp. Euripides, Trojan Women 636: τὸ μὴ γενέσθαι τῷ θανεῖν ἴσον λέγω (Not to be born is the same, I say, as to die). 20. unborn . . . ] unborn: Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839; unborn 1840. 21. love;] woe; Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839. 22. wake; — forever] wake forever; Ath; wake for ever; Medwin (1833), 1839, 1840; wake, — forever Chernaik (as MYRS viii 394 notes, in A ‘the dash seems to be written over the point of a semicolon’). 23. world’s] worlds A. scorn. —] scorn; Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839, 1840. S. was depressed in the months before his death by his apparent failure as a poet, particularly in contrast with Byron’s success; cp. To — (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’) 9–11 and note, and see headnote to Lines to —— [Sonnet to Byron] (Longman v, no. 429). 24–25. the divine . . . brief morn] Probably referring to S.’s lasting resentment and regret over the end of his relationship with his cousin Harriet Grove. Their strong romantic attachment in 1809–10 was broken off by her parents, alarmed by S.’s sceptical and anti-Christian views. See L&C Dedication stanza 6 and notes. 24. lost health] S. suffered badly throughout his adult life from a variety of medical problems, never satisfactorily diagnosed but involving painful ‘spasms’ and a recurrent pain in the side attributed to

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25 Feelings which died in youth’s brief morn; And forget me, for I can never Be thine. — ‘Like a cloud big with a May shower   My soul weeps healing rain 30   On thee, thou withered flower. — It breathes mute music on thy sleep —   Its odour calms thy brain — Its light within thy gloomy breast Spreads, like a second youth again — 35 By mine thy being is to its deep Possessed. — ‘The spell is done — how feel you now?’   ‘Better, quite well’, replied   The sleeper — ‘What would do

kidney stones (see headnote); for detailed speculation on the possible causes of these conditions see Nora Crook and Derek Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody (1986). 25. which died] S. first wrote which fell in A, then cancelled fell and wrote died above with a caret below; that die Ath, Medwin (1833); 1839. 27. thine. —] thine. Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839, 1840. 28–30. Cp. Keats, ‘Ode on Melancholy’, ll. 11–14: But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hill in an April shroud 28. shower] shower, Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839, 1840. 29. rain] rain. Ath; rain, Medwin (1833), 1839. 30. flower. —] flower, Ath; flower; Medwin (1833), 1839, 1840. The lady’s description of the patient as a ‘withered flower’ suggests S.’s own tendency to compare his worn heart to a blighted plant; see headnote to The Zucca (Longman v, no. 421), and cp. S.’s letter to Claire Clairmont of 11 December 1821, recalling her apparent earlier identification of him with the Sensitive-Plant of his own poem: ‘The Exotic as you please to call me droops in this frost — a frost both moral & physical — a solitude of the heart’ (L ii 367; cp. also On a Dead Violet). 31. sleep —] rest; Ath; sleep; Medwin (1833), 1839, 1840; sleep, Chernaik (S.’s dash in A is abbreviated and could conceivably be a comma). 32. brain —] brain! Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839, 1840. 33. Its] Its’ A. breast] breast, Ath. 34. Spreads,] Speaks Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839; Spreads 1840. again —] again. Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839, 1840. 36. Possessed. —] Possest. Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839, 1840. 37. done — how] done. How Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839, 1840. 38. ‘Better, quite well’,] “Better, quite well” A; Better — Quite well, Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839. 39. sleeper — ‘What] sleeper — “what A; sleeper. What Ath; sleeper. — What Medwin (1833); sleeper, — What 1839; sleeper, — “What 1840.

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40 You good when suffering and awake,   What cure your head and side?’ ‘What would cure that would kill me, Jane, And as I must on earth abide Awhile yet, tempt me not to break 45      My chain.

70  The Triumph of Life Manuscript Evidence The TL MS  displays all the characteristics of S.’s difficult rough first drafts. There is an impression of rapid conception and fast inscription, fundamentally controlled by the iambic pentameter, and by the severe underlying discipline of the terza rima (S. frequently marks completed tercets by a short horizontal line centred beneath), but constantly checked by copious running revisions, involving an often barely-legible hand overlaid with cancellations, underlined re-instatements, uncancelled alternatives, problems with ink-flow, over-writing, and inserted words and phrases. With the exception of ll. 392–405, which are known only from 1824, the sole source of TL is S.’s holograph draft in ink (except for some pencil corrections, and one page drafted entirely in pencil) on forty loose leaves in Box 1, ff. 19r-58v (all forty leaves are enclosed within a bifolium made from a sheet of coarse white paper). Most of the MS is written on thin Italian paper consisting of greenish or yellowish sheets measuring approximately 255 x 390 mm, which have been ready-folded (i.e. by the manufacturer or vendor) to form bifolia of conjugate pairs giving a four-page booklet, each page of each booklet measuring 255 x 195 mm. The sheets are watermarked ‘BENEDETTO PARODI’ across the 390 mm dimension, such that when the sheet is placed for use with the fold to the writer’s left, ‘PARODI’ appears on the first page (backwards on p. 2) and ‘BENEDETTO’ on the fourth page (backwards on p. 3). For the most part, S.’s draft uses the folded sheets in this way, progressing one bifolium at a time over fifteen complete four-page booklets, and usually beginning the use of each new bifolium ‘right way up’, i.e. with the

40. awake,] awake A; awake? Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839, 1840. 41. side?’] side? — Medwin (1833); side?” — 1840. 42. ’Twould kill me what would cure my pain; Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839, 1840: a line invented by Medwin to conceal the direct reference to Jane in A, and left uncorrected when Jane Williams (presumably) supplied corrections to other errors in Mary’s 1839 text; the correct reading was first printed in Rossetti 1870 (see headnote). Jane,] Jane A. Paul Dawson (K-SR i (1986) 21–2) notes ‘Medwin’s suggestion that Shelley is referring here to an operation for the stone [see headnote] is rather ludicrous. [S.] means either that the ‘cure’ for his condition is Jane’s love, a betrayal of Mary which would be moral death; or, more probably, that the name for his disease is mortality, for which the only cure is indeed death’. 44. Awhile yet,] Awhile, yet Ath, Medwin (1833), 1839, 1840. 45. Chernaik 165 comments: ‘The “chain” he must not break is the chain of life; also, undoubtedly, it is the chain of his marriage’. Cp. Pope, ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ l. 173, ‘Death, only death, can break the lasting chain’.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315170343-70

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fold to the writer’s left and the Parodi watermark visible correctly on the first page. There are, however, six bifolia where S. has started use ‘right way up’, but then for various reasons has inverted the booklet by turning it over while keeping the fold to the left, and used it ‘wrong way round’ (ff. 21r-22v, 25r-26v, 42r-43v, 47r-48v, 55r-56v, and 57r-58v); in these cases it is generally a reasonable inference that S.’s use of the booklet ‘right way up’ (i.e. resulting in draft which appears reverso on the fourth page of the booklet as now foliated) predates the remaining draft in the booklet. The bifolium 42r-43v presents a strange anomaly: before use S. appears to have rotated the booklet through 180 degrees, so the watermark is upside-down and the fold to the writer’s right. S. has drafted ll. 373–85 on this page, then flipped over the whole booklet, so the Benedetto watermark is upside-down and the fold to the writer’s left, and drafted ll. 386–91. Both inside pages are blank (perhaps S. for some reason opened out the booklet and used it upside down, i.e. with the watermarks upside down, using first the left-hand half and then the right-hand). Folios 29r-34v are a gathering consisting of one bifolium wrapping two further bifolia (such that the outside leaves of a twelve-page booklet are one conjugate pair, f. 29 and f. 34; S. may have assembled this enlarged booklet once he resumed composition in earnest in mid-June). There are also three individual sheets which each represent one half of a conjugate pair (ff. 19, 20, and 41). Towards the end of the composition period S. was becoming concerned about his supply of paper. Bifolium 44r-45v is a folded sheet of different, pinkish-white paper containing on its first three pages draft of ll. 406–37, with sketches of boat design on page four (see BSM i 131 for its watermark). Folio 46 is the address leaf of a letter addressed to ‘Sig.e Shelley | Gentil uomo Inglese’ at Villa Magni, possibly in the hand of Byron’s secretary Antonio Lega Zambelli, and postmarked ‘Mag 15 Pisa | Sarzana’, containing on its recto side draft of lines 438–50. Bifolium ff. 47r-48v is Parodi paper on which S. had already begun a letter before drafting TL 451–78, and the following Parodi bifolium ff. 49r-50r is missing the lower half of f. 50 where it was torn away before S. used it to draft ll. 479–507. Folio 51 is a single sheet of different paper, longer than the Parodi paper, containing draft of ll. 508–23. Folios 52r-53v, containing draft of the final lines of TL (ll. 524–48), is one sheet of a different paper again, forming a bifolium which is folded not to the writer’s left, but hinged at the top. There are two ‘strays’ which have become separated from the MS in Box 1: one single sheet of the Parodi paper is now in CHPL (Pforz MS PBS 0283: henceforth designated Pforz). There is also TL draft on one page of a four-page letter to Mary, which is now part of the Abinger bequest in the Bodleian Library (Bodleian MS. Abinger c. 45 f. 127r: henceforth Abinger). These two MSS both contain draft for an early version of the poem’s opening, and provide evidence for the date of composition of TL. The opening forty-eight lines of the draft, covering the first three pages of the MS, ff. 19r-20r (both single sheets each representing one half of a conjugate pair), are copied fair in S.’s hand. The MS then continues in rough first draft from f. 21r through to f. 53r (f. 20v is blank), leaves which also include other poems: The earthquake is rocking (Longman vi, no. 451) (f. 26v), Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven (ff. 35r-37v), draft for To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’) (ff. 33v, 38v, and 56r), and The hours are flying (Longman vi, no. 455) (f. 37r). One passage of draft is entirely missing from the MS, for there is no equivalent in Box 1 to ll. 392–405 as they appeared in Mary’s text of TL in 1824 (which is consequently the sole source for those lines). Given S.’s normal practice in the TL draft of managing between ten and fifteen lines of draft to the page this might indicate that it is a single leaf — or possibly one bifolium additionally containing material other than draft — which is missing; this missing leaf or bifolium would have been placed between f. 43v and f. 44r of the current foliation in Box 1.

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shelley: selected poems

Four pages of the MS contain cancelled passages only (ff. 22v, 31v, 34r, 38v), and ten pages contain four earlier uncancelled versions of the opening of the poem. These uncancelled openings represent S.’s successively longer and more developed attempts at an induction, here designated Appendices A, B, C and D (ff. 54r and v, and 55r-58v). D is close in length and substance to the poem’s induction as it is copied fair by S. on the first three pages of the MS in Box 1. D is also the sole source for the poem’s title, ‘The Triumph of Life’ (written at the top of f. 54r), which does not appear anywhere in the fair-copied version of the induction. The discarded opening designated B is partly drafted on a page (f. 56r) which also contains draft for To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’) ll. 1–10, and this too has implications for the date of composition of TL (see headnote to To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’)).

Date of Composition The evidence of the MS, taken together with the few instances where it is possible to assign specific dates to relevant documents, suggest that TL was very probably written between 27 May and 1 July 1822, and that composition was in two phases, the first from around 28 May to 4 June, and the second through the latter half of June. Although the four discarded openings are edited separately as Appendices A, B, C and D in Lines connected with The Triumph of Life (Longman vi, no. 452 Appendix), it is helpful to consider here their implications for the overall composition period of TL. Kenneth Neill Cameron proposed that S. began work on the poem in February or March 1822 (Cameron (1974) 647–8; perhaps, as BSM i 116 suggests, ‘reacting to critics who turned the poem into a suicide note’), drawing selectively on Mary’s ‘Note on Poems Written in 1822’ in 1839, and also on Medwin’s assertion that S. had begun TL around the same time that he was working on Charles the First (Longman v, no. 426) (Medwin (1913) 352). However, Mary’s comments in 1839 point unequivocally to a very late date for the composition of at least the greater part of TL. She explains that S. gave up his efforts to write Charles the First for ‘one of the most mystical of his poems, “The Triumph of Life,” on which he was employed at the last’ (1839 iv 227). This statement might still be taken to keep open the possibility of at least a start on TL immediately following the abandonment of Charles the First, although Mary goes on to clarify that after the arrival of S.’s boat, the Don Juan, The time of the friends was now spent on the sea; the weather became fine, and our whole party often passed the evenings on the water. . .When Shelley was on board, he had his papers with him; and much of the “Triumph of Life” was written as he sailed or weltered on that sea which was soon to engulf him. (1839 iv 231) This confirms her account fifteen years earlier (and so still close in time to the events themselves) of S.’s work on TL: In the wild but beautiful Bay of Spezia, the winds and waves which he loved became his playmates. His days were chiefly spent on the water; the management of his boat, its alterations and improvements, were his principal occupation. At night, when the unclouded moon shone alone on the calm sea, he often went alone in his little shallop to the rocky caves that bordered it, and sitting beneath their shelter wrote “The Triumph of Life,” the last of his productions. (Preface to 1824, v-vi)

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It is obvious from these statements that Mary recalled the composition period of TL as falling at least mostly in the period between the arrival of the Don Juan at Villa Magni on 12 May 1822 (see Gisborne Jnl 148), and S.’s fateful final departure for Leghorn on 1 July to meet the newly arrived Leigh Hunt and his family. However, the discovery of Abinger, while not quite incontrovertibly establishing a terminus a quo for the start of work on TL, very strongly suggests that composition was not begun before late May 1822 (see Betty T. Bennett and Alice Green Fredman, ‘A Note on the Dating of Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life” ’, K-SJ xxxi (1982) 13–5). Abinger is a letter from Lady Mountcashell (who lived in Pisa with George William Tighe as ‘Mr and Mrs Mason’) to Mary. It is written on a sheet of thin woven paper which has been folded once to make a booklet of four pages, one of which bears the address ‘alla Signora | Signore Shelley | Villa Magni | Lerici’ in Lady Mountcashell’s hand on an address panel with the handwritten postmark ‘Pisa’, and stamped ‘SARZANA’ and ‘MAG 26’ (i.e. 26 May 1822). Pages one and two contain most of the letter, while on the third page, the recto of the address page, beneath the concluding lines of the letter and written reverso, is a continuation in S.’s hand of his fourth attempt, D, to draft the opening lines of TL. The passage drafted on the letter follows on from the draft of D which covers both sides of a single folio of Parodi paper in Box 1, folio 54 recto and verso, and which is continued on the single sheet of the same paper now in the CHPL (Pforz; for facsimiles of the MSS of D in correct sequence see BSM i 274–85). It is therefore certain that S. was making his successive efforts to begin TL after 26 May. There is a theoretical but very unlikely possibility that S. had begun drafting his first three attempts at the opening lines a short while before the date of the letter from Lady Mountcashell. The earliest surviving dateable use by S. and Mary of the Parodi paper is S.’s letter of 29 May to Mary Jane Godwin (Mary’s stepmother); all other known uses of the paper bear dates in June or later. It is also notable that among the various jottings and calculations which occur throughout the TL MS are several dates in June or later, but none from any earlier period (aside from the anomalous reference to ‘March 12’ on f. 47v, which we take to have been written in late June). Conversely, it was conjectured by GM that the opening lines 1–40 of TL could conceivably have been written last and then fair-copied for positioning at the beginning of the MS, and could therefore have been written even as late as the end of June, a conjecture potentially supported by the current placement of the folios containing the rejected draft openings at the end of the MS in Box 1. S.’s use of the Mountcashell letter could also notionally offer an instance of his repurposing various odd sheets of paper as his supply of Parodi paper began to run out towards the end of the composition period (as, for example, must have been the case with the draft of ll. 438–50 on f. 46r, the other side of which is the address cover of a letter postmarked 15 May). However, the foliation of Box 1 ff. 19r-58r undertaken by Bodleian Library staff after Sir John Shelley-Rolls’ gift of 1946 offers only a partial insight into the order in which composition occurred over those leaves, and the placement of the leaves containing the discarded draft openings at the end of the Bodleian foliation could be the result of re-ordering by S. himself on completion of the fair copy opening, or by Mary, or by a subsequent owner of the MS. The discarded openings are on Parodi paper which, as noted, was clearly running out towards the end of the composition period. A probable scenario is that composition began on or around 27 May with the drafts of the openings in the sequence A, then B, then C, then D. The end of the draft in the Abinger portion of D (l. 49) was apparently followed by draft of the next tercet on f. 21r with the rhyme-words know and so on that page (see the present edition’s text of TL 47 and 49) linking back to fro in D line 48, demonstrating conclusively that S.’s rough draft of TL beginning on f. 21r is a continuation of the opening section, and cannot pre-date it.

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S. may, of course, have made the fair copy of ll. 1–48 on ff. 19r-21r at any point after the tercet which includes ll. 47–8 had been drafted on f. 21r. One possible indication that the opening lines were not fair-copied at the outset of composition, but at some subsequent point, may be inferred from S.’s apparently erroneous line-counts which appear at two places in the left margin of f. 24v. Each calculation appears to be S.’s attempt to work out the running line-count by multiplying the number of completed tercets by 3. One calculation is placed next to what is the forty-first tercet in the edited text (ending at l. 124, ‘So that the trunk survived both fruit and flower’) but S.’s calculation reads 42 x 3, giving 126. The other calculation is placed next to what is the received tercet forty-three (ending at l. 130, ‘As they had touched the world with living flame’); those figures read 44 x 3, giving 132. In both cases S.’s line-count is off by 2, a circumstance which Donald Reiman explains as follows: The two multiplications in the left-hand margin show PBS multiplying the number of completed tercets by three to learn how many lines he had completed. His count was, inevitably, off because of the extra line [40] at the end of the induction of “The Triumph.” (BSM i 304) This explanation does not, however, account for the discrepancy. If S. had simply forgotten that he had completed the poem’s induction by extending the closing tercet into a quatrain, ll. 37–40, then his count would in the case of both his sums be off by only 1. But S. is in each of his sums counting one extra tercet, and assuming that they are all correct 3-line tercets, this could imply that at the time of making his running line-count on f. 24v, he had not made the fair copy of the poem’s opening, but was counting from a version of the opening somehow intermediate between discarded opening D, and the fair copy version; this intermediate version could have included an extra tercet not finally used, but have excluded the extra line added to complete the quatrain at ll. 37–40 of the final form of the opening. As it survives, Lines Connected with The Triumph of Life Appendix D as redacted in the present edition is close to S.’s fair-copied opening until its l. 28, at which point it breaks down into unresolved form for several lines until its l. 35, corresponding to l. 37 in the fair copy. D does not, however, have any quatrain (though it does contain the rhymes of the fair copy quatrain), but continues in tercets through to the speaker’s vision ‘beside a public way’ (our text l. 43). Given that the TL portion of the rough draft on f. 21r comprises a complete version of the tercet whose first line is ‘All hastening onward’ (our text l. 47), one might infer that the draft of the leaves of rough draft which preceded f. 21r comprised sixteen tercets, i.e. forty-eight lines, which could explain S.’s two tercet-counts on f. 24v. This might be explained by speculating how S. might have counted the tercets in Lines Connected with The Triumph of Life Appendix D (the rough draft of the opening that is closest to the fair copy). The number of tercets in Appendix D is sixteen if one assumes that S. did not include the ‘[Nothing of what]’ tercet in his counts on f. 24v. With that omission, ‘The birds, the fountains . . .’ is l. 35, ‘Rise invisible . . .’ is l. 40 and ‘Methought I sate . . .’ is l. 48. Our note to l. 34 of Appendix D discusses why we include the ‘[Nothing of what]’ tercet in our text. It is still not possible to establish when the fair copy of the opening was made, but it is interesting to reflect that if it was done at or towards the end of the composition period, that might suggest S. was thinking of the poem as all but finished; on the other hand, the fact that the fair-copied opening lines are on Parodi paper might suggest a somewhat earlier date (i.e. S. was not, at the time of making his fair copy of the opening lines, concerned about running out of Parodi paper).

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Since the drafting of D must have been done after 27 May, it is likely that S.’s comment in a letter to Claire of 28 May, ‘I sit within the whole morning and in the evening we sail about. — I write a little’ (L ii 427) is a reference to his efforts to make a start on TL. Two days later, on 30 May, he wrote again to Claire in terms which (as noted by both B. C. BarkerBenfield, Shelley’s Guitar 181, and Reiman, TL (Reiman) 250) suggest he was becoming more engaged in writing TL: My health is much better this summer than it has been for many years; but the occupation of a few mornings in composition has somewhat shaken my nerves. — I have turned Maria’s room into a study, and am in this respect very comfortable. (L ii 430) S. may well be alluding here to his successive efforts to begin the poem. His decision to convert the room of their recently departed cook Maria into a study is interesting in light of Mary’s statements that ‘much of the “Triumph of Life” was written as he sailed’. As Reiman has cogently argued, composition on a boat is inherently unlikely, and the use of a study far more probable: Because all the conjugates of BENEDETTO PARODI paper were first begun on the same page, I think that he must have written at a table or desk, where the unused papers could be stacked and where he could spread out at least two pages at once, as he must have done in order to continue from one page to the next of TL or [To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’)]. (TL (Reiman) 248) Doubtless some composition could have been on a boat, perhaps using loose sheets for initial drafting which were then discarded (a few passages of the draft in Box 1 seem sufficiently neat to have been copied from earlier rough draft, for example on f. 46r), but the actual period in which S. did that was probably quite brief, and relatively early in the overall composition period. Mary’s vivid recollection of S. writing TL ‘At night, when the unclouded moon shone alone on the calm sea’, would locate that activity in the first few days of June, a period of hot, calm weather when S. and his companions were sailing on a daily basis (Gisborne Jnl 152–3), with a full moon on 4 June which rose at 20:21 (the only full moon in the composition period). It can then be concluded with some confidence that the overall composition period of TL fell between late May and 1 July, when S. left Villa Magni to sail to Livorno with Edward Williams. It is, however, very difficult to establish more exact dates for composition within that period, although some possibilities may be conjectured on the basis of the small body of dated material, and the evidence of the MS. If TL was begun around 27 May, there was probably a break in composition after 4 June, followed by a pause of perhaps two weeks or so, and then a more intense period of composition up to the end of June. On f. 26v, which constitutes the fourth page of a four-page booklet in the Parodi paper, Shelley’s rough ink draft stops about three-quarters of the way down the page, with his apparent inability to complete the tercet which would become ll. 161–4. As drafted in ink on f. 26v the tercet reads: Yet ere I could say where the chariot hath Past over them; nor other[s canc.] trace remained But as of [smoke upon the stream canc.]

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S. has written foam in ink above the cancelled smoke, and has torrents cancelled above stream, with Oceans uncancelled below. S. has then at some point returned to this broken-off ink draft and revised the tercet in pencil, cancelling could and writing can above, establishing a rhyme in the third line, wrath, to go with hath, and cancelling remained to replace it with I find, to establish the rhyme word for the next new tercet, which is written at the top of the first page of a new four-page booklet. The whole of this new page contains a pencil draft, suggesting that the revisions on f. 26v in pencil carried straight on to new composition in pencil on f. 27r (S.’s draft as revised is given here in our edited text): Yet ere I can say where, the chariot hath Passed over them; nor other trace I find But as of foam after the ocean’s wrath Is spent upon the desert shore. — Behind, Old men and women foully disarrayed Shake their grey hair in the insulting wind, The remaining bottom quarter of the page is taken up with the reverso draft of The earthquake is rocking, also in ink but apparently with a different pen (these lines were probably written before the TL draft; see headnote in Longman vi, no. 449). To the left of the reverso draft are two sketches, right way up, of boats, one of which is probably a somewhat illdrawn representation of the ‘Serchio’ boat, the ‘shallop’ of Mary’s account in the Preface to 1824 quoted earlier (see Gisborne Jnl 146 ff., and headnote to The Boat on the Serchio, Longman iv, no. 406); this was a small sailing boat with a mast and two sails, corresponding to S.’s representation on f. 26v of a boat which appears to be single-masted and fore-and-aft rigged (although in S.’s drawing the foresail’s rigging looks a little like a second mast, albeit impossibly close to the other mast). The Don Juan was probably a two-masted schooner, and amongst the several sketches of boats which appear throughout the TL MS, there is none which corresponds convincingly to the boat on which S. had been sailing when he drowned. Apart perhaps from a sketch done from memory by Daniel Roberts (now at Eton College; it is reproduced in Stephen Hebron and Elizabeth C. Denlinger, Shelley’s Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family (2010) 93), there is in fact no existing picture which can be firmly identified as representing the Don Juan, a source of much confusion among biographers and commentators: see Joseph A. Dane, ‘On the Instability of Vessels and Narratives: A Nautical Perspective on the Sinking of the “Don Juan” ’, K-SJ xlvii (1998) 63–86, and Donald B. Prell, ‘The Sinking of the “Don Juan” Revisited’, K-SJ lvi (2007) 136–54. The other sketch on f. 26v is of a small unmasted boat, possibly the ‘small flat bottomed boat’ mentioned by Williams (Gisborne Jnl 147), or alternatively the boat of ‘canvas and reeds’ that Williams was trying to build between 22 May and 5 June (Gisborne Jnl 150–3). These sketches, in the space below the point at which the ink draft of TL 161–4 peters out, could have been made at a point where S. was finding it difficult to continue composition, which also coincided with his trip with Williams up the coast to Massa on the Don Juan, which took up the whole of 5–6 June. On their return from that trip, there was the immediate distraction of the arrival of Claire on 7 June, Mary’s worrying health as she struggled with her pregnancy (she had a miscarriage on 16 June), and the visit of Trelawny and Captain Roberts from 13–18 June (Gisborne Jnl 154–5). The change from ink to pencil on f. 26v, which is continued by a whole page of pencil draft on f. 27r, may be related to S.’s postscript in his letter to John Gisborne of 18 June: ‘I waited

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three days to get this pen mended, and at last was obliged to write’ (L ii 437). This could locate S.’s resumption of work on TL around the middle of June, initially in pencil (with an additional implication for the date of The hours are flying; see headnote to that poem, Longman vi, no. 455), with the bulk of the poem as it has survived being written throughout the second half of the month, until being left behind, still unfinished, on S.’s departure for Livorno on 1 July (the relatively good condition of the thin paper rules out any possibility that the TL MS could have been retrieved from the wreck of the Don Juan). Throughout the second half of June the Don Juan was being refitted and so was unavailable for sailing (Gisborne Jnl 154–6), which may have encouraged S. to concentrate on his poem; there are several indications in the MS that the various boats in use were constantly on his mind, for example the sketches of stem (the foremost timber forming the bow) and stern designs on f. 49v, the fourth page of a non-Parodi bifolium which may have been used initially for boat-related matters and then repurposed for TL as paper ran low. Edward Williams noted in his journal for 17 June, ‘Consulted with Roberts and S[helley] about a false stem and stern’ (Gisborne Jnl 155). A further possible indication of a hiatus in the composition of TL, just before the trip to Massa on 5 and 6 June, may be found in the MS evidence for S.’s composition of To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’) (see the headnote to that poem for an argument that it was written around 4 June). The draft of the opening lines of The keen stars is written beneath S.’s interim draft B of the induction to TL on f. 56r. As the TL draft appears to have been written first this would also confirm a date for the successive drafts of TL’s opening lines to some time before 4 June. The draft of TL 451–78 is on Parodi bifolium ff. 47r-48v on the outer pages of which S. has twice begun a letter to Captain Roberts, one start of which explains that he has just received a letter from Hunt which makes me anxious to see him before he leaves Genoa. Hunt’s letter of 21 June announcing his arrival at Genoa had been received by S. on Monday 24 June: his reply to Hunt is dated ‘Lerici — Monday’ (i.e. Monday 24 June), and in that letter he states ‘This morning, on the receipt of your letter, I was on the point of setting sail to Genoa . . .’ (L ii 440). As the TL draft of ll. 451–78 begins by skipping the start of the letter on f. 47r, those lines must have been written on or after 24 June, when S. was within some 100 lines of the end of the poem. Assuming that S. stopped writing on or before 30 June, that would represent a slowing rate of composition over the final week of June. If the hypothesis is assumed of a hiatus in composition between around 4–16 June, S. would have completed roughly 250 lines (i.e. up to l. 164, together with the four successive openings) in the period 27 May-4 June, implying a composition rate of about 30 lines a day (throughout the TL MS S. usually averages between 3 and 5 tercets per page). If composition resumed around 15 June then a further 290 or so lines were drafted up to 24 June. This again computes to about 30 lines a day, notwithstanding the evident difficulties S. encountered at various points in taking the poem forward during this period (see the cancelled passages which interrupt composition between roughly ll. 220 and 280, Appendices F, G, and H).

Publication TL was first published in 1824, in a text edited by Mary Shelley from the MS left incomplete after S.’s death by drowning on 8 July 1822. Mary stated in her Preface to 1824 that the MS she worked from ‘was left in so unfinished a state, that I arranged it in its present form with great difficulty’ (vii). Writing fifteen years later, in a footnote to her ‘Note on Poems of 1822’ in 1839, she recalled her experience in producing the texts for 1824:

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shelley: selected poems Did any one see the papers from which I drew that volume, the wonder would be how any eyes or patience were capable of extracting it from so confused a mass, interlined and broken into fragments, so that the sense could only be deciphered and joined by guesses, which might seem rather intuitive than founded on reasoning. Yet I believe no mistake was made. (1839 iv 226)

This does not overstate the editorial challenge presented by the TL MS. Mary’s confidence that ‘no mistake was made’ has proved inaccurate, but that does not detract from the fact that her remarkable efforts provide the basis for all subsequent editors of the poem. Indeed, notwithstanding the brilliant textual scholarship which GM and Donald Reiman brought to the study of the TL MS in the 1950s and 1960s, it could be argued that the larger questions of meaning and interpretation posed by the poem (perhaps the most-studied of all S.’s major works) emerge essentially as clearly from Mary’s original 1824 text as from any subsequent edition. She declared herself defeated at one point in 1824, in failing to identify a coherent sequence of comprehensible tercets at what are ll. 278–283 of the present edition, remarking in an editorial comment within square brackets, ‘There is a chasm here in the MS, which it is impossible to fill up’ (1824 85). She also omitted the last three-and-a half lines of the received text, and made a substantial number of what are now identified as errors in reading particular words, mispunctuations, or local omissions. A few of these could be viewed as significant, for example her reading of ‘mystery’ for ‘mutiny’ at line 213, but the overall effect of Mary’s mistaken readings does not seriously obscure the sense of TL. For her edition of TL in 1839 Mary used 1834 as copy text (though apparently attempting to check at least a few difficult lines against the MS; see e.g. notes to ll. 84, 167–8), thereby introducing errors which were compounded by other minor changes which served to move the poem further from its basis in the MS. Rossetti 1870 derives from 1839, with an accretion of Rossetti’s characteristic practices of ‘corrected’ grammar and conjectural emendation, over-punctuation, and other presentational features (though he did print the poem’s tercets separated by a line of space and indented in a pattern alternating between second line, and first and third lines, exactly as S. himself does in his fair copy of the poem’s induction). Some new readings appeared in Mathilde Blind’s review of Rossetti 1870, Westminster Review n. s. xxxviii (1870) 75–97 (Blind (Westminster)), supplied to her by Richard Garnett, who was allowed access to the MS  by Jane, Lady Shelley (the readings from Blind were incorporated into Rossetti 1878). Forman 1876, again in characteristic fashion, was more conservative, preferring to base his text on 1824 wherever possible. The poem’s final three lines were first included in Locock 1911, again supplied by Garnett, but otherwise Forman’s text provided the basis for all subsequent editions, until the MS itself became available for sustained study by scholars after 1946, when Sir John Shelley-Rolls gifted it to the Bodleian (see TL (Reiman) 119–128 for a detailed account of the variants between successive editions from 1824 to Julian). GM worked on the MS in the Bodleian in the later 1950s, and his work culminated in the completely new text TL (GM). Five years later, Donald Reiman published his new text TL (Reiman), and following GM’s review of Reiman’s work JEGP lxvi (1967) 597– 605 (TL (JEGP)), the two scholars met to resolve outstanding issues with the MS before them, producing further changes which were incorporated into the text of TL in Reiman (1977). A facsimile of the MS with a full transcript and detailed commentary appeared in BSM i in 1986, and, as a result of this, Reiman made further changes to his text of TL in Reiman (2002).

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The text of TL in the present edition draws frequently on the authoritative work of GM and Reiman, but is based on a thorough, completely fresh examination of the MS. All variants between Box 1 and our text, and all substantive variants from 1824, are recorded in the notes. There is one exception to our policy of recording all MS variants: there are no speech marks in Box 1, so all speech marks in our text (and punctuation associated with them) are editorial insertions. These insertions are not recorded in the notes. There are occasions in Box 1 when, although words, phrases or lines are cancelled, the present editors judge that they must be retained for a text of TL because (in the case of words and phrases) no viable alternative is evident, or (in the case of lines), the rhyme-scheme evident in subsequent lines is dependent on a cancelled rhyme word. Since we believe such material to be necessary to retain, it is not presented as cancelled in our text or our notes.

Structure The plot of TL is as follows: we find the narrator under a tree on a hill, where he has spent the night awake, deep in thought. The sun rises and the narrator turns his back to it, at which point he is overcome by the trance-like state in which he experiences his vision. In this vision, the narrator is by the side of a public way on a summer’s evening, and observes a large crowd moving seemingly at random. This multitude grows more wild and chaotic, before a chariot guided by a Janus-faced shadow (with its eyes covered) approaches, carrying an ethereal figure within it. The crowd gives way to the chariot and becomes even more agitated; the chariot is then compared to a Roman triumphal procession, and we are told that the chariot has a separate crowd that it drives along in captivity. The narrator describes the captives as those who had been powerful in their lifetime and had acquired fame and infamy. The crowd observing these captives becomes wilder still, and begins a highly sexualised dance. The narrator is overcome by what he has seen and asks aloud how and what these sights are, and who the figure is in the chariot. Although he is not expecting an answer, a deformed figure who looks like a tree answers with the word ‘Life’. The new speaker offers to explain the procession to the narrator, but the narrator first demands to know who the speaker is. The speaker reveals that he is the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The narrator then asks Rousseau who the captives are, and Rousseau describes the figures chained to the chariot which include Napoleon, Voltaire, Frederick the Great, Kant, Catherine the Great, Leopold II, and Plato. After a long description of various people kept captive, the narrator asks Rousseau to explain how he got to this place, where he intends to go, and why. The answer to these questions comprises most of the rest of the poem. Rousseau relates that on a spring day, on a mountain by a riverside, he found himself asleep. The manner of his sleep is described as particularly deep and oblivious, and then Rousseau describes his dream. It occurs on a sunny day, as Rousseau awakes next to a wooded stream and describes in detail the approach of a shape all light. After the elaborate description of the shape’s approach, Rousseau asks it where he has come from, where he is, and why, to which the shape responds by asking Rousseau to drink from a cup it offers to him. It is unclear whether Rousseau does drink from this cup, but on putting it to his lips Rousseau’s mind becomes blank, and he then experiences a new vision. We are told that the shape all light is still a dim presence in this new vision, but now a triumphal chariot approaches with captives in tow. This triumphal chariot is surrounded by phantoms and demons who engage in various macabre actions on and around those humans following the chariot. As these phantoms toy with them, the humans grow more and more distorted,

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some dying and others falling by the wayside. Rousseau confesses that he is one of those who fell by the wayside, at which point the narrator interrupts him and asks him what ‘Life’ is. Rousseau looks into the distance where the chariot has rolled on and is seven words into an answer when the manuscript ends mid-sentence. TL has several structural divisions within it which signal shifts in both the plot and point of view. The poem is divided into four sections: the induction, which includes the narrator’s description of the landscape at sunrise, and sees the narrator fall into a visionary state (ll. 1–40), the beginning of the vision and the description of the triumphal procession of ‘Life’ (ll. 41–179), the conversation between the narrator and Rousseau about those in and around the procession (ll. 180–308), and Rousseau’s tale of his vision and encounter with the shape all light (ll. 308–546). All the transitions between these sections are marked by ellipses, and at two points S. goes further to mark these shifts more clearly: the narrator’s fall into a vision is preceded by a four-line stanza (ll. 37–40) and an elaborate ruled marking in Box 1 (see note to ll. 40–41); and the shift to Rousseau’s vision at l. 308 is marked by the imperative ‘now listen’, which signals his narration of TL from this point until a few lines from the end. The division at l. 308 is also significant because it divides the two visions of TL, that of the narrator (ll. 41–308) and that of Rousseau (ll. 308–546), which are often referred to by critics as the vision and the vision within the vision. The fullest account of the parallels between the first and second visions is in GM, ‘On Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life” ’, Studia Neophilologica xxxiv (1962) (SN (1962)) 106–8, which argues that TL ‘consists of two parallel accounts of the same experience’. GM notes the replication of the narrator’s situation at the opening in Rousseau’s later vision, and observes that ‘Both scenes are in early summer, at sunrise (ll. 2–3; 343–4), and on a mountainside (ll. 25–6; 311–12); Spectator and guide are both on a “lawn” (ll. 36; 355), near musical water (ll. 7; 314–20); the former hears “The birds, the fountains, and the ocean hold/Sweet talk in music through the enamoured air” (ll. 38–9) while Rousseau’s Shape dances to “the ceaseless song/Of leaves and winds and waves and birds and bees (ll. 375–6)” ’ (SN (1962) 106). In structural terms, this repetition means that Rousseau’s narration is more than simply an inset narrative: it results in readers having the same experience narrated twice. This doubleness is the reason for the sense of déjà vu that the narrator feels during the opening sun-rise (ll. 33–7), a déjà vu which can be read as either the narrator remembering his own birth, or, more puzzlingly, that he is a kind of Everyman, who dimly remembers Rousseau’s birth (which is chronologically earlier but narrated later in the poem). Both interpretations suggest that S. has structured the poem to create a lapsarian and a cyclical quality to the experiences described: we are all born into an apparently Edenic world, and then fall into the ‘harsh world’ (l. 334) controlled by ‘Life’, a process which each new generation is doomed to repeat. The double-birth structure of TL may be inspired by the Wordsworthian idea, articulated in ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, of being born into a world ‘Apparelled in celestial light’ (l. 4), which then fades as we move with adulthood ‘into the light of common day’ (l. 76). Both S. and Wordsworth drew inspiration for this distinction between birth and life from the fourth book of Émile, ou De l’éducation (Emile, or On Education) (1762), in which Rousseau claims: ‘Nous naissons, pour ainsi dire, en deux fois: l’une pour exister, et l’autre pour vivre; l’une pour l’espèce et l’autre pour le sexe’ (Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols (1959–95) iv 489; ‘We are, so to speak, born twice; once to exist and once to live; once for our species and once for our sex’, trans. Allan Bloom). The unfinished state of TL means that any analysis of the poem’s structure is provisional. Critics disagree on how many more lines of TL remained to be written at S.’s death. The

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most convincing argument for the extant lines being only half of what S. had planned is given by F. Melian Stawell in ‘Shelley’s “Triumph of Life” ’, Essays and Studies v (1914) 129–31, who argues that S. conceived of a much longer poem on a Petrarchan model, at the conclusion of which ‘Love, untrammelled and unperverted, would ride triumphant’. GM disagrees, claiming in SN (1962) 110–11, ‘by the time the final question is asked, “Then, what is Life?”, the limits have been reached both of the poem’s formal pattern and of the phase of experience necessitating it, and it looks as though “The Triumph of Life” was within a very few lines of its intended end’. Although all such claims are speculative, there is some evidence to support the idea that the current draft of TL is almost complete. First, Rousseau’s curtailed final speech on ll. 547–8 — ‘ “Happy those for whom the fold/Of” ’’ — seems to be summative, and to share an aphoristic quality with the conclusion of another poem S. was writing at the same time as TL: Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven (see note to TL 547–8). Second, to create an equally balanced structure, it would make sense for Rousseau’s answer to the final question to run for about forty lines and then end the poem, providing a neat division between an induction (ll. 1–40), the narrator’s vision (ll. 41–308), Rousseau’s story (ll. 308–546), and a conclusion (l. 546 to a speculative l. 586). Third, ending TL at this point would reinforce its thematic concern with the power of the tyrannical figure of ‘Life’ to remain conqueror over humankind. Dante’s journey from Hell to Paradise and Petrarch’s progress of triumphs, which begin with Love and end with Eternity and the fulfilment of God’s ‘promessa a chi si fida in lui’ (‘Triumphus Eternitatis’ i 5, Trionfi, rime estravaganti, codice degli abbozzi ed. Vincio Paca and Lauro Paulino (1996) ‘covenant with one who trusts in him’, trans. Ernest Hatch Wilkins), are structured around a Christian belief in a sinful earthly life redeemed in heaven. If S. had chosen to end his narrative at around l. 580, his structure would reject the Dantean and Petrarchan model of progress and reinforce ‘Life’s’ cyclical tyranny.

Sources and Influences TL displays an unusually wide range of sources and influences, reflecting S.’s extensive reading in European literature from Homer onwards. The poem is also filled with many echoes of S.’s own poetry from as far back as WJ (Longman i, no. 11). The present edition identifies allusions to S.’s poetry, and includes notes on S.’s previous engagements with the various figures the narrator meets in the procession. There are also numerous local allusions to classical authors, especially Euripides, Horace, and Lucretius; the English canon, especially Shakespeare and Milton; and to the European writers whom S. had been studying since 1820, especially Calderón, Dante, and Goethe. Densely-woven allusions to these authors show their pervasive influence on TL, but these references to canonical poetry are also, as Epipsychidion and Adonais show, more generally part of the aural fabric of S.’s mature verse. It is worth noting, however, just how profoundly European TL is, drawing as it does so consistently on poetry, prose, and drama, in French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, and Spanish. The two major influences on TL, which act on more than one of the poem’s four parts, are Dante Alighieri (?1265–1321) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). These two are also, if we remember that Rousseau was for S. in DP ‘essentially a poet’ (Reiman (2002) para. 36 n.), the only poets mentioned in TL. The exalted position of Dante in TL is foreshadowed by S.’s recent interactions with the Italian poet. In DP, written in the spring of 1821, Dante is the poet S. refers to more than any other. Dante’s poetry receives expected praise, but it is also clear that for S. he is much more than a fine craftsman. Dante is described as among the

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philosophers ‘of the very loftiest power’ (para. 8), as ‘the first religious reformer. . .the first awakener of entranced Europe’ (para. 29), and as the second epic poet: that is, the second poet, the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it, developing itself in correspondence with their development. (para. 28) S.’s sense of Dante’s role in the development and reform of his society, and his power to transcend time in the claim that Dante’s poetry ‘may be considered as the bridge thrown over the stream of time, which unites the modern and antient world’ (para. 27), make him a fit model for TL’s visionary attempt to question and reform the Christian and Monarchical system of modern Europe. In August 1821, while in Ravenna, S. paid a further tribute to Dante by making a pilgrimage, as he had earlier to Petrarch’s house in Arquà, to Dante’s tomb, where he ‘worshipped the sacred spot’ (L ii 335). Dante’s poem is not only the inspiration for S.’s terza rima (see Form), but also a source for the sunrise landscapes at the start of both visions and, by providing a model in Virgil and the Pilgrim, the model for the interaction between the narrator and Rousseau. The claim that the narrative mode of TL is based on the Commedia is complicated. A. C. Bradley, ‘Notes on Shelley’s “Triumph of Life” ’, MLR ix (1914) (Bradley Notes) 443, SN (1962) 106 and TL (Reiman) 40 are partly correct in seeing the basis for the conversation between the narrator and Rousseau in the relationship between Dante’s pilgrim and Virgil, which takes place from Inferno i to Purgatorio xxx. In the manner of Virgil, following questions from the narrator, Rousseau identifies the various figures around the procession whose looks have changed between the earthly and visionary world. Rousseau’s descriptions also contain several references to Inferno (see notes to ll. 182–3, 274–5, 280) and are in the same gnomic style as many of Virgil’s, whereby characters are crystallised in a few lines (Alexander, Aristotle, and Napoleon) or a few words (Frederick, Kant, Catherine, Leopold). However, on closer examination, there are some important differences between the approach of S. and Dante. The relationship between the narrator and Rousseau in TL is static; they do not move through the visionary world as Virgil and Dante do, which makes Rousseau less of a literal guide to the narrator. (This static mode of description has more in common with the description of the processions in Petrarch’s Trionfi). Furthermore, although Rousseau forbears to ‘join the dance’ (l. 189), he is still ‘one of that deluded crew’ (l. 184), who describes his own fate as well as that of his fellow victims of ‘Life’, whereas Virgil only narrates the sins of others and is placed in Limbo because he lived outside of the Christian dispensation. This difference in status means that Rousseau’s guidance is not moral — he does not explain the structures and meanings of the visionary world to the narrator as Virgil does to Dante in Inferno xi and Purgatario xvii — and therefore S.’s narrator has none of the respect or admiration that Dante has for Virgil, whom he describes at Inferno i 85 ‘lo mio maestro e’l mio autore’ (‘my master and my author’, trans. John D. Sinclair). This difference in moral authority between the Commedia narrator and guide and that of TL is reflected in the fact that all the questions in the dialogue between guide and pilgrim are directed by the narrator to Rousseau (at ll. 177, 178, 179, 199, 208, 216, 281, 296, 297, 544). Indeed, an indication of the narrator’s authority is given when Rousseau offers him an opportunity to change positions and become guide in ll. 305–8, a reversal which would be inconceivable in the Commedia. As well as being a formal and structural influence on TL, Dante is also discussed within the narrative of TL in a ten-line tribute (ll. 471–80). These lines about Dante are a rare description of someone

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who is not among those under the control of ‘Life’: like Francis Bacon, Christ, and Socrates, he appears to transcend the earthly preoccupations of the crowd. In this tribute Rousseau, and by implication S., twice claim to be telling a story ‘worthy of his rhyme’, advertising that Dante is the poetic model for such ‘wondrous’ (l. 475) poetry. Rousseau’s role in TL is more immediately obvious than Dante’s: aside from the narrator he is the only speaker in the poem, he is its dominant figure from line 180 to the end, and he is the second part of S.’s double vision (see Structure). As with Dante, the prominence of Rousseau in TL builds upon S.’s praise for him in the year before composition: S. claimed that Rousseau was the redeemer of the French language in April 1821 (L ii 278) and listed him in DP as one of those who ‘celebrated the dominion of love, planting as it were trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force’ (Reiman (2002) para. 26). The Rousseau of TL is a fictional creation, but many of his statements are based on Rousseau’s published works. Critics agree on the importance of Rousseau to the poem, but disagree on which texts inform S.’s characterisation: Stawell argues that ‘[r]eaders of the Confessions and the Rêveries will recognize the substantial truth of the portrait drawn by Shelley, both in its generosity and its severity’ (‘Shelley’s “Triumph of Life” ’, 108); GM is more specific in SN (1962) 108, citing ‘Rousseau’s situation at Les Charmettes in 1737–8, described in Books V-VI of the Confessions’; while Reiman views Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) (Julie, or the New Heloise) as S.’s central source, in a reading which sees Saint-Preux as Rousseau and the ‘shape all light’ as Julie (‘Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life”: The Biographical Problem’, PMLA lxxviii (1963) (Reiman, ‘Biographical Problem’), 536–50). As the notes to ll. 180, 182–3, 204, 212, 240–3, 311–8 show, the Rousseau of TL is an amalgam drawn both from Rousseau’s works and from contemporary depictions of him. It is unnecessary to confine S.’s portrait of Rousseau to a single work, as there is ample evidence that he had read widely in both the Confessions and Julie (L i 84, 482–8, ii 407), and read Émile alongside Mary in 1816 (Mary Jnl i 135–6), who was re-reading this work in January and February 1822 (Mary Jnl i 389–90, 394–7). The Rousseau figure may be considered to have three related purposes in TL. The first is structural, as the narrator of the second vision, which creates the cyclical scheme of the poem (see Structure). The second is chronological: the figure of Rousseau, who died in 1778 and whose remains were exhumed and placed in the Panthéon in 1794, allows a poem which ranges across time from Aristotle to Napoleon to focus predominantly on the fifty years before 1822. This chronology means that TL can encompass the foundations, advent, and aftermath of the French Revolution, the event which S. called in a letter to Byron of 8 September 1816, ‘the master theme of the epoch in which we live’ (L i 504). TL also includes several allusions to other important writers on the French Revolution, such as Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke (see notes to ll. 110–1, 236, 498–9, 510). It may seem paradoxical to consider Rousseau as the central figure in a period at the start of which he died, but S. is considering both Rousseau’s works and the ‘thousand beacons’ (l. 207) sparked by his influence. S.’s contemporaries shared this sense of Rousseau’s importance. Byron claims that Rousseau was inspired, and from him came, As from the Pythian’s mystic cave of yore, Those oracles which set the world in flame, Nor ceased to burn till kingdoms were no more[.] (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III lxxxi ll. 1–4) And Hazlitt argues in ‘On the Character of Rousseau’ (1817) that

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shelley: selected poems [Rousseau] did more towards the French Revolution than any other man. . .Rousseau who brought the feeling of irreconcilable enmity to rank and privileges, above humanity, home to the bosom of every man, — identified it with all the pride of intellect, and with the deepest yearnings of the human heart. (Hazlitt Works, iv 89)

The extent to which Rousseau was viewed by S. and others as the progenitor of the French Revolution means that he functions in TL as, by implication, its lead representative. Given the allegorical character of the poem, it is possible to read Rousseau’s story of a man who almost manages to overcome the cycle of ‘Life’, but who ultimately could not, and who wakes at arrival of a ‘new Vision and its cold bright car. . .as if from some dread war/Triumphantly returning’ (ll. 434, 436–7), as a narrative which traces S.’s (and to some extent, his literary generation’s) emotional journey through the promise, realisation, and disappointment of the Revolutionary age. TL can also be understood as a sustained visionary engagement with the French Revolution, and as a return to engaging with politics in a visionary manner (as in MA) and to a certain extent in OT (Longman iii, no. 344)) in the aftermath of S.’s abortive attempt at a more historical reckoning with a revolution in Charles the First. Rousseau’s third and most profound purpose in TL is thematic. GM claims that Rousseau appears in the poem ‘because the real Rousseau had been the supreme advocate of life lived in accordance with the laws of Nature as opposed to life falsified by man-made tyranny, self-interest, and prejudice’ (SN (1962) 113–4). S.’s study of Rousseau is of a man who can almost be a model for how to live. Although Rousseau is not ‘chained to the car’ (l. 208) he is still hurried by it (see l. 304); he is not in the transcendent position of Socrates, or of Christ who S. had claimed Rousseau ‘in the structure of his feelings and understanding resembles most nearly’ (‘On Christianity’, Prose Works 266). In the manner of a sinner in the Inferno, Rousseau knows why he is in this place: ‘I was overcome/By my own heart alone, which neither age/Nor tears nor infamy nor now the tomb/Could temper to its object’ (ll. 240–3). As the commentary to these lines shows, this confession is somewhat cryptic, but it is important to note that Rousseau’s sin is not one of action; he is not punished like Plato for an act of immoral love. S. sees Rousseau’s fault as one of intemperance; he is not tempted by fame or fortune like those chained to the car, but he cannot exercise self-control in the transposition of his commitment to Love into the literature he produced. S. had been critical of Rousseau’s Confessions for this inability in a letter to Hogg of May 14 1811, claiming that his confessions are ‘either a disgrace to the confessor or a string of falsehoods, probably the latter’ (L i 84). It seems that over a decade later S. thought it was the former and has Rousseau admit as much when he sees the ‘great bards of old who inly quelled ‘The passions which they sung, as by their strain May well be known: [their living melody] Tempers its own contagion to the vein ‘Of those who are infected with it — I Have suffered what I wrote, or viler pain!’ (ll. 274–9) It is clear from the poem and from S.’s other writings that he admired Rousseau’s attempt to break the traditions of ‘Life’ and to put love at the centre of thought, but the pessimistic con-

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clusion of TL is that this brought Rousseau little personal happiness and sparked a cult of passionate freedom that led first to the Revolution and then to the tyranny of ­Napoleon. As GM puts it, ‘the object of [Rousseau’s] pursuit converted into its opposite’ (SN (1962) 127). S.’s sense of the double-edged legacy of Rousseau’s writings, which lead to an aspiration to freedom that also creates pain, was one he developed over a long period, and finds its germ in his Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists (1812) in which he claims ‘Rousseau gave licence by his writings, to passions that only incapacitate and contract the human heart’ (Prose Works 52). Rousseau’s inability to control his emotions is heightened by S.’s decision to compose TL in terza rima, a form which is both intrinsically measured and associated with the ordered poetry of Dante. The fact that it is Rousseau who speaks the tribute to Dante further reinforces his flawed status in the poem: Rousseau’s lines are highly rhetorically sophisticated so that he appears to aspire to be worthy of the self-control that Dante (who is not present in the scene) showed when he wrote of ‘Love’, and to pay tribute to a man whose legacy was, according to S., the reformation of European religion. The exploration of Rousseau’s untrammelled freedom of expression can also be more obliquely connected to S.’s attempts to control his own emotions in intensely personal poetry about Jane Williams written at the same time as TL (see Biographical context). Each section of TL (ll. 1–40; 41–179; 180–308; 308–548) is to some extent discrete and has its own sources. The opening is the most rhetorically taut and consciously literary part of the poem, and its evocation of sunrise develops from a broad range of influences including: the Commedia (especially Dante’s first sunrise at Purgatorio i, ‘li splendori antelucani’ (‘the splendours before dawn’, trans. Sinclair) of Purgatorio xxvii 109, and as an inversion of Paradiso xx; ‘the approach of morn’ in Paradise Lost ix 191; and Faust’s speech in conversation with Wagner in Goethe’s Faust 1064–99 (a speech that S. alludes to again in l. 547 and in Which like a crane, its distant home pursuing (Longman v, no. 413)). Characteristically, S. manages to take something from all these sources while never imitating any of them. Indeed, the induction of TL contains one significant difference from the traditional poetic use of the sunrise: S. does not use this event to look forward to the promise of a new day, or, as in an aubade, as the culmination of a night awake, but rather as a moment to cherish before the narrator’s volte-face to consider the darkness. The turn to night does not mean a turn to sleep: it is clear at the opening that the ‘strange trance’ (l. 29) or ‘vision’ that comprises most of TL is ‘not slumber’ (l. 30). There are many medieval sources for this induction into vision, including Inferno i; Petrarch’s Trionfi; Brunetto Latini’s Tesoretto, which S. read and translated in autumn 1821 (see A fresh fair child stood by my side (Longman v, no. 418 and Appendix); and Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess. However, these waking dreams can also be found in more recent sources. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, subtitled ‘A vision in a dream’ is the best-known Romantic dream poem, but The Eolian Harp also includes a more sedate fall into trance, when the narrator describes how ‘on the midway slope / Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon. . .And many idle flitting phantasies, / Traverse my indolent and passive brain’ (ll. 34–5, 40–1). In S.’s own poetry, MA ll. 1–27 anticipates the opening of TL, as a ‘voice’ leads the speaker ‘To walk in the visions of Poesy’, before the subsequent vision takes place ‘on the way’ and features a ‘ghastly masquerade’. The beginning of the vision proper (ll. 41–179) features allusions to the fallen angels of Paradise Lost and the damned of the Inferno, but two sections — the description of the triumphal pageant (ll. 79–106) and of the dance (ll. 137–60) — offer a more complex range of sources. S. makes clear in l. 113 that his procession is based on those ancient triumphs given to victorious generals upon their return to Rome. In a triumphal procession the general and his soldiers parade their chained captives to a jubilant crowd, and these triumphs were the

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subject of two important essays by Edward Gibbon, whose Miscellaneous Works S. had read in February 1815 (see Mary Jnl i 62–3). Gibbon’s ‘On the Triumphs of the Romans’ and ‘On the Triumphal Shows and Ceremonies’, seem to influence TL in their appreciation of how the triumph ‘converted spectators into actors’ and therefore implicated its crowd, and their view of the triumph as the ultimate display of imperial power, occasions which meant ‘military virtue was forever associated with religion in the imagination of the Romans’ (‘Upon the Triumphs of the Romans’, Miscellaneous Works (1796) iii 159 and 123). These processions were commemorated in arches such as the Arch of Titus and the Arch of Constantine, which were the subject of eighteenth-century prints by Giovanni Battista Piranesi and his imitators. S. carefully studied these triumphal arches in the Forum at Rome, and described them to Peacock in a letter of 23 March 1819 (L ii 86): That of Constantine, or rather of. . .Titus, (for the relief & sculptures & even the colossal images of Dacian captives were torn by a decree of the Senate from an arch dedicated to the latter to adorn that of this stupid & wicked monster Constantine, one of whose chief merits consisted in establishing a religion. . . the destroyer of those arts which would have rendered so base a spoliation unnecessary) is the most perfect. It is an admirable work of art. It is built of the finest marble, & the outline of the reliefs is in many parts as perfect as if just finished. Four Corinthian fluted columns support on each side a bold entablature, whose bases are loaded with reliefs of captives in every attitude of humiliation & slavery. The compartments above express in bolder relief the enjoyment of success, the conqueror on his throne or in his chariot, or riding over the crushed multitudes who writhe under horses hoofs, as those below expressed the torture & abjectness of defeat. There are three arches, whose roofs are pannelled with fretwork, & their sides adorned with similar reliefs. The keystone of these arches is supported each by two winged figures of Victory, whose hair floats on the wind of their own speed, & whose arms are outstretched bearing trophies, as if impatient to meet. They look as it were borne from the subject extremities of the earth on the breath which is the exhalation of that battle & desolation which it is their mission to commemorate. Never were monuments so completely fitted to the purpose for which they were designed of expressing that mixture of energy & error which is called a Triumph. — It is clear from this letter that many of the subjects and images which would later appear in TL are based on S.’s study of triumphal arches at Rome. S’s later prose fragment ‘Arch of Titus’ (Box 1 ff. 207r-v; facsimile and transcription in BSM xxi 245–9), edited by Nora Crook, is tentatively dated by her to between the first quarter of 1820 and the spring of 1821 (see ‘Shelley’s Jewish “Orations” ’, K-SJ lix (2010) 43–64). S.’s description of this arch shows Gibbon’s influence in its appreciation of the quasi-religious quality of the triumph’s martial symbolism, and one section in particular may have influenced the two lists of the subjugated at TL ll. 237 and 510: Titus is represented standing on a chariot drawn by four horses, crowned with laurel & surrounded by the tumultuous numbers of his victorious army; & our magistrates & priests & generals & philosophers dragged in chains beside his wheels. (‘Arch of Titus’, text from ‘Shelley’s Jewish “Orations” ’, 58–9) The Roman triumph had an afterlife in the allegorical procession in the art of medieval Europe, which is a further source for TL. The moving procession of a central allegorical figure is the basis of Petrarch’s six Trionfi, which describe the progress of Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity. Indeed, by referencing the triumphs at which ‘Imperial

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Rome poured forth her living sea/From senate-house and prison and theatre’ (ll. 113–4) S. is following Petrarch, who claims that his procession of Fame is ‘Sì come in Campidoglio al tempo antico/talora o per Via Sacra o per Via Lata’ (‘Triumphus Fame’ i 29–30; Like [a triumph] one could see on the Capitoline in ancient days, sometimes moving along the Via Sacra or the Via Lata). S. had read aloud from the Trionfi to Mary in 1819 (see Mary Jnl i 297), and it provides the model for both the allegorical procession and the subsequent static narration of figures in the moving pageant (for a close comparison of S. and Petrarch, see Alan Weinberg, Shelley’s Italian Experience (1991) 202–42). Another influential medieval depiction of a triumph that S. was aware of is the Trionfo della Morte (The Triumph of Death), a large fourteenth-century fresco attributed to Buonamico Buffalmacco in the Campo Santo at Pisa. Although this fresco contains no central allegorical figure, it does include a procession, tortured souls, winged demons, and falcons upon fists which may have influenced the imagery of Rousseau’s narrative (see note to ll. 480–507). The ‘maniac dance’ first mentioned in l. 110, and described in detail in ll. 137–60, provides a good case study of S.’s syncretic use of source material. The behaviour of the dancers around the triumph strongly resembles the ecstatic worship of Ancient Greece, and the demeanour of those at ll. 147 and 165–7 shows the influence of the Bacchae of Euripides (one of the Greek tragedians S. was reading carefully in late 1821; see headnote to An archer stood upon the Tower of Babel (Longman v, no. 414)). S. is also drawing from his own observations of autumn 1819 on seeing carved Maenads (female worshippers of Bacchus) on a statue of Minerva collected in the ‘Notes on Sculptures’, about which he concluded ‘Nothing can be conceived more wild and terrible than their gestures, touching as they do the verge of distortion, into which their fine limbs and lovely forms are thrown’ (Julian vi 323). Superimposed on these classical observations are two relevant contemporary sources. Critics of the French Revolution compared the ecstasy of the crowd to classical religious fervor, notably Burke (see note to ll. 110–11). In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke calls the journey on 6 October 1789, in which King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were brought back to Paris from Versailles, a ‘famous triumph’ and asks, Is this a triumph to be consecrated at altars? to be commemorated with grateful thanksgiving? to be offered to the divine humanity with fervent prayer and enthusiastick ejaculation? — These Theban and Thracian Orgies, acted in France, and applauded only in the Old Jewry, (Reflections 122) Burke’s account seems especially pertinent if we read TL as a consideration of the failure of both the established methods of religion orchestrated by ‘men divine’, and of the uncontrolled overthrow of these methods by Rousseau and his disciples. Finally, while S. was composing TL he witnessed beach festivals of the local inhabitants near the Villa Magni. While we have no record of what S. thought of these events, Mary’s accounts claim they featured wild and savage dancing with clear similarities to that described in TL (see note to ll. 140–2). The dance is a useful example of how a diverse range of sources — taken from literature (classical and modern), the visual arts, and personal experience — are at play in almost every section of TL. As discussed earlier, the conversation between narrator and guide, and the description of the persons in the pageant, in ll. 180–308 show S.’s unique interpretation of Dantean and Petrarchan models. There are two additional, largely unacknowledged Romantic sources for this central section of TL. The first is J&M: along with an opening on an Italian landscape, this earlier poem features a conversation at ll. 85–270 which precedes a story-within-astory, both around the same length as those in TL. The differences between J&M and TL are

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obvious, especially the contrast between real and visionary suffering, but this earlier poem is a crucial anticipation of S.’s control and modulation of conversation in verse, displayed especially in the interjections and the sharing of speech across lines in the most dramatic section of dialogue from ll. 234–82. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto the Third (1816) is another under-appreciated influence. Most of the poem was composed in S.’s company during the Geneva summer of 1816, and Byron later reflected that S. used to ‘dose’ him with Wordsworth’s poetry in this period (see Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr. (1966) 194). S. had a thorough grasp of Byron’s poetry in general and, given that he was present during its composition and that Claire and Mary made fair copies of its MS, of Childe Harold III in particular. Childe Harold III and TL share an aim of assessing the wreck of post-Napoleonic Europe, and the works of Rousseau, especially Julie, are central to both. More importantly, S. seems to develop Byron’s scheme of surveying Europe in search of those who were once great (e.g. Gibbon, Napoleon, Rousseau, Voltaire). TL brings these disparate Europeans into a single visionary landscape by condensing Byron’s descriptions into curt Dantescan description, and in some cases, S. seems to be directly alluding to the portraits of Childe Harold III (see notes to ll. 182–3, 204, 208–12, 215–24, 235–40). The fourth and final section of TL (ll. 308–548) comprises Rousseau’s narrative, set chronologically earlier, which repeats many aspects of the poem’s first half to create a sense of déjà vu. This structural repetition means that many of the sources in the last part of TL are the same as those in the three earlier sections. Dante, especially the Purgatorio, remains prominent, and the account of the appearance of the ‘shape all light’ (ll. 348–85) borrows particularly from the encounter with Matilda, which S. had translated in 1820 (see Dante’s Purgatorio Canto XXVIII, 1–51 (Longman iii, no. 331)). The ‘shape all light’ is drawn from a number of well-known representations of powerful women: the ‘shape’ appears as the sun ‘Burned on the waters’ (l. 346), recalling Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra (Antony and Cleopatra II ii 190–208); she then emerges from, and proceeds to walk on, water in the manner of a Venus Anadyomene; her movements by the stream match those of Matilda, and her direct and brief speech suggests Dante’s Beatrice; and her presentation of a cup of nepenthe shows an affinity with Spenser’s Cambina (Faerie Queene IV ii 37–43), and more generally with the other duplicitous women of the Faerie Queene such as Ate and Duessa. Given that these various sources for the ‘shape all light’ offer no consistent indication of her moral character, it is fitting that she then offers Rousseau a cup to drink, a convention with a similarly ambiguous history. Homer’s Helen uses such a drink to temper Telemachus’ grief at hearing Menelaus’ tales of his father (Odyssey iv 219–35), and Christ claims that ‘ “whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in my name, because ye belong to Christ, verily I say unto you, he shall not lose his reward” ’ (Mark ix 41), whereas in Milton’s Comus (ll. 523–29, 665–89) and Goethe’s Faust (ll. 690–741) it is clear that the attempts of Comus and Mephistopheles respectively to persuade the Lady and Faust to drink are designed to bring grave harm. The many sources at play in the final section are layered in such a manner as to appear highly conventional while offering no clear way to read the ‘shape all light’, an ambiguity which has led to numerous attempts to understand the figure and her behaviour (see Criticism). But the ‘shape all light’, and the earlier figure of ‘Life’, are more than interpretative puzzles: they show how S.’s use of sources has a thematic purpose in TL. The range of seemingly incompatible sources which informs these figures creates a difficulty in comprehension, which is an integral part of a poem that is concerned with the dangers of interpreting signs and with questioning why ‘God made irreconcilable/Good and the means of good’ (ll. 230–1). The poem’s habit of disrupting expected literary conventions through its ambivalent use of sources is perhaps best illustrated in Rousseau’s curtailed answer to

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the final question ‘what is Life?”. . .“Happy those for whom the fold/Of’ (ll. 547–8). Just as TL begins in an archetypal mode, taken from the medieval dream poem, so it ends with a European poetic archetype, the beatus ille (happy is the man) begun by Horace and continued by a number of S.’s key sources such as Dante, Goethe, and Milton (see note to ll. 547–8). Given TL’s concern with the failure of traditional modes of understanding, and its structure that makes us doomed to repeat our forebears’ subservience to them, S.’s decision to have Rousseau respond to the narrator’s question with a conventional poetic platitude suggests that his answer, had S. composed it, would not have offered a panacea.

Biographical Context There has been significant debate over the extent to which S.’s personal life, especially tensions in his marriage to Mary and his growing attraction to Jane Williams (see headnote of To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’)), is a source for TL. While one could read Rousseau’s passionate nature and his encounter with the ‘shape all light’ as S. analysing his own tendency to idealise female figures, for example in WA and Epipsychidion, most biographical readings of the poem have hinged on an interlineated phrase at Box 1 f. 52v (the final leaf of TL) between l. 541 and l. 542: And [sank] fell, as I have fallen by the wayside, Alas I kiss you [?Jane]   Those soonest, [from whose limbs the] from whose forms most shadows passed The phrase Alas I kiss you [?Jane] is not part of the draft of TL. Its presence among these lines in Box 1 led GM to claim that S. was either ‘translating the universalized despair of the poem back into the private experience that had helped to generate it, more or less as he went along, or else that in reading over his draft he was struck by its retrospective aptness as a commentary on that experience’ (‘Shelley and Jane Williams’, RES xii 45 (1961) (‘Shelley and Jane Williams’), 47–8). Reiman disagrees with both GM’s transcription and interpretation. Reiman reads ‘Julie’ for [?Jane] and argues that this is a reference to Rousseau’s Julie. Reiman claims that the significance of this jotting is that S. ‘had reached a maturity comparable to that finally achieved by Saint-Preux in Julie, a state in which both love and duty, no longer in violent conflict, contributed their respective rewards, chaste love bringing him a sense of personal security, and duty, its modicum of peace and tranquillity’ (Reiman, ‘Biographical Problem’, 550). (In the later transcription of this passage in BSM i 269, Reiman changes his mind, and does not venture a reading for [?Jane]). The danger of biographical readings is illustrated by these diametrically opposed interpretations of the role that S.’s personal relationships play as a source for TL. GM’s claim that S.’s jotting is a retrospective commentary seems the most reasonable approach to the role of biography in the poem. However, as GM points out, this jotting occurs among the final lines of TL, probably written in the last week of June, and S. drowns on the 8th of July, so ‘the distinction between a running and a retrospective commentary is perhaps not as meaningful as it sounds’ (‘Shelley and Jane Williams’, 48). Any more directly biographical reading of TL based around this jotting or any other part of the poem needs to contend with two problems: neither Jane Williams or Mary are referred to directly or by an alias in TL, as they are for example in WA, Epipsychidion, To Jane. The invitation, To Jane — The recollection; and every person that the narrator meets in

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TL is both personally unknown to S. and deceased. As the series of poems to Jane W ­ illiams beginning with To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’) and ending with Bright Wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven illustrate, in his final months S. was not averse to writing poetry that concerned itself with his personal life, but TL in theme, length, structure, and rhetorical formality seems not to be such a poem. A partial explanation for the presence of Alas I kiss you [?Jane] at this point in the draft can be given by the nature of the TL MS in Box 1 ff. 19r-58v. As discussed, TL is written on loose sheets which contain countless jottings, drawings, and calculations, and this conjectural mention of Jane Williams is not the only cryptic interlineation (see note to l. 260). It seems possible, given the multiple purposes of the sheets containing the poem, that this jotting, although tantalising, is neither substantively related to, nor a commentary on TL. While direct biographical readings tend towards the speculative, there are undoubtedly elements of S.’s life which influence TL. Most obviously S.’s Italian residence from 1818 to 1822 is mirrored in the landscape in which the narrator falls into his vision ‘athwart the steep/Of a green Apennine’ (ll. 25–6), and this scene also has strong affinities with S.’s other long description of an Italian sunrise in Lines Written among the Euganean Hills ll. 70–114. In the subsequent vision, local references to the ‘South wind’ (l. 76) and the song of a ‘Brescian shepherd’ (l. 422) suggest that all of TL shares this Italian setting. More obliquely, TL seems permeated by the successive failures in revolutionary politics that S. had witnessed, and been involved in, since being sent down from Oxford in 1811. Rousseau’s description of Enlightenment figures who tried to reform the world concludes that ‘ “in the battle Life and they did wage/She remained conqueror” ’ (ll. 239–40), and the same could be said for attempts at revolutions and reform supported by S. in England, France, Greece, Ireland, and Naples. The pirated publication of Q Mab by William Clark, which S. learned of in June 1821 (see L ii 298), may have brought these revolutionary discussions back into focus, and revolutions across Europe from the second half of 1820 to the first half of 1822 had been the subjects of Ode to Naples (Longman iii, no. 343) and Hellas (Longman v, no. 411). There is a possibility that S. received a copy of the pirated Q Mab at the end of the composition period of TL: S. had requested some books from Peacock in January 1822, which arrived at Genoa on 21 May, were inspected by customs, and eventually arrived at the Villa Magni on 29 June 1822 (see L ii 373, Gisborne Jnl 150, 155). Although it is not clear which books were in this shipment, the day after their arrival Edward Williams notes (Gisborne Jnl 156) that he is reading Q Mab for the first time. S. was evidently jaded after so many thwarted attempts at political change, and wrote to Horace Smith in October 1821 that ‘All public attention is now centred on the wonderful revolution in Greece. I dare not, after the events of last winter, hope that slaves can become free men so cheaply’ (L ii 350). Given the intensely political nature of TL and its cast, it is remarkable that S.’s letters during the composition period are free from political discussion, spending time instead considering modifications to his boat, the Don Juan, and the arrival of Leigh Hunt in Italy. A letter to Horace Smith on June 29 1822 is the one exception to this. The letter is the third-last (surviving) S. ever sent, and is almost entirely devoted to politics: It seems to me that things have now arrived at such a crisis as requires every man plainly to utter his sentiments on the inefficacy of the existing religions no less than political systems for restraining & guiding mankind. Let us see the truth whatever that may be. — The destiny of man can scarcely be so degraded that he was born only to die: and if such should be the case, delusions, especially the gross & preposterous ones

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of the existing religion, can scarcely be supposed to exalt it. — if every man said what he thought, it could not subsist a day. But all, more or less, subdue themselves to the element that surrounds them, & contribute to the evils they lament by the hypocrisy that springs from them. — England appears to be in a desperate condition, Ireland still worse, & no class of those who subsist on the public labour will be persuaded that their claims on it must be diminished. (L ii 442) There are clear parallels between these sentiments and TL: in ‘restraining & guiding mankind’ and the activity around the triumphal procession; in the claim that the people ‘subdue themselves’ with uses of these terms and cognates (see ll. 121, 211–3, 259); and the depiction of a people doomed to mental confinement by ‘existing religions no less than political systems’ in the futile cycle illustrated by the double structure of TL.

Form TL is written in terza rima, i.e. tercets rhyming aba bcb cdc ded etc. For the formal break between the induction (ll. 1–40) and the vision (ll. 41–547), S. adapts his terza rima to rhyme aba bcbc, which is the same adaptation that Dante uses to conclude cantos of the Commedia and Petrarch to conclude parts of the Trionfi. Despite numerous lacunae and strike-throughs in the manuscript, there are only three occasions when a rhyme word is cancelled (see ll. 269, 276, 380 and notes) and only one occasion, apart from the sudden end to the poem on line 547, when a tercet is incomplete (see ll. 278–82 and note). Sometimes the consistency of the terza rima helps an editor of this rough MS by showing S.’s preferred line-ending in the continuation of the rhyme. S.’s careful attention to this difficult form is shown, as noted, by his frequent use of short rulings for tercet breaks in Box 1. Terza rima is the form of the major Italian analogues to TL — Dante’s Commedia and Petrarch’s Trionfi — and was also used by Italian poets of S.’s day such as Vincenzo Monti and Ugo Foscolo. Terza rima is also used in Calderón’s El Principe Constante (The Constant Prince), Act I, ll. 477–558, a play which is included in Sexta Parte de Comedias del Celebre Poeta Español, Don Pedro Calderon de la Barca ed. Vera Tassis (1683), the edition that S. likely used to read Calderón (see headnote to Cyprian (Longman vi, no. 441)). There is some evidence that S. knew this play: Medwin claims that El Principe Constante was the inspiration for ‘The opening Chorus of Hellas’ (Medwin (1913) 353). The form was not established in English before the Romantic period, although it was used by Chaucer (‘Complaint to his Lady’) and Wyatt (‘Of the Mean and Sure Estate’). Critics have speculated that a lack of feminine rhymes in English has hindered its wider adoption (see John Wain, ‘Terza Rima: A Foot Note on English Prosody’, Rivista di letterature moderne n.s. i (1950) 44–8). One notable exception to this is Milton’s translation of Psalm ii, sometimes titled ‘Terzetti’, in which Milton loosens the form through enjambed lines and tercets in a manner which may have influenced TL. TL is S.’s longest poem in terza rima, a form he had been experimenting with since 1817: his first long composition in tercets is the incomplete Athanase (Longman ii, no. 146) and he adapted the form in the fourteen-line stanzas of OWW. These earlier uses are generally more punctuated and end-stopped than the freer and faster verse of TL. In the summer of 1820 S. translated Dante’s Matilda episode into English terza rima (Dante’s Purgatorio Canto XXVIII, 1–51) and, at Pisa in December 1820, used terza rima, and the same hendecasyllable line as the Commedia, to write the Dantescan fragment The Tower of Famine

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(Longman iv, no. 370). The sparse punctuation, and concision of phrase and image, in both the translation and the fragment suggest S. was thinking more deeply about the form’s potential in English. However, as GM perceptively noted in the headnote to Athanase, despite all of S.’s experiments in the form, he never finished (or published in his lifetime) any of the poems he wrote in the strictest version of terza rima. S.’s brilliant control over the terza rima in TL is aided by two factors related to his prolonged stay in Italy. First, he was reading more widely and deeply in the Italian poetic tradition, especially in the Trionfi and, as Mary’s reading lists show, in the Purgatorio and Paradiso (August 1819), and in the Inferno (February-March 1822) (see Mary Jnl i 644). Secondly, S. was settled at Pisa from January 1820 to April 1822 in a community of expatriates with whom he could discuss the form. Given the obscurity of terza rima in English up to this point, it is remarkable that Byron’s The Prophecy of Dante (1819) and Medwin’s part translation of Inferno xxxiii in Sketches in Hindoostan with Other Poems (1820) were written in tercets, and that John Taaffe gives a detailed discussion of the form’s mechanics in his Comment on the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (1822) pp. xix-xxx (for discussion of S.’s view of Comment, see the headnote to A capering, squalid, squalling one (Longman v, no. 419)). The use of enjambment in TL marks it out from S.’s previous work, and from other terza rima poetry in Italian and English. Just under two-thirds of the lines in TL are enjambed and over two-thirds of the tercets are enjambed. Some comparisons with poems by Dante, Petrarch, and Byron, show the extent to which TL departs from the tradition. Although there is some enjambment within tercets in the Commedia, and this increases as Dante moves from Inferno to Paradiso (see for example Paradiso xiv 118–223), it is never on the scale of TL, and enjambment between tercets is very rare (a notable example occurs in Ulysses’ speech at Inferno xxvi 81–2). Tercet enjambment is slightly more common in the Trionfi but it only occurs four times in the 700 lines of ‘Triumphus Cupidinus’ (i 45, ii 99 ii 132, iv 15). Around half of the lines and tercets are enjambed in Byron’s Prophecy of Dante, the most significant tercet poem in English before TL, which may have influenced S.’s move away from the Italian sense of the tercet as a discrete unit. S.’s further loosening of terza rima is not uniform across TL: there are points that are particularly lacking in line-end punctuation (e.g. ll. 109–16, 217–27, 367–74, 439–49, 495–505, 520–9), and these are often when the poem is at its most visionary, while at others, for instance Rousseau’s description of the pageant at ll. 249–62, S. opts for more formal end-stopped verse. Claims for the looseness between tercets, and the generally sparse punctuation of TL, may be countered by the very rough state of the MS, and perhaps S. would have pointed the poem more carefully had he made a press copy of it. However, in the opening forty-eight lines, which is the only part of TL in fair copy (Box  1 ff. 19r-20r), thirty-three lines are enjambed and so are twelve of the sixteen tercets (including the first four of the poem), which suggests that this looseness was a conscious decision. S.’s enjambment creates a speed that provides TL with a remarkable narrative drive, as enjambed tercets force the progress of the sun’s rise, the wild dance, and the two triumphal processions. William Keach has suggested that ‘In this kind of terza rima, rhyme defines a regular structural pattern which is continually threatened with effacement as lines and tercets are denied grammatical closure’ (Shelley’s Style (1984) 187–8). S.’s enjambment also softens the chiming triple rhyme by avoiding additional stress, moving the form away from the closed tercet which has associations in the Italian tradition with the Holy Trinity. S.’s use of rhyme in TL is impressively varied, including numerous uses of feminine rhyme, rime riche, and the repetition of rhyme words across the poem. TL (Reiman) 94–5 remarks on two instances (form/storm/deform at ll. 84, 86, 88, 464, 466, 468 and beneath/

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death/breath at ll. 57, 59, 61, 386, 388, 390) where S. replicates a run of rhymes in the same order, and argues that this repetition is intended to support a sense of déjà vu. There are also a few instances of the Dantean technique of rima equivoca, a rhyme on the same word but with a different meaning, notably on lay (ll. 8, 41) in the break between the sunrise and the vision, and on rolled (ll. 40, 546) which book-ends the extant lines of the main part of the poem. TL is written in a pentameter line rather than the hendecasyllable preferred in the Italian tradition, which S. had experimented with in The Tower of Famine. The rhythm is predominantly iambic, but on occasions the rhythm of TL is inverted to become trochaic, as in the first foot of the poem, and there are also some spondees, for example in the first foot of l. 13 and in the second foot of l. 29.

Criticism Some contemporary reviews of 1824 mention TL, but the only substantial engagement with the poem is in Hazlitt’s Edinburgh Review article of July 1824: The poem entitled The Triumph of Life, is in fact a new and terrific Dance of Death; but it is thus Mr. Shelley transposes the appellations of the commonest things, and subsists only in the violence of contrast. How little this poem is deserving of its title, how worthy it is of its author, what an example of the waste of power, and of genius “made as flax,” and devoured by its own elementary ardours, let the reader judge from the concluding stanzas [quotes ll. 480–514, 523–35] Any thing more filmy, enigmatical, discontinuous, unsubstantial than this, we have not seen; nor yet more full of morbid genius and vivifying soul. (Hazlitt Works xvi 273–4) Although ambivalent, Hazlitt’s focus on the importance of the macabre dance at lines 41–116 and on the poem’s puzzle-like quality are perceptive and influential. Along with its important corrections to the text, Blind (Westminster) 94–6 compares sections of the poem to Adonais and Hellas, calls the allegory of TL ‘a magnificent riddle’, and claims that the poem was ‘[e]vidently projected on a colossal scale’. Dowden Life ii 505–7 contains a short paraphrase of TL that establishes Petrarch’s Trionfi as a precursor, mentions the poem’s Dantescan manner, and speculates that the poem is almost finished. The first extended treatment of TL was given in a lecture by John Todhunter to the Shelley Society on 9 February 1887, and subsequently published in a private run of twenty-five copies as Notes on Shelley’s Unfinished Poem “The Triumph of Life” (1887). This lecture is an expanded and developed version of Todhunter’s thoughts on TL given in A Study of Shelley (1880) 282–9. Todhunter’s lecture offers a long paraphrase of TL, which he sees as the ‘first-fruits of the mature genius of [S.]’ (8), and goes on to comment on the mastery of terza rima, and the poem’s pessimism when compared to S.’s other works, especially PU. Two influential studies of TL appeared in 1914: Stawell, ‘Shelley’s “Triumph of Life” ’ and Bradley Notes. Both compelling essays are essential reading in the criticism of TL. Stawell’s essay gives a comprehensive discussion of the sources for TL (esp. Calderón, Goethe, Petrarch, and Rousseau), offers a reading of the figure of ‘Life’, and situates the poem within S.’s verse and prose. Bradley’s article takes the form of twelve notes on important figures and textual cruxes in the poem, and several of his readings inform the following annotation (see ll. 18–20, 240–3, and notes). Of the studies after Bradley and before the major revisions to the text in the 1960s, Baker gives an introduction to the poem and its analogues, and Harold Bloom Shelley’s

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Mythmaking (1959) 220–37, provides an illuminating discussion of S.’s biblical imagery. Three seminal articles by GM — TL (GM), ‘Shelley and Jane Williams’ and SN (1962) — fundamentally revise the text of TL, offer a reading of the poem which stresses the importance of Rousseau, and give a new biographical context in the relationship between S. and Jane Williams. Donald Reiman disagrees with GM’s claim for a connection to Jane Williams in Reiman, ‘Biographical Problem’, and provides his own edition and unique reading of the poem in TL (Reiman). GM responded to several issues with Reiman’s text and reading in a review in TL (JEGP). Text from Box 1 ff.19r-20r (ll. 1–48); ff. 21r-22r (ll. 49–83); ff. 23r-31r (ll. 84–251); ff. 32r-33r (ll. 252–80); ff. 37v-38r (ll. 281–306); ff. 39r-42r (ll. 307–85); f. 43r (ll. 386–91); ff. 44r-45r (ll. 406–37); f. 46r (ll. 438–50); ff. 47r-48r (ll. 451–78); ff. 49r-53r (ll. 479–548); 1824 (ll. 392–405). Published in 1824 (ll. 1–132, part of l. 133, ll. 134–280, part of l. 282, ll. 283–493, part of l. 494, ll. 495–543, part of l. 544); TL (GM) (complete); TL (Reiman) (complete); BSM i 136–41, 144–49, 152–85, 188–93, 210–13, 216–29, 232–33, 234–39, 242–3, 246–51, 254–71 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

The Triumph of Life Swift as a spirit hastening to his task Of glory and of good, the Sun sprang forth Rejoicing in his splendour, and the mask

¶ 70. 1–32. Cp. this sunrise with the address to the morning Sun at WJ 348–63: Fled were the vapours of the night, Faint streaks of rosy tinted light Were painted on the matin grey; And as the sun began to rise, To pour his animating ray, Glowed with his fire the eastern skies, The distant rocks — the far-off bay, The ocean’s sweet and lovely blue, The mountain’s variegated breast, Blushing with tender tints of dawn, Or with fantastic shadows dressed. The waving wood, the opening lawn, Rose to existence, waked anew In colours of exquisite hue, Their mingled charms Victorio viewed, And lost in admiration stood. And with the Italian sunrise in Lines Written among the Euganean Hills ll. 70–89: ’Mid the mountains Euganean I stood listening to the paean With which the legioned rooks did hail The sun’s uprise majestical; Gathering round with wings all hoar, Through the dewy mists they soar Like grey shades, till th’eastern heaven Bursts, and then, as clouds of even,

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Of darkness fell from the awakened Earth. The smokeless altars of the mountain snows Flamed above crimson clouds, and at the birth

Flecked with fire and azure, lie In the unfathomable sky, So their plumes of purple grain, Starred with drops of golden rain, Gleam above the sunlight woods, As in silent multitudes On the morning’s fitful gale Through the broken mist they sail And the vapours cloven and gleaming Follow, down the dark steep streaming, Till all is bright, and clear, and still, Round the solitary hill. 1–2. See 1 Peter iv 14: ‘If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye; for the spirit of glory and of God resteth upon you’. Cp. Adonais 197–8: ‘Swift as a Thought by the snake Memory stung,/ From her ambrosial rest the fading Splendour sprung.’ 2–6. the Sun . . . above crimson clouds] See Wordsworth, ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802’, ll. 8–10: All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendor valley, rock, or hill; 4. awakened Earth] Cp. OWW 68–9: ‘Be through my lips to unawakened Earth/The trumpet of a prophecy!’. 5–14. Cp. Paradise Lost ix 192–200: Now when as sacred light began to dawn In Eden on the humid flowers, that breathed Their morning incense, when all things that breathe, From the earth’s great altar send up silent praise To the creator, and his nostrils fill With grateful smell, forth came the human pair And joined their vocal worship to the choir Of creatures wanting voice, that done, partake The season, prime for sweetest scents and airs: 5–6. The smokeless altars . . . crimson clouds] Altars are smokeless when no offering is burnt upon them, but here ‘altars’ is used metaphorically to describe peaks above the clouds. The sun lights the clouds beneath the snowy mountains and turns them crimson, to appear like the fire beneath an altar. In this optical illusion the mountain snows are not actually flaming, so the altar produces no smoke. It is possible that S. is referring to the Apuan Hills, which contain marble the white colour of which could appear like ‘mountain snow’ (see note to l. 26). Marble is also used in the production of altars. Related images occur in Lines Written among the Euganean Hills ll. 100, 104–14:

824

shelley: selected poems Of light, the Ocean’s orison arose To which the birds tempered their matin lay. All flowers in field or forest which unclose

10

Their trembling eyelids to the kiss of day, Swinging their censers in the element, With orient incense lit by the new ray Burned slow and inconsumably, and sent Their odorous sighs up to the smiling air,

Lo! the sun upsprings behind. . . And before that chasm of light, As within a furnace bright, Column, tower, and dome, and spire, Shine like obelisks of fire, Pointing with inconstant motion From the altar of dark ocean To the sapphire-tinted skies; As the flames of sacrifice From the marble shrines did rise, As to pierce the dome of gold Where Apollo spoke of old. And The Boat on the Serchio (Longman iv 350–68, no. 406) ll. 11, 14–16: Day had kindled the dewy woods. . . And the Apennine’s shroud of summer snow, And clothed with light of aery gold The mists in their eastern caves uprolled. 7. orison] prayer. 8. matin lay] Cp. Paradise Lost v 7–8: ‘the shrill matin song/Of birds’. Matins is the first of the canonical hours in the Catholic church. It is in this context that it appears in a tercet at the beginning of Purgatorio, which is one of the main sources for the opening of TL. See Purgatorio i 115–17: L’alba vinceva l’ora mattutina che fuggia innanzi, sì che di lontano conobbi il tremolar de la marina. (‘The dawn had chac’d the matin hour of prime, Which fled before it, so that from afar I spy’d the trembling of the ocean stream.’) 9–10. All flowers . . . kiss of day] See Aaron Hill, The Creation (1720) ll. 72–3: ‘The opening Rose, by Nature, gay,/Blushes, at the Kiss of Day!’. 11. censers] Vessels in which incense is burnt that are swung at important offices of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches. 12. orient] GM glosses ‘rising (with connotations of Eastern richness)’, adding ‘The sun “lights” the ­flowers and releases their perfumes’. The word can also mean ‘coming from the east’ (see l. 344). 13. inconsumably] Not being consumed by the fire that burns it. This predates the first usage cited in OED (1855). See Epipsychidion l. 579: ‘Ever still burning, yet ever inconsumable’ and WA 278–9: ‘There yawned an inextinguishable well/Of crimson fire’. 14. air,] air Box 1.

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And in succession due, did Continent, Isle, Ocean, and all things that in them wear The form and character of mortal mould Rise as the Sun their father rose, to bear

Their portion of the toil which he of old 20   Took as his own and then imposed on them; But I, whom thoughts which must remain untold Had kept as wakeful as the stars that gem The cone of night, now they were laid asleep, Stretched my faint limbs beneath the hoary stem 25

Which an old chestnut flung athwart the steep Of a green Apennine: before me fled The night; behind me rose the day; the Deep

15. Continent,] Continent Box 1. 18–20. Rise as the Sun . . . then imposed on them] ‘The Earth’s response to the Sun’s appearance in the opening is an act of universal hierurgical devotion. . .its human inhabitants accept the Sun as their father and taskmaster. The notion of “father” and of toil “imposed” on men does not imply disapproval of the Sun’s dominion, but necessary obedience to natural law’ (GM). Bradley Notes 444 suggests an allusion to Paradiso xxii 116, in which Dante refers to a mighty power among the stars ‘quelli ch’è padre d’ogne mortal vita’ (‘he that is the father of each mortal life’, trans. Sinclair). Cp. the effect of morning light in The Boat on the Serchio ll. 37–8: ‘All rose to the task He set to each/Who shaped us to his ends and not our own’. 23. cone of night] ‘The shape of the earth’s shadow in space’ (GM). Cp. Paradise Lost iv 776 (‘Now had night measured with her shadowy cone’), the Earth in PU IV 444–5 (‘I spin beneath my pyramid of night,/Which points into the heavens’), and The Two Spirits. An Allegory l. 10 (‘If I should cross the shade of night’). 25. athwart the steep] On the slope. Dante’s Pilgrim awakes on a such a slope in the Earthly Paradise at Purgatorio xxviii 4. 26. green Apennine] ‘The Northern Apennine hills skirt the sea round the Gulf of Genoa’ (GM). But, as Rognoni (2018a) 1528 perceptively claims, the description of ‘altars’ (l. 5) and ‘hills’ glimmering (l. 33) could suggest that S. has in mind the marble of the Apuan Hills, which would have been visible from his residence at San Terenzo, near Lerici in the Bay of Spezia. Cp. the description of ‘the mountain’s marble brow’ in Athanase (Longman ii 311–27, no. 146) Detached Passage (b) l. 28. 26–8. before me . . . my head] A draft in Pforz f. 1r reads: before me fled/The [day] night; behind me [sunk] rose the [night] day. In SN (1962) 115, n. 2 GM notes that in this earlier version the lines ‘are quoted directly from Goethe’s Faust’. The lines in question are Faust ll. 1087–8: ‘Vor mir den Tag, und hinter mir die Nacht,/Den Himmel über mir und unter mir die Wellen’ (‘the day before me and the night behind, — the heavens above, and under me the waves’, trans. Hayward 34). S.’s lines are revised in Box 1 to have the narrator look into the night and thus no longer assume the dawn-gazing pose of the aubade, found in Boccaccio, Il Filostrato iii 42–4, Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde iii 1415–519, Donne, ‘The Sun Rising’, and Goethe’s Faust. 27–40. the Deep . . . on my brain was rolled] The narrator’s fall into vision has similarities with Theseus’ account of poetic inspiration in A Midsummer Night’s Dream V i 12–18: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

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shelley: selected poems Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head, When a strange trance over my fancy grew Which was not slumber, for the shade it spread Was so transparent that the scene came through As clear as when a veil of light is drawn O’er evening hills they glimmer; and I knew

35

That I had felt the freshness of that dawn, Bathed in the same cold dew my brow and hair, And sate as thus upon that slope of lawn

And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to aery nothing A local habitation and a name. 28. head,] head Box 1. 29. fancy] ‘the faculty of forming mental representations of things not present to the senses’ (OED 4a). 32–3. as when . . . they glimmer] I.e. as when hills glimmer through the evening light as if through a veil. 33–9. I knew . . . enamoured air] There is a strong sense of déjà-vu, as the narrator ‘knows he has been in precisely that place under precisely those circumstances before’ (GM), which ends with the change in tense at l. 40. 34. dawn,] dawn Box 1. A terminal comma seems necessary as ‘the plain intention is to accumulate verbal parallels’ (GM) and is required for ‘Bathed’ to relate to ‘my brow and hair’ (l. 35) and not to ‘that dawn’. 35. See Virgil cleansing the face of Dante with dawn dew in Purgatorio i 121–9: Quando noi fummo là’ve la rugiada pugna col sole, per essere in parte dove, ad orezza, poco si dirada, ambo le mani in su l’erbetta sparte soavemente’l mio maestro pose: ond’ io, che fui accorto di sua arte, porsi ver lui le guance lagrimose: ivi me fece tutto discoverto quel color che l’inferno mi nascose. (‘When we had come, where yet the tender dew Strove with the sun, and in a place, where fresh The wind breath’d o’er it, while it slowly dried; Both hands extended on the watery grass My master plac’d, in graceful act and kind. Whence I of his intent before appriz’d, Stretch’d out to him my cheeks suffus’d with tears. There to my visage he anew restor’d That hue, which the dun shades of hell conceal’d.’) hair,] hair Box 1.

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Under the self-same bough, and heard as there The birds, the fountains and the Ocean hold Sweet talk in music through the enamoured air. And then a Vision on my brain was rolled . . . As in that trance of wondrous thought I lay This was the tenor of my waking dream: — Methought I sate beside a public way

37–9. The natural harmony S. describes is reminiscent of a description in Thomson’s ‘Spring’ ll. 321–2 where Fruits and Blossoms blush’d, In social Sweetness, on the self-same Bough. 38. birds,] birds Box 1. 40–1. Between these two lines of verse in Box 1 are two straight horizontal lines with two wavy lines between that are intersected by a vertical line. This clearly signalled break in the MS separates the opening sunrise and the subsequent vision. There are breaks in earlier poems by S., e.g. J&M 397 - 8, but none are marked so elaborately in his MS or used for the apparent purpose of separating a real and a visionary state. If he had overseen publication of TL, S. may have intended for there to be a more pronounced typographic break than the standard half rule in 1824. 42. waking dream] ‘An involuntary vision occurring to one awake’ (OED). The phrase is found in Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, l. 79: ‘Was it a vision, or a waking dream?’. The difference between a ‘vision’ and a ‘waking dream’ implied by Keats’s question is not apparent here. There are earlier usages that are of interest to a reading of TL. Diogenes, who is named in cancelled lines of the TL draft (Box 1 f. 33r; BSM i 192–3), writes thus of Aristotle in Lives of Eminent Philosophers v 1 18: ἐρωτηθεὶς τί ἐστιν ἐλπίς, “ἐγρηγορότος,” εἶπεν, “ἐνύπνιον.” ’ (‘He [Aristotle] was asked to define hope, and he replied, “It is a waking dream” ’). Another possible source is Cowper’s account of the interplay of his fancy and his waking dream in The Task iv 286–90: Me oft has fancy ludicrous and wild Sooth’d with a waking dream of houses, tow’rs, Trees, churches, and strange visages express’d In the red cinders, while with poring eye I gaz’d, myself creating what I saw. dream: —] dream. Box 1. 43–6. Methought . . . gleam] Cp. S.’s fragment written between April and June 1821 Methought I was a billow in the crowd (Longman iv 6–7, no. 361): Methought I was a billow in the crowd Of common men — that stream without a shore, That Ocean which at once is deaf and loud, That I, a man, stood amid many more By a wayside — which in [  ] aspect bore To some imperial metropolis Whose misty shapes, pyramid, dome and tower Gleamed like a pile of vast crags. This fragment also displays similarities to ll. 465–7.

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shelley: selected poems Thick strewn with summer dust, and a great stream Of people there was hurrying to and fro Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam, All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know Whither he went, or whence he came, or why He made one of the multitude, yet so

50

Was borne amid the crowd as through the sky One of the million leaves of summer’s bier. — Old age and youth, manhood and infancy, [?Whirled] in one mighty torrent did appear, Some flying from the thing they feared and some

43. public way] Petrarch’s Triumph of Death occurs on a ‘publico viaggio’; see ‘Triumphus Mortis’ ii 14. The phrase is also found in other works by S. such as the Maniac’s speech in J&M 371–3: ‘poverty and shame may meet and say — Halting beside me on the public way — That love-devoted youth is ours — ’ A partially cancelled draft of these lines appears to be even more explicitly Petrarchan: ‘I seem to [wander canc.] linger on the public way/And hear Oblivion whisper Death, & say’ (Nbk 6 p. 97; BSM xv 100–1). A further example occurs in Charles the First ii 107. 44. Thick strewn] See Paradise Lost i 302–4: ‘His legions, angel forms, who lay entranced/Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks,/In Vallombrosa’. summer dust] Cp. WA 231–2: ‘the stubborn creature must/Be scattered, like a cloud of summer dust’. 45. hurrying] eddying Abinger. 46. For other uses of insect similes by S., see ll. 509–10 and: Q Mab ii 100–1, WA 364–5, Adonais 253–61 (and notes), and Fragments of an Unfinished Drama (Longman vi, no. 436) ll. 282–3. Insects are commonly used for extended similes in Greek and Latin poetry; see Iliad ii 84–96, and Aeneid iv 401–7 and vi 706–9. See also Mary’s note to poems of 1821 in 1839 iv 152: ‘By day, multitudes of ephemera darted to and fro on the surface; at night, the fire-flies came out among the shrubs on the banks; the cicale, at noon-day, kept up their hum; the aziola cooed in the quiet evening.’ gleam,] gleam Box 1. 47. onward,] onward Box 1. 49. yet] and 1824. 51. The simile of a crowd as dead leaves is common in classical poetry, e.g. Iliad vi 156 and Aeneid vi 309–10. It is also found in Inferno iii 104–8 and Paradise Lost i 303–4. 53. This line rejects the hierarchical order of the Petrarchan Trionfi, particularly that of ‘Triumphus Fame’ i-ii. [?Whirled] . . . torrent] Mixed . . . torrent eds. The first draft of this line in Box 1 reads: Mixed in one mighty impulse did appear. [?Whirled] is written above the uncancelled Mixed (it may in fact be Whirrd or, as BSM suggests, Whirred). The word is written after two cancelled words in Box 1, the first of which is Were, the second, as proposed in BSM, could be Whirled, while torrent is written above the cancelled impulse. All words written above the original line are in a similar hand hence the likelihood that [?Whirled] was intended to accompany torrent. one mighty torrent] See Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I xix l. 9: ‘mix’d in one mighty scene’. appear,] appear Box 1.

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Seeking the object of another’s fear And others as with steps towards the tomb Pored on the trodden worms that crawled beneath, And others mournfully within the gloom

60

Of their own shadow walked, and called it death . . . And some fled from it as it were a ghost, Half fainting in the affliction of vain breath. But more, with motions which each other crossed, Pursued or shunned the shadows the clouds threw Or birds within the noonday ether lost,

65

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Upon that path where flowers never grew, And weary with vain toil and faint for thirst Heard not the fountains whose melodious dew Out of their mossy cells forever burst, Nor felt the breeze which from the forest told Of grassy paths, and wood lawns interspersed With overarching elms, and caverns cold, And violet banks where sweet dreams brood, but they Pursued their serious folly as of old . . .

75

And as I gazed methought that in the way The throng grew wilder, as the woods of June When the South wind shakes the extinguished day,

57. Pored] ‘To look intently or fixedly, to gaze’ (OED 1a). 61. affliction of vain breath] ‘Their tortured breathing as they run’ (GM). 62–4. Chasing or running away from shadows that have been thrown by clouds or birds, the figures in the procession impede each other’s forward motion. 62. more,] more Box 1. crossed,] crossed Box 1. 63. shunned] spurned 1824. 65. grew,] grew; Box 1. 67. dew] Used figuratively to mean the water produced by the fountain. Cp. the opening line of To Constantia (‘The red Rose that drinks the fountain dew’) (Longman ii 328–9, no. 147). 68. cells] Natural caverns or wells. burst,] burst Box 1. 70. And grassy paths and wood, lawn-interspersed 1824. wood lawns] Grass clearings within a wood. 71. elms,] elms Box 1. cold,] cold Box 1. 76. the South wind] Preceded by the [?East] canc. in Box 1 (the second word is read as heat in TL (Reiman) and blast in BSM). Reiman (2002) glosses this wind as the libeccio, the Southwest wind, but S. is surely referring to the South wind (Ital. ostro, Gk νότος, Lat. Auster, Notus), which brings storms to

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shelley: selected poems And a cold glare, intenser than the noon, But icy cold, obscured with [  ] light The Sun, as he the stars. Like the young Moon

80

85

When on the sunlit limits of the night Her white shell trembles amid crimson air And whilst the sleeping tempest gathers might Doth, as a herald of its coming, bear The ghost of her dead mother, whose dim form Bends in dark ether from her infant’s chair, So came a chariot on the silent storm Of its own rushing splendour, and a Shape So sate within as one whom years deform

the Mediterranean in the summer, described in Georgics i 443–4: ‘namque urget ab alto/arboribusque satisque Notus pecorique sinister’ (‘from the deep the South Wind is sweeping, foe to tree and crop and herd’). See also Lucan, Pharsalia vi 471, ‘turbante Noto’ (‘while the South Wind blusters’); Horace, Odes I iii 14, ‘rabiem Noti’ (‘the mad South wind’). day,] day. — Box 1. 77. glare, . . . noon,] glare . . . noon Box 1. 78. But icy cold obscured with [blinding] light 1824 (the brackets are removed in 1839). There is no MS authority for [blinding]. The first draft of this line and the beginning of the next in Box 1 read: But icy cold, with lancinating light/Pierced Heaven & covered earth; the words with lancinating and Pierced Heaven & covered earth are cancelled. ‘Lancinating’ = ‘Chiefly of pain: acute, darting, piercing’ (OED). Another adjective deriving from the verb lancinate (here meaning ‘torn to pieces’) is found in the opening line of the fragment The lancinated gossamers were glancing (Longman iii 723, no. 354). TL (GM) and TL (Reiman) read fascinating for lancinating. 79. Sun,] Sun Box 1. 79–85. Like the young Moon . . . from her infant’s chair] ‘The “old moon in the new moon’s arms”, a sign of coming storm’ (GM). See the epigraph to Coleridge, ‘Dejection: An Ode’: Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon, With the old Moon in her arms; And I fear, I fear, my Master dear! We shall have a deadly storm. Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence Coleridge has modernised the version of this ballad found in Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry, 4th edn (1794) i 80. One contemporary reader of TL made the association with ‘Dejection’: in the copy of 1824 owned by Fanny Edgeworth, stepsister of the novelist Maria Edgeworth, now in Trinity College Cambridge Library (shelf mark: H.12.37), an asterisk is placed next to l. 84 and is keyed to a note at the foot of page that reads: ‘ “I see the old moon in the new moons lap” | Colerig.’. 83. a] the 1824. 84. her] its 1824. form] frown 1824 (1839 reads form, an indication that in at least a few cases Mary returned to check against the MS in preparing 1839 for the press). 85. chair,] chair Box 1. 87–93. a Shape . . . the light] S.’s description of the ‘Shape’ has a number of literary antecedents. The earliest of these is the Thessalian witch Erichtho in Lucan, Pharsalia vi 507–626, especially ll. 511–12: ‘desertaque busta/Incolit et tumulos expulsis obtinet umbris’ (‘she inhabited deserted tombs, and

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Beneath a dusky hood and double cape Crouching within the shadow of a tomb; And o’er what seemed the head a cloud-like crape Was bent, a dun and faint etherial gloom Tempering the light; upon the chariot’s beam A Janus-visaged Shadow did assume

haunted graves from which the ghosts had been driven’), and, after her speech to Sextus Pompey, ll. 625–6: ‘Maestum tecta caput squalenti nube pererrat/Corpora caesorum tumulis proiecta negatis’ (‘with her gruesome head veiled in a hideous mist, she moved here and there among the bodies of the slain that were thrown out and denied burial’). There are also similarities with Petrarch’s Death described in ‘Triumphis Mortis’ i 31 as ‘una donna involta in veste negra’ (‘a woman shrouded in a dress of black’ trans. Wilkins) and Milton’s Death in Paradise Lost ii 666–73: The other shape, If shape it might be called that shape had none Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb, Or substance might be called that shadow seemed, For each seemed either; black it stood as night, Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as hell, And shook a dreadful dart; what seemed his head The likeness of a kingly crown had on. See also the description of Dulness in Pope, The Dunciad (1742) iv 17–8: ‘her head a Cloud conceal’d,/ In broad Effulgence all below reveal’d’. 91. a cloud-like crape] a cloud, like crape, TL (GM). crape] ‘A thin transparent gauze-like fabric. . .much used for ladies’ mourning dresses, and for funereal trimming and draping’ (OED 1a). 92. bent,] bent Box 1. dun] ‘Dark in colour; spec. characterized by or c­ ausing a lack of light; murky, gloomy; (of light) dim, obscure’ (OED 2). 93. Tempering the light upon the chariot beam; 1824. Tempering] Written after Softening uncanc. in Box 1. beam] ‘The pole or shaft of a chariot’ (OED 7). Cp. Dryden’s translation of Aeneid xii 688: ‘Forc’d from the beam her brother’s charioteer’. 94. Janus-visaged shadow] ‘Janus was a two- or four-faced Roman god who presided over new undertakings, including business; hence the ironical pun on profit in l. 100’ (GM). A four-faced and winged human-like form also occurs in Ezekiel i 5–10: out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man. And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings. And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf ’s foot: and they sparkled like the colour of burnished brass. And they had the hands of a man under their wings on their four sides; and they four had their faces and their wings. Their wings were joined one to another; they turned not when they went; they went every one straight forward. As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle. See also the description of the ‘watchful cherubim’ in Paradise Lost xi 128 - 31: four faces each Had, like a double Janus, all their shape Spangled with eyes more numerous than those Of Argus,

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95

The guidance of that wonder-wingèd team; The Shapes which drew it in thick lightnings Were lost: I heard alone on the air’s soft stream

The music of their ever-moving wings. All the four faces of that charioteer 100 Had their eyes banded . . . little profit brings Speed in the van and blindness in the rear, Nor then avail the beams that quench the Sun Or that these banded eyes could pierce the sphere Of all that is, has been, or will be done — 105 So ill was the car guided, but it passed With solemn speed majestically on . . . The crowd gave way, and I arose aghast, Or seemed to rise, so mighty was the trance,

95. wonder-wingèd] Box 1; wonder-winged eds. There is a mark after the i dot in Box 1 which signals the accented second syllable needed for the pentameter. team;] team Box 1. 96. Shapes] These are the bearers of the chariot — the wonder-wingèd team — not to be confused with the Shape of l. 87. drew it in] drew in 1824 (corrected to ‘drew it in’ in the 1824 errata slip). 98. wings.] wings Box 1. 99–100. four faces . . . banded] Blind (Westminster) 95 argues that this figure resembles the description of Destiny as ‘The world’s eyeless charioteer’ in Hellas 711. This unidentified charioteer could be ‘Destiny’, but it is important to note that in TL the figure has eyes, although banded. 100–1. little profit . . . in the rear] S. uses military diction to note that the ‘rushing splendour’ (87) of the Chariot is of little benefit as its driver’s eyes are ‘banded’ (100). S. may be recalling Byron’s description of the Battle of Marathon in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage II xc l. 4 as ‘Death in the front, Destruction in the rear!’. 101. in the van] ‘The foremost portion of, or the foremost position in, a ­company or train of persons moving, or prepared to move, forwards or onwards’ (OED 2a). rear,] rear Box 1. 102–4. Nor then . . . be done] The charioteer’s eyes are capable of emitting rays that quench the sun, and of visions into the past, present, and future, but he cannot profit from these abilities as his eyes are banded. 103. these] with 1824; their GM (TL); his TL (Reiman). In Box 1 these is altered from the and ir written beneath, suggesting that S. contemplated substituting their for these. This possibility was perhaps rejected so as not to echo l. 100 too closely. The 1824 reading combines the two alterations, reading ir as ‘wi’ and se as ‘th’ to create ‘with’. 104. done —] done. — Box 1. 105. car] ‘A chariot, esp. of war, triumph, splendour, or pageantry’ (OED 1b). 106. See the description of the eagle in Pope’s translation of Odyssey xv 184–5: ‘In solemn speed the bird majestick flew/Full dexter to the car’. 107. aghast,] aghast Box 1. 108. trance,] trance Box 1.

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And saw like clouds upon the thunder-blast 110

The million with fierce song and maniac dance Raging around; such seemed the jubilee As when to greet some conqueror’s advance

109–10. like clouds . . . The million] A thunder-blast is a peal of thunder, an audible accompaniment to the visual phenomenon of lightning. S. is using a periphrastic construction to show that the ‘million’ appear like clouds in a thunderstorm when viewed from a distance (i.e. swiftly moving and illuminated in flashes). The imagery returns in the later description of the dancers ‘like two clouds into one vale impelled’ (l. 155) and in Rousseau’s narration (ll. 453–5, ll. 530–2, ll. 534–5). This simile recalls the chorus in PU IV 77–80: But now — oh weave the mystic measure Of music and dance and shapes of light, Let the Hours, and the Spirits of might and pleasure, Like the clouds and sunbeams, unite. ‘I would not be a King: enough’ (Lines connected with Hellas (Longman v, no. 411 Appendix) J ll. 45–51 show that the association between clouds and the dance also had mystical and pleasurable qualities for S. in autumn 1821: Come sisters of the dance . . . Weave the splendour of the dance As the Wind leads forth her clouds through the Heavens wild and wide — As the moon leads forth her stars in the purple eventide I lead ye to the dance To the dance I am dancing 109. thunder-blast] thunders blast, 1824. 110–11. The million . . . around] Such dancing was reported in English accounts of events in France during the Revolution. Discussing the people’s procession of the French Royal family back to Paris in October 1789, Burke states that two of Louis XVI’s bodyguards were decapitated, Their heads were stuck upon spears, and led the procession; whilst the royal captives who followed in the train were slowly moved along, amidst the horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women. (Reflections 122) See also Stephen Weston, Letters from Paris, during the summer of 1791 (1792) i 25, describing the Parisian crowd’s reaction on 24 June 1791 to news that Louis XVI had been stopped at Varennes and was on his way back to the capital: ‘The whole square formed itself into a ring, and danced round like an Indian tribe, with a hoop and halloo. . .the place re-echoed with screams of joy. These frantic exultations continued till eleven at night, and the town was in a blaze’. 110. maniac dance] See note to ll. 137–158. 111. around;] around Box 1. jubilee] The word has two discrete but associated meanings. One is derived from Hebrew, for a year of emancipation and restoration, which according to Leviticus xxv was to be kept every fifty years, and was proclaimed by the blast of trumpets which signalled ‘liberty throughout all the land’ (Leviticus xxv 10). The second meaning is based on the Latin term jubilum, and means a wild cry or shout (cp. Paradise Lost iii 347–8, ‘As from blest voices, uttering joy, heaven rung/With jubilee’). In Christian Latin an association was established between the two meanings of jubilee which S.’s usage here seems to require as prisoners are being freed and there is ‘fierce song’. George III celebrated his jubilee in 1809, the fiftieth year of his reign, with public feasts, illuminations, and fireworks across the country. 112. greet] meet 1824.

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Imperial Rome poured forth her living sea From senate-house and prison and theatre 115 [                  ] upon the free Had bound a yoke which soon they stooped to bear. Nor wanted here the just similitude Of a triumphal pageant, for where’er

113. Imperial Rome] The period after the Roman Republic and following the civil wars (c. 130 BC-44 BC), in which the Emperor was granted greater powers and the Senate was substantially weakened. Imperial Rome began in effect with the appointment of Julius Caesar as dictator in 49 BC and was formally instated in 27 BC when the adopted son of Caesar, Octavian, was given the title Augustus. The last Roman Emperor, now established in Byzantium, was Constantine XI (1449–53). In PVR S. calls the Roman empire a ‘vast and successful scheme for the enslaving of the most civilized portion of mankind’ (SC vi 963). living sea] See the description of the sunken ship in A Vision of the Sea (Longman ii 365–78, no. 321) ll. 31–2 ‘the heavy, dead hulk/On the living Sea rolls’. living] Written above a cancelled word in Box 1 that is read by GM as ‘fresh’ and in BSM as ‘foul’. 114–6. Box 1 includes the following drafts towards ll. 114–5: Of senators & gladiators and slaves When Freedom left those who would not be free The semblance of These lines are struck through and beneath the first of them S. wrote From senatehouse & prison & theatre (the idea of gladiators is still present in l. 114 if theatre is taken to mean an open-air location, such as the Coliseum, where spectacles took place). After the cancelled The semblance of S. wrote — upon the free thus achieving the rhyme with l. 113. There are clearly marked tercet breaks in Box 1 beneath this last line and above the draft of l. 113. Editors have dealt with the problem of the incomplete l. 115 in various ways. 1824 and TL (GM) read ‘When [  ] upon the free’ (retaining the cancelled When in the second of these lines). The reading in TL (Reiman) retains the next four words as well: ‘When Freedom left those who upon the free’. The meaning of lines 115–16 seems to be: not only are those apparently free, the citizens of Rome, deprived of their freedom by the same state power that subjugates the enemy soldiers paraded in triumph, but also if, like the citizens, you condone this imprisonment, you commit a vindictive act and become a prisoner to your own vindictiveness. 114. From senate house, and forum, and theatre, 1824. 115. When [                 ] upon the free 1824, GM (TL); When Freedom left those who upon the free TL (Reiman). 117. just] true TL (Reiman); true (alongside which is written just) is cancelled in Box 1 by a horizontal stroke through the last two letters, as noted in TL (JEGP) 603. 118. a triumphal pageant] In Ancient Rome the highest honour given to a victorious general on his return to Rome was a triumphal procession, where he led his army and the subjugated foe through Rome. Cp. the ‘triumph of Anarchy’ in MA 51–7: the Pageant swift and free, Tearing up, and trampling down; Till they came to London town. And each dweller, panic-stricken, Felt his heart with terror sicken Hearing the tempestuous cry Of the triumph of Anarchy.

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The chariot rolled, a captive multitude Was driven: all those who had grown old in power Or misery, — all who have their age subdued By action or by suffering, and whose hour Was drained to its last sand in weal or woe, So that the trunk survived both fruit and flower;

125

All those whose fame or infamy must grow Till the great winter lay the form and name Of their [?bright] earth with them forever low,

All but the sacred few who could not tame Their spirits to the Conqueror, but as soon

119. captive multitude] See Paradise Lost ii 320–3: ‘to remain/In strictest bondage, though thus far removed,/Under the inevitable curb, reserved/His captive multitude’. rolled,] rolled Box 1. 120. driven:] The punctuation after driven in Box 1 is ambiguous; the semicolon read in TL (GM) and TL (Reiman) appears to have been made into a colon. 120–37. all . . . fled before] The syntax is difficult. There is a group (governed by the first three uses of all) who are present, and the final group who are not (the sacred few governed by all but). As GM (TL) notes, S. apparently ‘forgot that the grammar of 120 onwards would eventually require a main verb’, so inserted Were there, despite it creating a hypermetrical line. The passage therefore means that these figures all were there, ‘till the last one’ (i.e. every last one of them), aside from ‘they of Athens and Jerusalem’ (the ‘sacred few’), who were neither among the ‘captives’ nor the ‘crowd’. 121–2. all who . . . suffering] GM’s gloss is ‘all who are demoralized in their old age by misery either suffered or inflicted on others’ but the first draft of this line in Box 1, Or misery, — all who had the world subdued, suggests a different meaning of ‘age’. (S. altered had to have and the to thier, and cancelled world and wrote age below). This earlier draft suggests those ‘who had grown old in power’ subdued the people of their ‘age’, as in the epoch in which they lived, rather than those who had ‘grown old’ and managed to subdue the process of ageing. 121. have] had 1824. subdued] subdued, Box 1. 126. the great winter] ‘The end of the world’ (GM). See S.’s letter to Peacock of 22 July 1816, which mentions the theory of the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon: ‘I will not pursue Buffons sublime but gloomy theory, that this earth which we inhabit will at some future period be changed into a mass of frost’ (L i 499). 127. Of this green earth with them for ever low; — 1824; [?bright]] fair TL (GM); own TL (Reiman); [?bright] replaces green which is written and cancelled three times in Box  1; TL (GM) conjectures [?living] (as does BSM) and busy as other possible readings. low,] low Box 1. 128. could not] cannot uncanc. is written above could not in Box 1. 129. Conqueror] conquerors 1824 (Conqueror is altered from conquerors in Box 1). In Paradise Lost i 143, 323 Satan and Beelzebub call God ‘conqueror’. That S. associated both life and a supernatural power with his idea of the Conqueror is suggested in the fragment Why would you overlive your life again? (Longman iii 233, no. 270), written in late 1819: Why would you overlive your life again? Ever press onward onward in the train Of the great conqueror — till ye climb

836 130

shelley: selected poems As they had touched the world with living flame Fled back like eagles to their native noon, Or those who put aside the diadem Of earthly thorns or gems, till the last one

Were there: for they of Athens and Jerusalem 135 Were neither mid the mighty captives seen

131. ‘Eagles traditionally lived near the blazing sun’ (GM). In the Roman tradition new-born eagles were forced to look into the sun: those that could behold it were reared and those that flinched were cast out, see Pliny, Nat. Hist. x 3, ‘haliaëtus tantum inplumes etiamnum pullos suos percutiens subinde cogit adversos intueri solis radios et, si coniventem humectantemque animadvertit, praecipitat e nido velut adulterinum atque degenerem; illum cuius acies firma contra stetit educat;’ (‘The sea-eagle only compels its still unfledged chicks by beating them to gaze full at the rays of the sun, and if it notices one blinking and with its eyes watering flings it out of the nest as a bastard and not true to stock, whereas one whose gaze stands firm against the light it rears’). It was also thought that during the cremation of Augustus, after his body had been consumed, an eagle flew from the pyre to take his spirit to heaven, see Dio Cassius, Roman History LVI xlii 3: καὶ ἡ μὲν ἀνηλίσκετο, ἀετὸς δέ τις ἐξ αὐτῆς ἀφεθεὶς ἀνίπτατο ὡς καὶ δὴ τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ἐς τὸν οὐρανὸν ἀναφέρων (‘So it [sc. the pyre] was consumed, and an eagle released from it flew aloft, appearing to bear his spirit to heaven’). S.’s phrasing is reminiscent of Spenser’s description of the ‘gentle spirite’ that ‘Fled backe too soone vnto his natiue place’ (‘The Ruines of Time’, ll. 281, 291) and Byron’s description of ‘birds of Paradise’ that ‘long to flee/Back to their native mansion’ (Prophecy of Dante, ll. 169–70). noon,] noon Box 1. 133. thorns] thrones 1824, TL (GM), TL (Reiman). In Box 1 S. first wrote thrones but then wrote an o over the third and some of the fourth letter, to make thornes. The alteration connects this crown to the mention of Christ in the next line, and the image is one S. had used recently in Charles the First (Longman iii, no. 426) ii 7 ‘the sharp thorns that line the English crown’ (see also Charles the First i 31). till the last one] Written above till the last swoon canc. in Box 1 (with to altered to till in pencil in the uncancelled portion). These words are omitted in 1824 which instead gives a space enclosed in square brackets. 134. they of Athens and Jerusalem] ‘Socrates (perhaps with other Athenians), and Jesus’ (GM). S. associates these two men in Fragments connected with Epipsychidion (Longman iv 173–90, no. 391 Appendix) B ll. 17–21: True love has this, different from gold and clay, That to divide is not to take away, And Socrates, the Jesus Christ of Greece, And Jesus Christ himself, did never cease To urge all living things to love each other Were there, of Athens or Jerusalem, 1824. Jerusalem] Jerusalem, Box 1. 135. Alongside a number of cancelled drafts in ink preceding this line in Box 1 is the word Aurangzebe, faintly pencilled and uncancelled. This is a variant title of Aurangzeb Alamgir (1618–1707), who ruled the Mughal Empire and expanded it to its greatest extent. Like Alexander and Napoleon, he was seen as an authoritarian military ruler. His title ‘Algamir’ means ‘world-seizer’. S. may have considered Aurangzeb in the context of ll. 217–24 and 261–5. Although Aurangzeb does not appear in the final text of the poem (so far as such a thing exists), S. clearly had this Mughal ruler on his mind: the uncancelled phrase the octogenerian Aurangzebe is written in Abinger above l. 47 of Lines Connected with The Triumph of Life Appendix D (Longman vi, no. 452 Appendix) and Aurangzebe appears in a rejected draft for lines following l. 280 (see headnote to Lines Connected with The Triumph of Life Appendix H).

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Nor mid the ribald crowd that followed them Or fled before . . . Swift, fierce and obscene The wild dance maddens in the van, and those Who lead it, fleet as shadows on the green, 140

Outspeed the chariot and without repose Mix with each other in tempestuous measure To savage music . . . Wilder as it grows,

136. them] them . . . Box 1 (‘the dots survive because [l.] 137 originally began: Meanwhile the dance grew wild & more obscene’ (TL (GM)). 137–158. S. describes a bas-relief on a pedestal of a statue of Minerva in ‘Notes on Sculptures’ (Julian vi 323) as containing: Maenads under the inspiration of the god. Nothing can be conceived more wild and terrible than their gestures, touching as they do the verge of distortion, into which their fine limbs and lovely forms are thrown.  .  .The tremendous spirit of superstition aided by drunkenness. . .seems to have caught them in its whirlwinds, and to bear them over the earth as the rapid volutions of a tempest bear the ever-changing trunk of a water-sprout. . .Their hair loose and floating seems caught in the tempest of their own tumultuous motion, their heads are thrown back leaning with a strange inanity upon their necks, and looking up to Heaven, while they totter and stumble even in the energy of their tempestuous dance. A further relevant image of crazed dancing is in Cowper Task ii 661–6: So fare we in this prison-house the world. And’tis a fearful spectacle to see So many maniacs dancing in their chains. They gaze upon the links that hold them fast With eyes of anguish, execrate their lot, Then shake them in despair, and dance again. 137. Nor those who went before fierce and obscene. 1824; Nor those who went before . . . Fierce and obscene TL (GM); Or fled before. . Now swift, fierce & obscene TL (Reiman). The first five words of the 1824 reading comprise the cancelled beginning of a line in Box 1. There is little doubt of the final three words of this line in Box 1 nor of the strength of the case made in TL (Reiman) for Or fled before being superimposed heavily on a cancelled phrase beginning Caught. S.’s replacement of swift with fleet in the draft of l. 139 supports the reading of the line as Or fled before . . . Swift, fierce and obscene first made in Reiman (2002). An abrupt and brief change in tone and tense is initiated by the capitalised Swift (the word that is also the incipit of the poem). 138. The first, cancelled draft of this line in Box 1 reads: The maniac dance, the dithyrambic hymn (with strains canc. written above the final word). in the van] See note to l. 101. 140–2. S.’s account of the dancing crowd bears similarities to Mary’s later description of ‘festa’s’ in Spezia where the local inhabitants behaved ‘like wild savages’ in her letter to Maria Gisborne of 15 August 1822 in which she informs her of S.’s death: the men & women & children in ­different bands — the sexes always ­separate — pass the whole night in dancing on the sands close to our door running into the sea then back again and screaming all the time one perpetuel air — the most detestable in the world (Mary L i 249). Mary later expanded on these happenings around the Villa Magni in ‘Note on the Poems of 1822’ 1839 iv 229–30:

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They, tortured by the agonizing pleasure, Convulsed, and on the rapid whirlwinds spun 145 Of that fierce spirit whose unholy leisure Was soothed by mischief since the world begun, Throw back their heads and loose their streaming hair, And in their dance round her who dims the Sun Maidens and youths fling their wild arms in air

The natives were wilder than the place. Our near neighbours, of Sant’ Arenzo, were more like savages than any people I ever before saw. Many a night they passed on the beach, singing or rather howling, the women dancing about among the waves that broke at their feet, the men leaning against the rocks and joining in their loud wild chorus. . .Had we been wrecked on an island of the South Seas, we could scarcely have felt ourselves further from civilisation and comfort. 143–4. tortured . . . Convulsed] See Inferno xiv 40–2: Sanza riposo mai era la tresca de le misere mani, or quindi or quinci escotendo da sé l’arsura fresca. (‘Unceasing was the play of wretched hands, Now this, now that way glancing, to shake off The heat, still falling fresh.’) 143. the] their 1824. 144. Convulsed,] Convulsed Box 1. S. uses the term intransitively: ‘To become convulsed; esp. to be affected with convulsion, go into convulsions, be convulsed’ (OED 3). Cp. Byron, The Corsair ll. 243–4: ‘With feelings loos’d to strengthen — not depart —/That rise — convulse — subside’. on the rapid whirlwinds spun] See Inferno v 31–33: La bufera infernal, che mai non resta, mena li spirti con la sua rapina; voltando e percotendo li molesta. (‘The hellish storm, never resting, seizes and drives the spirits before it; smiting and whirling them about, it torments them’, trans. Sinclair). 145. fierce] Written above stormy canc. in Box 1 (the cancellation and substitution are in pencil.) spirit] spirit, Box 1. 147. In Euripides, Bacchae the herdsman reports on the Bacchant women who καθεῖσαν εἰς ὤμους κόμας (‘let their hair fall to their shoulders’) (695). See also Bacchae ll. 99–104: ἔτεκεν. . . ταυρόκερων θεὸν στεφάνωσέν τε δρακόντων στεφάνοις, ἔνθεν ἄγραν θηρότροφον μαινάδες ἀμφιβάλλονται πλοκάμοις (‘he gave birth to the god with the horns of a bull and crowned him with garlands of serpents: that is why maenads catch beast-eating snakes and drape their tresses with them’). hair,] hair Box 1. 148. her who dims the Sun] The allegorical figure of Life who is identified in l. 180.

70  the triumph of life 150

839

As their feet twinkle; now recede, and now, Bending within each other’s atmosphere Kindle invisibly; and as they glow Like moths by light attracted and repelled, Oft to their bright destruction come and go,

155 Till — like two clouds into one vale impelled That shake the mountains when their lightnings mingle, And die in rain — the fiery band which held 150. feet twinkle] The image of feet twinkling in the dance comes from Odyssey viii 265: μαρμαρυγὰς θηεῖτο ποδῶν, θαύμαζε δὲ θυμῷ (‘[Odysseus] gazed at the flashing of their feet and marvelled in spirit’).

See also the dance in Gray, The Progress of Poesy: A Pindaric Ode (1757) ll. 25 - 35, esp. ll. 34–5: ‘To brisk notes in cadence beating/Glance their many-twinkling feet’, and Lioni’s description of ‘The music, and the banquet’ in Marino Faliero IV i 51–68 with its description of the young revellers’ ‘many-twinkling feet so small and sylphlike’ (S. had heard Byron read from Marino Faliero and also read the play himself in Ravenna, see L ii 308, 330). now recede] S. initially wrote now recede then wrote they in pencil between the two words. He then cancelled now they and wrote now above. Editors have opted for ‘they recede’ (1824, TL (Reiman)) and ‘now they recede’ (TL (GM)). A document in the hand of GM entitled “Revisions in Collaboration with Don Reiman, 9 Aug 1971” shows that GM and Reiman agreed that the phrase reads now recede and now in Box 1. now,] now Box 1. 153–7. See Romeo and Juliet II vi 9–11: These violent delights have violent ends, And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, Which as they kiss consume. 153–4. The simile of the moth being attracted to the light also occurs in On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci (Longman iii 218–23, no. 263) ll. 30–1, ‘And he comes hastening like a moth that hies/After a taper’, and PU II iii 67, ‘As a weak moth the taper’. The image is also similar to that in Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven ll. 51–2, 53–4 of the ‘fisher with his lamp/And spear’ who ‘struck the fish who came/To worship the delusive flame’. 154. their] Written beneath the canc. in Box 1 (the cancellation and substitution are in pencil.) The reading ‘new’ in TL (Reiman) is doubtful. 155–7. Till — . . . mingle, . . . rain —] Till . . . mingle . . . rain, — Box 1 (Till is in pencil). This imagery is anticipated in The Cloud ll. 9–12: I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder. There are sources for the meteorological image in earlier poetry, scientific observations, and travel writing. The sexual potency of S.’s simile appears in John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ‘A Dialogue between Strephon and Daphne’, ll. 33–44: [Strephon] See the heavens in lightnings break, Next in storms of thunder speak, Till a kind rain from above Makes a calm — so ’tis in love.

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Their natures, snaps . . . the shock still may tingle; One falls and then another in the path 160 Senseless, nor is the desolation single, Yet ere I can say where, the chariot hath Passed over them; nor other trace I find

Flames begin our first address; Like meeting thunder we embrace; Then, you know, the showers that fall Quench the fire, and quiet all. Daphne How should I these showers forget? ’Twas so pleasant to be wet! They killed love, I knew it well: I died all the while they fell. S.’s image is also in line with contemporary writing on climate, such as Benjamin Franklin, Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751) 42: if an electrified cloud coming from the sea, meets in the air a cloud raised from the land, and therefore not electrified; the first will flash its fire into the latter, and thereby both clouds shall be made suddenly to deposit water. It is also in keeping with accounts of seeing such a storm, such as James Bruce, Travels, between the years 1768 and 1773, through Africa into Abyssinia to discover the source of the Nile (1805) 352–3: About nine, a small cloud, not above four feet broad, appears in the east, whirling violently round as if upon an axis, but, arrived near the zenith, it first abates its motion, then loses its form, and extends itself greatly, and seems to call up vapours from all opposite quarters. These clouds having attained nearly the same height, rush against each other with great violence. The air, impelled before the heaviest mass, or swifter mover, makes an impression of its own form in the collection of clouds opposite, and the moment it has taken possession of the space made to receive it, the most violent thunder possible to be conceived instantly follows, with rain. 158. the . . . tingle] while the shocks still may tingle TL (GM); ere the shock cease to tingle TL (Reiman). tingle;] tingle Box 1. 160. Senseless,] Senseless Box 1. nor . . . single] ‘i.e. they die in couples’ (GM). single,] single Box 1. 161–6. See ‘Date of composition’ in the headnote for a discussion of S.’s drafting of these lines. 161. I can] can is written above could which is cancelled with a single stroke in Box 1; however, there are multiple small strokes through I which suggest initial cancellation and then retention (the cancellations and substitution are in pencil). where,] where Box 1. 162. I find] Written in pencil above the cancelled word remained in ink which had been altered, in pencil, to remains. 162–3. trace . . . wrath] See Inferno xxiv 47–51: ‘ché, seggendo in piuma, in fama non si vien, né sotto coltre; sanza la qual chi sua vita consuma,

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But as of foam after the ocean’s wrath Is spent upon the desert shore. — Behind, 165 Old men and women foully disarrayed Shake their grey hair in the insulting wind, Grasp in the dance and strain with limbs decayed To reach the car of light which leaves them still Far behind and deeper in the shade . . .

cotal vestigio in terra di sé lascia, qual fummo in aere e in acqua la schiuma.’ (‘ “for sitting down or under blankets none comes to fame, and without it he that consumes his life leaves such trace of himself on earth as smoke in air or foam on the water” ’, trans. Sinclair). 163. ocean’s] oceans is written in ink over the pencilled words hoar waves in Box 1 (BSM reads ‘roar’ for hoar). 164. Behind,] behind Box 1. 165–7. There is some confusion in the grammar of these lines in Box  1. TL (GM) argues for the removal of the manuscript comma after men because ‘ “Old” must qualify both men and women, since both have grey hair, so despite Shelley’s firm comma “foully disarrayed” must also qualify both nouns’. In 1824 Mary retains this comma and adds one after ‘disarrayed’. The grammar of 1824 dictates that it is both the ‘Old men’ and ‘women’ who ‘Shake their grey hair’ but that only the ‘women’ are ‘foully disarrayed’. The problem with this reading is that it implies that the ‘women’ have ‘grey hair’ and ‘limbs decayed’ but are not ‘Old’. GM’s reading is preferred as it is the least confusing, while it also admits some ambiguity. S. may have in mind Euripides’ Bacchae 322–4 (see headnote for this play as a source for TL), in which Tiresias and Cadmus decide to join the ivy-clad women in their ecstatic dance: ἐγὼ μὲν οὖν καὶ Κάδμος, ὃν σὺ διαγελᾷς, κισσῷ τ᾿ ἐρεψόμεσθα καὶ χορεύσομεν, πολιὰ ξυνωρίς, ἀλλ᾿ ὅμως χορευτέον.

(‘I shall crown my head with ivy and join the dance, and so will Cadmus, whom you mock. We are a pair of grayheads, but still we must dance.’) 165. men] men, Box 1. See note to ll. 165–7. 166. hair] hairs 1824. insulting] Attacking, assaulting, assailing (see OED 4a). wind,] wind Box 1. 167. To seek, to [ ], to strain with limbs decayed, 1824; And follow in the dance, with limbs decayed, 1839 (the change means that in this case Mary must have returned to consult the MS in preparing 1839 for the press); Grasp in the dance and strain with limbs decayed TL (GM); Limp in the dance & strain with limbs decayed TL (Reiman). The 1824 reading is of a cancelled line; GM later concurred with TL (Reiman) in reading ‘Limp’ for Grasp (see TL (JEGP) 601) although the evidence of Box 1 appears to be for the TL (GM) reading. The action of grasping was associated with dancing in the period, e.g., Byron, Waltz (1813) ll. 236–7: ‘Where were the rapture then to clasp the form,/From this lewd grasp, and lawless contact warm?’. 168. To reach the car of light] Limping to reach the light 1824. ‘Limping’ is a misreading of Grasp in in l. 167 which is written above Seeking canc. in Box 1. 169. Far] Farther 1824, TL (Reiman). The last four letters of Far’ther are crossed out in Box 1. GM comments: ‘S.’s firm cancellation of the second half of “Farther” would not itself be decisive, but it makes better poetry to take “still” as modifying verb rather than adjective, thus involving process instead of mere distance (i.e. “goes on leaving them far behind and deeper — ” rather than “leaves them even further behind and deeper — ”).’

842 170

shelley: selected poems But not the less with impotence of will They move, though ghastly shadows interpose Round them and round each other, and fulfil

Their work, and to the dust whence they arose Sink, and corruption veils them as they lie, 175 And frost in these performs what fire in those. Struck to the heart by this sad pageantry, Half to myself I said, ‘And what is this? Whose shape is that within the car? And why — ’ 180

I would have added — ‘Is all here amiss?’ But a voice answered — ‘Life’ . . . I turned and knew (O Heaven have mercy on such wretchedness!) That what I thought was an old root which grew

171. move,] move Box 1 (only visible through pressure on the leaf; the pencil lead has faded entirely); wheel, eds. In Box 1 wheel uncanc. is written above dance canc. with move uncanc. below. 172. Round them] ‘i.e. round the interposing shadows’ (GM). 173. work,] work Box 1. to the dust whence they arose] in the dust from whence they rose 1824. 174. Sink, . . . lie,] Sink . . . lie Box 1. 175. These dancers lie down exhausted and are then destroyed by the cold frost, just as ‘those’ wild dancers of ll. 138–64 ‘kindle invisibly’ and are brought to their ‘bright destruction’ consumed in fire. frost] past 1824. fire] [ ] 1824 (the rough and faint pencilling of l. 175 in Box 1 makes Mary’s difficulty in extracting a reading entirely understandable). those.] those Box 1. 176. This pencilled line in Box 1 is overwritten in ink. pageantry,] pageantry Box 1. 178. There are a number of cancelled drafts of this line in Box 1, including: And who, is the mistress of the mystery? And who is she, and a voice made reply, And a voice said life 179. added —] added Box 1. 180. answered —] answered. . Box 1. ‘Life’] Rousseau’s first word is the first mention of ‘Life’, the mysterious subject of the triumph mentioned again on ll. 236 and 256, and the subject of the narrator’s final question on l. 544. As noted in the headnote, some idea of what S. means by ‘Life’ can be found in the consideration of the nature of existence which opens the fourth book of Émile: ‘Nous naissons, pour ainsi dire, en deux fois: l’une pour exister, et l’autre pour vivre; l’une pour l’espèce et l’autre pour le sexe’ (Oeuvres complètes iv 489; ‘We are, so to speak, born twice; once to exist and once to live; once for our species and once for our sex’, trans. Bloom). 182–3. an old . . . side] Cp. the description in Alastor ll. 529–32 of the ‘rugged slope’ on which ‘nought but gnarlèd roots of ancient pines/Branchless and blasted, clenched with grasping roots/the unwilling soil’. Cp. also To Jane — The recollection ll. 21–4: We paused amid the pines that stood The giants of the waste, Tortured by storms to shapes as rude As serpents interlaced[.]

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To strange distortion out of the hill side Was indeed one of that deluded crew 185 And that the grass which methought hung so wide And white, was but his thin discoloured hair,

And that the holes it vainly sought to hide

Were or had been eyes. — ‘If thou canst forbear To join the dance, which I had well forborne’, 190 Said the grim Feature, of my thought aware, ‘I will now tell that which to this deep scorn Led me and my companions, and relate The progress of the pageant since the morn;

The idea of dead humans as trees is found in Inferno xiii 1–39, in which those who committed suicide are turned into trees ‘nodosi e’nvolti’ (‘knotted and warped’, trans. Sinclair). Orrin Wang has suggested that S. may be punning on etymologies by having Rousseau appear as a root, as the English word ‘root’ comes from the Latin radix, which is also the root of the English word ‘radical’ (see Orrin N. C. Wang, ‘Disfiguring Monuments: History in Paul De Man’s “Shelley Disfigured” and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life” ’, ELH lviii (1991) 643. Rousseau’s Émile opens with a series of tree similes to explain man’s corruption of his fellow man, beginning with the claim that man ‘aime la difformité, les monstres. Il ne veut rien tel que l’a fait la nature, pas même l’homme; il le faut dresser pour lui comme un cheval de manége; il le faut contourner à sa mode comme un arbre de son jardin’ (Oeuvres complètes iv 245; ‘loves deformity, monsters. He wants nothing as nature made it, not even man; for him, man must be trained like a school horse; man must be fashioned in keeping with his fancy like a tree in his garden’, trans. Bloom). Man under these social conditions ‘seroit comme un arbrisseau que le hazard fait naitre au milieu d’un chemin, et que les passans font bientot périr en le heurtant de toutes parts et le pliant dans tous les sens’ (Oeuvres complètes iv 245; ‘would be like a shrub that chance had caused to be born in the middle of a path and that the passers-by soon cause to perish by bumping into it from all sides and bending it in every direction’ trans. Bloom). Byron writes of Rousseau in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III lxxviii ll. 1–2 that ‘His love was passion’s essence — as a tree / On fire by lightning’. 184. that] those 1824. deluded crew] See Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ (1798) l. 332: ‘We were a ghastly crew’. deluded] degraded and a barely decipherable word, read as unnoticed in TL (GM) and (less plausibly) [?unnatural] in BSM, are written above (both are uncancelled.) 186. hair,] hair Box 1. 189. forborne,] forborne Box 1. 190. Said the grim Feature of my thought: “Aware, 1824. Feature,] Feature Box 1. Feature meaning ‘form’ or ‘shape’ (OED 1a). aware,] aware Box 1. 191. now tell] unfold 1824; tell all TL (GM). Box 1 presents almost insuperable difficulties. S. first wrote relate all then cancelled each word separately probably at the same time as cancelling will tell in l. 192 and writing relate above. The word or words written above relate all canc. are partially blotted and cancelled. TL (JEGP), contra TL (Reiman), suggests that S. ‘cancelled relate for unveil; then wrote tell on top of the last half of unveil (blotting it), which must reinstate all. There is no now.’ 192. companions,] companions; Box 1. 193. morn;] morn Box 1.

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‘If thirst of knowledge doth not then abate, 195 Follow it thou even to the night, but I Am weary’ . . . then like one who with the weight Of his own words is staggered, wearily He paused, and ere he could resume, I cried, ‘First, who art thou?’ . . . ‘Before thy memory 200

‘I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did, and died, And if the spark with which Heaven lit my spirit Earth had with purer nutriment supplied ‘Corruption would not now thus much inherit Of what was once Rousseau — nor this disguise

194. doth not then] shall not then 1824; shall not thus TL (GM); doth not thus TL (Reiman). In Box 1 doth appears to have been cancelled then reinstated (as Reiman notes), and then is written above thus uncanc. abate,] abate Box 1. 195. it thou even] it even TL (Reiman). 198. cried,] cried Box 1. 199. First,] First Box 1. Before thy memory] This could be Rousseau claiming to be alive in an age before the narrator and therefore be unremembered, but given that the narrator seems to know who Rousseau is, the phrase instead is most likely to be Rousseau claiming to have presented his own life in Les Confessions (published posthumously in 1782 (Part I) and 1789 (Part II)), to be remembered by his readers. 200. feared,] feared Box 1. died,] died Box 1. 202. Earth had] Had been 1824. 204. Rousseau] S. had been reading Rousseau, and considering his influence on European politics and thought, from as early as 1811 (see headnote). One of S.’s letters from his travels around Geneva in summer 1816, ‘Letter III’ of 1817, recounts an eight-day journey with Byron to Vevey and Lausanne, which S. describes as ‘on every account delightful, but most especially, because then I first knew the divine beauty of Rousseau’s imagination, as it exhibits itself in Julie’ (Prose Works 212). S. mentions in the letter that he is reading Julie during this journey; discusses various places in relation to characters from Rousseau’s novel; and at one point claims ‘I read Julie all day; an overflowing, as it now seems, surrounded by the scenes which it has so wonderfully peopled, of sublimest genius, and more than human sensibility’ (Prose Works 217). Near the end of this letter, S. tells of a visit to the house at which Gibbon completed The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) and makes a comparison between Rousseau and Gibbon (and the Roman empire he wrote about), which foregrounds Rousseau’s mutiny against the imperial trappings of ‘Life’ in TL: My companion gathered some acacia leaves to preserve in remembrance of [Gibbon]. I refrained from doing so, fearing to outrage the greater and more sacred name of Rousseau; the contemplation of whose imperishable creations had left no vacancy in my heart for mortal things. Gibbon had a cold and unimpassioned spirit. I never felt more inclination to rail at the prejudices which cling to such a thing, than now that Julie and Clarens, Lausanne and the Roman Empire, compelled me to a contrast between Rousseau and Gibbon. (Prose Works 220) S. was influenced by Rousseau’s Julie when writing Epipsychidion and lent the novel to Teresa Viviani (see the letter of 28 July 1821 at Bod. MS Abinger c. 67 f. 18r in which she asks S. if he would like the book returned; the text and translation of the relevant passage is given in Valentina Varinelli, ‘The

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205 Stained that which ought to have disdained to wear it; ‘If I have been extinguished, yet there rise

Truth about “Emilia”: Teresa Viviani’s letters to Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Abinger Collection’, Bodleian Library Record xxx (2017) 154–5). S. also appears to have been influenced by Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III lxxvi-lxxxi in his portrayal of Rousseau (and in TL more widely, see headnote), especially lxxvii-lxxviii and lxxxi: Here the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau, The apostle of affliction, he who threw Enchantment over passion, and from woe Wrung overwhelming eloquence, first drew The breath which made him wretched; yet he knew How to make madness beautiful, and cast O’er erring deeds and thoughts, a heavenly hue Of words, like sunbeams, dazzling as they past The eyes, which o’er them shed tears fleetingly and fast. His love was passion’s essence — as a tree On fire by lightning; with ethereal flame Kindled he was, and blasted; for to be Thus, and enamoured, were in him the same. But his was not the love of living dame Nor of the dead who rise upon our dreams, But of ideal beauty, which became In him existence, and o’er flowing teems Along his burning page, distempered though it seems. [. . .] For then he was inspired, and from him came, As from the Pythian’s mystic cave of yore, Those oracles which set the world in flame, Nor ceased to burn till kingdoms were no more: Did he not this for France? which lay before Bowed to the inborn tyranny of years? Broken and trembling, to the yoke she bore, Till by the voice of him and his compeers, Roused up to too much wrath which follows o’ergrown fears? 205. Stain that within which still disdains to wear it. — Reiman (2002). Reiman’s reading takes the uncancelled words above the cancelled first draft of this line rather than those words below which appear to express S.’s latest intentions. Stained] Stain GM (TL); Reiman (2002). The grammar suggests that this should be understood as ‘have stained’. Rossetti, N&Q, 4th ser. (25 April 1868) 386, was the first to argue that Stained in Box 1 is a solecism and changed the word to ‘Stain’. it;] 1824; it. — Box 1. 206–7. S. repeatedly used the image of a spark which ignites a large fire before itself being extinguished; cp. Lines Written among the Euganean Hills ll. 256–84, and OWW 66–7, ‘Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth/Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!’ Given that Rousseau’s most influential writing was in prose and not poetry, the following passage from DP (Reiman (2002) para. 10) may have been in S.’s mind when forming this image:

846

shelley: selected poems A thousand beacons from the spark I bore. — ’ ‘And who are those chained to the car?’ ‘The wise, ‘The great, the unforgotten: they who wore

The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition as a whole being a poem. A single sentence may be considered as a whole though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated portions; a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought. See also the speech of Statius in Purgatorio xxi 94–6: ‘Al mio ardor fuor seme le faville, che mi scaldar, della divina fiamma onde sono allumati più di mille;’ (‘ “Of my flame Those sparkles were the seeds, which I deriv’d From the bright fountain of celestial fire That feeds unnumber’d lamps” ’) 206. there] there then Box 1. 208–12. The wise . . . themselves] The depiction of the great has a number of literary analogues. First, in Petrarch, ‘Triumphus Mortis’ i 79–84: Ivi eran quei che fur detti felici: pontefici, regnanti, imperadori; or sono ignudi, miseri e mendici. U’ sono or le richezze? U’ son gli honori? E le gemme, e gli sceptri e le corone, e le mitre e i purpureï colori? (‘Here now were they who were called fortunate, Popes, emperors, and others who had ruled; Now are they naked, poor, of all bereft. Where now their riches? Where their honours now? Where now their gems and scepters, and their crowns, The miters, and the purple they had worn?’, trans. Wilkins). Furthemore, Rousseau’s description of those chained to the car is an inversion of Virgil’s characterisation of Dante in his valediction in Purgatorio xxvii 139–42: ‘Non aspettar mio dir più né mio cenno: libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio, e fallo fora non fare a suo senno: per ch’io te sovra te corono e mitrio.’ (‘ “Expect no more Sanction of warning voice or sign from me, Free of thy own arbitrement to choose, Discreet, judicious. To distrust thy sense Were henceforth error. I invest thee then With crown and mitre, sovereign o’er thyself.” ’) These lines also seem to be influenced by part of Byron’s description of Napoleon (see note to ll. 215–24), in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III xxxviii ll. 5–8: ‘An empire thou couldst crush, command, rebuild,/But govern not the pettiest passion, nor,/However deeply in men’s spirits skill’d,/Look through thine own’. 208. wise,] Wise Box 1.

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Mitres and helms and crowns, or wreaths of light, Signs of thought’s empire over thought; their lore ‘Taught them not this — to know themselves; their might Could not repress the mutiny within, And for the morn of truth they feigned, deep night

215 ‘Caught them ere evening.’ ‘Who is he with chin

209. great,] great Box 1. unforgotten:] unforgotten Box 1. 210. wreaths of light] ‘Not saintly haloes but emblems of intellectual supremacy’ (GM). light,] light Box 1. 211–3. Cp. Sonnet: Political Greatness ll. 10–4: Man who man would be, Must rule the empire of himself, in it Must be supreme, establishing his throne On vanquished will; quelling the anarchy Of hopes and fears; being himself alone. 212. to know themselves] ‘ “Know thyself ” [γνῶθι σεαυτόν], a Socratic motto, was inscribed over the temple of Apollo at Delphi’ (GM). See also the Preface to The Cenci (Longman ii, no. 209) ll. 60–3: ‘The highest moral purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama, is teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself ’. As the author of Les Confessions, Rousseau may be implying that he has escaped being chained to this procession because of his self-knowledge. At the end of Confessions iv Rousseau claims: ‘Je n’ai pas promis d’offrir au public un grand personage; j’ai promis de me peindre tel que je suis’ (Oeuvres complètes i 174) (‘I have not promised to offer a great personage to the public; I have promised to depict myself as I am’, trans. Christopher Kelly). 213. repress] Written above restrain uncanc. in Box 1. mutiny within] Written below rebel in their heart canc. in Box 1; mystery within, 1824. 214–5. And for the morn . . . evening] ‘And in place of the new world they purported to herald, they were themselves benighted’ (GM). S. may have in mind the speech of Petrarch’s Death (who resembles the Shape of ll. 87–93) at ‘Triumphus Mortis’ i 37–9: ‘io son colei che sì importuna e fera chiamata son da voi, e sorda e cieca gente, a cui si fa notte inanzi sera.’ (‘ “I am the one who all you mortals call Fierce and relentless; ye are deaf and blind, Night falls on you ere’ tis eventide.” ’ trans. Wilkins) 215–24. Who is he . . . Napoleon fell] S.’s description is influenced by Byron’s portrait of Napoleon in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III xxxvi-xlvi, especially xxxvi-xxxvii: There sunk the greatest, nor the worst of men, Whose spirit antithetically mixt One moment of the mightiest, and again On little objects with like firmness fixt, Extreme in all things! hadst thou been betwixt, Thy throne had still been thine, or never been; For daring made thy rise as fall: thou seek’st Even now to re-assume the imperial mien, And shake again the world, the Thunderer of the scene!

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shelley: selected poems Upon his breast and hands crossed on his chain?’ ‘The Child of a fierce hour; he sought to win Conqueror and captive of the earth art thou! She trembles at thee still, and thy wild name Was ne’er more bruited in men’s minds than now That thou art nothing, save the jest of Fame, Who wooed thee once, thy vassal, and became The flatterer of thy fierceness, till thou wert A god unto thyself; nor less the same To the astounded kingdoms all inert, Who deem’d thee for a time whate’er thou dids’t assert.

215. evening.] evening Box 1. 215–6. with chin . . . his chain] Napoleon’s pose is based on La veille de la Bataille d’Austerlitz (The Eve of the Battle of Austerlitz) an unsigned colour stipple engraving of the French camp on 1 December 1805, which was made sometime between 1806 and 1810. The engraving claims it is ‘aprés le tableau de F. Gérard appartenant au Genéral Rapp’ (after the painting by F[rançois] Gérard owned by Genéral [Jean] Rapp), but no such painting appears to be extant. The print shows Napoleon at rest (possibly asleep) in the middle of his camp; he is seated with his feet on a stool and dressed in uniform; he has his chin on his chest and has his arms crossed over his chest. Behind him there is a large fire casting smoke, and the Grande Armée is busy preparing for battle. This image of Napoleon became popular in Europe in the 1810s and begot several imitations and adaptations in black and white engraving, black and white woodcut, and hand-coloured woodcut. In England, the first known adaptation of this print is a wood engraving by Thomas Williams, entitled The Evening before the Battle of Austerlitz (c. 1813), and it was engraved later by George Cruikshank, under the title Napoleon’s Bivouac on the Night preceding the Memorable Battle of Austerlitz (1823) (Cruikshank’s print acknowledges that it is ‘from the original French Print published at Paris’). S. transposes the effect of this famous image into TL, to make the chained Napoleon appear in still contemplation amidst the chaos of the triumphal procession. See also Byron’s line that Gaul ‘wears the shattered links of the world’s broken chain’ as Harold reaches the battlefield of Waterloo in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III xviii l. 9. 216–7. There are many drafts of these lines in Box 1 including the following cancelled phrases: He decks the triumph well; A willing slave; and That is Napoleon. S. may have revised these drafts to defer naming Napoleon as the subject of these lines until l. 224. 216. hands crossed on his chain] S.’s first attempt at this phrase in Box 1 was hands folded in sorrow he then cancelled folded and sorrow, and wrote the final version below. 217–24. The Child .  .  . fell] Rousseau’s description is difficult in meaning and syntax, but its central concerns are Napoleon’s relation to and subsequent betrayal of the French Revolution (a revolution that Rousseau was thought to be a progenitor of by S. and his contemporaries; see headnote). Napoleon was a child of the revolutionary epoch, but his quest for world domination resulted in a global loss of greatness and hope which was greater than the opportunity for personal fame and global peace that the French Revolution offered. Like many leaders before him, his attempt to dominate the world was based on military power, symbolised by the imperial eagle (see notes to ll. 131 and 222), but was ultimately fruitless. 217. Child of a fierce hour] By considering Napoleon’s formation during a turbulent epoch, S. may have in mind a speech of Pitt the Younger, recorded by Coleridge for The Morning Post (Essays on his Times, ed. David V. Erdman, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge III, 3 vols (1978) i 185), to the House of Commons on 18 February 1800. On the rise of Napoleon, Pitt claims: to this Jacobinism we are now to reconcile ourselves, because all its arts and all its energies are united under one person, the child and the champion of Jacobinism, who has been reared in its principles, who has fought its battles; who has systematised its ambition, at once the fiercest instrument of its fanaticism, and the gaudiest puppet of its folly!

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‘The world, and lost all it did contain Of greatness, in its hope destroyed, and more 220 Of fame and peace than Virtue’s self can gain ‘Without the opportunity which bore Him on its eagle’s pinion to the peak From which a thousand climbers have before Fall’n as Napoleon fell.’ — I felt my cheek 225 Alter to see the great form pass away Whose grasp had left the giant world so weak That every pigmy kicked it as it lay — And much I grieved to think how power and will In opposition rule our mortal day — 230

And why God made irreconcilable Good and the means of good; and for despair I half disdained mine eye’s desire to fill With the spent vision of the times that were And scarce have ceased to be . . . ‘Dost thou behold,’

218. all it] all that it 1824. 219. destroyed,] destroyed; Box 1. 222. eagle’s pinion] eagle pinions 1824. See note to l. 131. In the days following his coronation in 1804, Napoleon decreed that eagle standards were to be carried into battle by French Imperial regiments in imitation of those carried by Roman legions. 224. fell.’ —] fell — Box 1. 225. great form] shadow 1824 (great form is written above mighty shadow canc. in Box 1). 230–1. God . . . Good] See ll. 1–2 (and note) for a similar play on words. 234–5. behold, . . . guide, . . . Voltaire,] behold . . . guide . . . Voltaire Box 1.

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shelley: selected poems

235 Said then my guide, ‘those spoilers spoiled, Voltaire,

235–40. those spoilers spoiled . . . conqueror] At this point the procession features a number of figures associated with the eighteenth-century advancement in thought often referred to as the Enlightenment. Rousseau suggests that these famous ‘spoilers’, disruptive figures who challenged the status quo in philosophy and government, have now been ‘spoiled’, i.e. their achievements have been diminished, but also, following on from Rousseau’s resemblance to an ‘old root which grew/To strange distortion’ (ll. 183–4) and the mention of freshness on l. 238, that their appearance and their ideas have decayed and become rotten. The presence of these figures in the triumphal procession is a signal that, despite the Enlightenment’s attempts to change social structures, the tyranny of Life remains unchecked. S.’s categorisation of these figures under various professional titles may have been inspired by Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III xliii: This makes the madmen who have made men mad By their contagion; Conquerors and Kings, Founders of sects and systems, to whom add Sophists, Bards, Statesmen, all unquiet things Which stir too strongly the soul’s secret springs, And are themselves the fools to those they fool; Envied, yet how unenviable! what stings Are theirs! One breast laid upon were a school Which would unteach mankind the lust to shine or rule: 235. Said then my] said my 1824. spoilers spoiled] Edward Duffy, Rousseau in England, 168, claims Byron as S.’s source for this phrase, citing the post-script to a letter to John Murray of 20 May 1820: Do you remember the epitaph on Voltaire? “Cy git l’enfant gaté” &c. “Here lies the spoilt Child Of the World which he spoil’d” The original is in Grimm & Diderot &c. &c. &c. (Byron L&J vii 103) See Friedrich Melchior, Baron Von Grimm, Correspondance littéraire et philosophique (1812) pt. II iv 355. Voltaire] François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778) wrote under the name Voltaire, a French polymath who served as advisor to Frederick II of Prussia from 1750–3. To many Britons of S.’s generation, due to the European fame of works such as Lettres sur les Anglais (Letters Concerning the English) (1733), Candide (1759), Traité sur la tolérance (Treatise on Tolerance) (1763), and the Dictionnaire philosophique (Philosophical Dic­tionary) (1764), Voltaire was the archetypal Enlightenment philosophe who challenged received notions about religion and government. It is clear from Lines Connected with The Triumph of Life Appendix H ll. 11–26 that S. had at one point considered a larger role for Voltaire in TL (see headnote to Appendix H). In his characterization of Voltaire as a ‘spoiler’, S. seems to have in mind Byron’s description of Voltaire in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III cvi as: fire and fickleness, a child, Most mutable in wishes, but in mind, A wit as various, — gay, grave, sage, or wild, — Historian, bard, philosopher, combined; He multiplied himself among mankind, The Proteus of their talents: But his own Breathed most in ridicule, — which, as the wind, Blew where it listed, laying all things prone, — Now to o’erthrow a fool, and now to shake a throne.

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‘Frederick, and Kant, Catherine, and Leopold,

S. chose Voltaire’s line ‘écrasez l’infâme’ (‘crush the infamous’), which he rendered as ‘Ecrasez l’infame’, as the first epigraph to Q Mab, and Voltaire’s Candide has been seen as an inspiration for PB3 (Longman iii, no. 239) (see headnote to PB3). In March and April 1820, S. and Mary read Voltaire, Mémoires de M. de Voltaire écrits par lui-même (1784) and Condorcet, Vie de Voltaire par le Marquis de Condorcet (1789), the latter also read by Claire (see Mary Jnl i 313–4, see Clarie Jnl 136–8). Although Voltaire was notoriously hostile to Rousseau — attacking Julie in Lettres sur La nouvelle Héloïse (1761), and later satirising Rousseau himself in La Guerre civile de Genève (1768) — in S.’s prose, and that of Peacock, the two thinkers were often considered as part of the same flawed challenge to authority (see Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists (1812), Prose Works i 52; An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte (1817), Prose Works i 232; and Peacock, The Four Ages of Poetry (1820), Peacock Works viii 16). 236. Frederic & Kant Catharine, & Leopold, Box 1; Frederic, and Paul, Catherine, and Leopold, 1824. Kant is written over Pitt in Box 1. The grouping together of Frederick, Catherine, and Leopold may have been inspired by the following passage from Paine, Rights of Man Part the Second (1792) 130: Is it then better that the lives of one hundred and forty thousand aged persons be rendered comfortable, or that a million a year of public money be expended on any one individual, and him often the most worthless or insignificant character? Let reason and justice, let honour and humanity, let even hypocrisy, sycophancy and Mr. Burke, let George, let Louis, Leopold, Frederic, Catharine, Cornwallis or Tippoo Saib, answer the question. Frederick] Frederick II of Prussia, known as ‘the Great’, ruled from 1740 to 1786 and was viewed as an enlightened despot. He supported many artists and philosophers (especially Voltaire), and Prussia under his reign was seen as the most liberal state in Europe. An entry in Claire’s journal for 5 April 1820 recalls an anecdote about Frederick that she learned from reading Condorcet, Vie de Voltaire par le Marquis de Condorcet (1789) while at Pisa (Claire Jnl 136–8). Kant] Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), German philosopher famous for writing Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781) (Critique of Pure Reason), Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788) (Critique of Practical Reason), and Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) (Critique of Pure Judgment). Hugh Roberts, in ‘Shelley Among the Post-Kantians’, SiR xxxv (1996) 295–329 (esp. pp. 304–5), claims that S.’s exposure to Kant was predominantly through mediators such as Coleridge and A. W. Schlegel, but Bysshe Coffey, Shelley’s Broken World (2021) 121–48, claims that S. had read Kant. The argument for S.’s direct knowledge is based on two sources: Hogg’s claim that S. acquired, but left uncut, Friedrich Gottlob Born’s translation of Kant in 1813 (see Hogg ii 311) and Mary’s journal entry of 1 September 1821 stating that ‘S. reads Kants’ (Mary Jnl i 378). S. seems to see Kant as a representative of obscure metaphysics, as shown by PB3 518–42 which is a humorous attack on the ‘Five thousand crammed octavo pages’ (523) of Born’s Kant. Peacock satirises the influence of Kant’s philosophy on Coleridge in Melincourt (1817) and Nightmare Abbey (1818), and S. criticises Coleridge’s philosophical obscurity in a similar vein in LMG 202–8: see Coleridge — he who sits obscure In the exceeding lustre, and the pure Intense irradiation of a mind, Which, with its own internal lightning blind, Flags wearily through darkness and despair — A cloud-encircled meteor of the air, A hooded eagle among blinking owls. See also PB3 378–87. Hazlitt’s 1817 review of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria in the Edinburgh Review, may have been a further source for S.’s sense of Kant:

852

shelley: selected poems With [?many] an anarch, demagogue and sage Whose name the fresh world thinks already old,

As to the great German oracle Kant, we must take the liberty to say, that his system appears to us the most wilful and monstrous absurdity that ever was invented. If the French theories of the mind were too chemical, this is too mechanical. . .It is an enormous heap of dogmatical and hardened assertions, advanced in contradiction to all former systems, and all unsystematical opinions and impressions. (Hazlitt Works xvi 123) Catherine] Catherine II of Russia, known as ‘the Great’, ruled from 1762 to 1796, and her reign is seen as a golden age in terms of social progress and military conquest. At the start of her reign, she encouraged religious toleration generally and toward Muslims in the Crimea specifically, and was viewed as an enlightened despot inspired by Voltaire and Diderot. But her role in the First Partition of Poland in 1772 and her long and bloody war with the Ottomans from 1773 tainted her benevolent reputation. In the year of her death, Coleridge wrote a withering attack on Catherine’s foreign policy in the epode to ‘Ode to the Departing Year’ (1796), calling her an ‘insatiate Hag’ (l. 45), and proclaiming in ll. 58–9: ‘Th’exterminating Fiend is fled —/(Foul her Life and dark her Doom!)’. S. knew this poem and it appears have influenced OL (Longman iii, no. 322) (see headnote and notes to ll. 171–3, 249). Byron set Don Juan IX in Catherine’s court and portrayed the Empress as keen on military and amorous conquest (see Don Juan IX lvii-lxv). (A draft of this canto was completed in August 1822 and it was published in 1823; Byron PW v 736). Leopold] Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1765–90) and Holy Roman Emperor (1790–2), reformed the government of Tuscany and was considered an enlightened despot. S. noted Leopold’s legacy in a letter to Peacock of 10 March 1820: ‘We live here under a nominal tyranny, administered under the philosophic laws of Leopold, and the mild opinions which are the fashion here. Tuscany is unlike all the other Italian states, in this respect’ (L ii 177). Leopold was known to have ridden in triumph, see Volney, Ruins 313: . . .the people are so servile and so ignorant! they have prostrated themselves before the yoke which we scarcely had the boldness to show to them.* * The inhabitants of Vienna, for example, who harnessed themselves like cattle and drew the chariot of Leopold. 237. And hoary anarchs, demagogues, and sage — 1824; Each hoary anarch and demagogue and sage TL (GM); Chained hoary anarch, demagogue and sage TL (Reiman); Chained hoary anarchs, demagogue and sage Reiman (2002). S. first began the line Each with his which he cancelled and tried Chained above, and then wrote And [?many] Kings and below this With. The word often taken for hoary seems to lack the high initial upstroke needed for an h so many is our conjectural reading. Chained is part of a failed speculative start of l. 237 so does not need to be considered as part of this line. Although faint, With seems to be a later uncancelled start than And so is preferred. S. then deleted Kings and wrote anarchs, seers before cancelling seers and trying an to make an anarch before cancelling this phrase. He then wrote & after anarchs to reinstate it followed by demagogues & sages. S. then seems to have faced the problem that this line — With many anarchs & demagogues & sages — was both hypermetric and lacking in euphony. To solve this S. made anarchs and sages singular (but seems to have forgotten demagogues), added a comma after anarch (but forgot to delete the now redundant first &), and restated the earlier an with an underlining, to make an anarch, demagogue & sage. This reading means that l. 237 does not define the occupations of Voltaire, Catherine, Leopold, and Kant, but instead describes other ‘spoilers spoiled’, of less renown, whom they were among. anarch] A usage peculiar to S., who saw these monarchs as tyrants, and all tyranny as essentially lawless, and thus anarchic. See also Lines Written among the Euganean Hills l. 152 and note. 238. — name the world thinks always old, 1824. old,] old — Box 1.

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853

‘For in the battle Life and they did wage She remained conqueror — I was overcome By my own heart alone, which neither age ‘Nor tears nor infamy nor now the tomb Could temper to its object’ — ‘Let them pass’ — I cried — ‘the world and its mysterious doom

245 ‘Is not so much more glorious than it was That I desire to worship those who drew New figures on its false and fragile glass ‘As the old faded.’ — ‘Figures ever new Rise on the bubble, paint them how you may;

240–3. I was . . . object] Bradley was the first to probe the grammar and meaning of these lines — see Bradley Notes, 451–2 — and seems right in thinking that ‘temper’ means ‘to modify, usually to moderate or subdue, this or that so as to make it suitable to this or that’. Although the meaning is by no means clear, our reading is that ‘its’ refers to Rousseau’s ‘heart’, so as to make ‘object’ refer to the person he was in love with, i.e. his heart’s object, (an interpretation Bradley is unconvinced by). We favour this interpretation for two reasons. First, this reading allows Rousseau both to differentiate himself from those chained to the car and to explain his present situation, deformed by the roadside. Despite age, emotion, infamy, and death, he could not control himself: his ‘mutiny within’ is not one concerned with a desire for fame or for domination, but in tempering his own excess of love. S. may be remembering Hazlitt’s claim that, No object that had once made an impression on [Rousseau] was ever after effaced. . .He owed the power which he exercised over the opinions of all of Europe, by which he created numberless disciples, and overturned established systems, to the tyranny which his feelings, in the first instance, exercised over himself. (Hazlitt Works, iv 88–9) Secondly, if we understand Rousseau to claim that he cannot control his heart, then S. could be making a reference to Letter 54 of part 1 of Julie. In Letter 54, Saint-Preux is in Julie’s room awaiting his lover, and claims, ‘Quel bonheur d’avoir trouvé de l’encre et du papier! J’exprime ce que je sens pour en tempérer l’excès, je donne le change à mes transports en les décrivant’ (Oeuvres complètes ii 147; ‘How fortunate to have found ink and paper! I express what I feel to temper its excess, I hold my transports in abeyance by describing them’, trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché). This effort to temper his heart is thwarted at Julie’s entrance, on which the letter concludes: ‘Mon cœur, mon foible cœur, tu succombes à tant d’agitations. Ah cherche des forces pour supporter la félicité qui t’accable!’ (Oeuvres complètes ii 147; ‘My heart, my weak heart, thou succumbest at such turbulence. Ah, find the strength to bear the felicity that overwhelms thee!’, trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché). S. had this letter on his mind just before the composition period of TL: he wrote from Pisa to John Gisborne on April 10 1822 about the possible influence of Julie on Goethe and asked him ‘Do you remember the 54th letter of the 1st part of the Nouvelle Heloise?’ (L ii 407). 249. Rise on the bubble] bubble is used figuratively to mean a thing ‘fragile, insubstantial, empty, or worthless’ (OED 2), and is describing the ‘world’ of l. 244, in which these ‘figures’ have briefly risen to prominence. bubble, . . . may;] bubble . . . may Box 1. how] as 1824.

854 250

shelley: selected poems We have but thrown, as those before us threw, ‘Our shadows on it as it passed away. But mark how chained to the triumphal chair The mighty phantoms of an elder day —

‘All that is mortal of great Plato there 255 Expiates the joy and woe his master knew not; The star that ruled his doom was far too fair — ‘And Life, where long that flower of Heaven grew not, Conquered the heart by love which gold or pain Or age or sloth or slavery could subdue not; 260

‘Be[          ] walk the [        ] twain,

250. us threw,] us, threw — Box 1. 251. as] ere TL (GM). away.] away Box 1. 252. mark] mark, Box 1. 255. not;] not Box 1. 256. The star that ruled his doom] Plato cast his lover Aster as the ‘Morning Star’ in an epigram attributed to him in the Greek Anthology vii 670. To Stella (Longman iii 721–2, no. 352) is a translation of this epigram, which is used as the epigraph for Adonais. The] That TL (GM), TL (Reiman). That appears to be changed to The in Box 1 rather than vice versa as suggested in BSM i 308. 257. not,] not Box 1. 258. the] that 1824 (the is written over that in Box 1). 260. And near walk the [      ] twain, 1824, TL (GM); And near him walk the [       ] twain 1839 (a change which suggests that Mary went back to the MS to check this line in preparing 1839 for the press); And near [          ] walk the [ ] twain TL (Reiman). S. first wrote And near walk the twain leaving a gap before the last word. He then cancelled And near and wrote Be above, which is not cancelled and is possibly a start for a preposition such as Behind, Beside, or Before (S. may not have finished this word as he knew he would need to return to fill the gap before twain). The obvious word to fill this second lacuna would be ‘Macedonian’, a word S. had recently used in a cancelled draft on Nbk 21 p. 261 related to ‘Could Arethusa to her fountain run’ (Lines connected with Hellas Appendix K), which reads Macedonia, its young Conqueror. So, a possible intention for the line could be ‘Behind walk the Macedonian twain’. Just below the gap in Box 1, S. wrote Srumfredevi in a thicker ink than the rest of the line, a word which is explained by three lines written vertically in the margin on the same folio: Srumfredevi Sir Humphry Davy Davi Sir Humphry Davy, chemist and inventor (1778–1829), lived in Italy from 1819–20. S. read Davy’s Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (1813) in 1820 and made notes on it in Nbk 14. Srumfredevi refers to one of many mistranscriptions of Davy’s name used by Italians who had only heard but never seen the chemist’s full name. There is some evidence that Davy enjoyed these approximations — he signed off letters to an Italian friend ‘Onofrio Davy’ in 1821 and 1825 (see The Collected Letters of Humphry Davy, eds Tim Fulford and Sharon Ruston (2020) iii 283, 562). Byron socialised with Davy at Ravenna in spring 1820 (see Byron L&J vii 95), and he is probably S.’s source for this portmanteau of Davy’s

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The tutor and his pupil, whom Dominion Followed as tame as vulture in a chain. — ‘The world was darkened beneath either pinion Of him whom from the flock of conquerors 265 Fame singled as her thunder-bearing minion;

name. Its inclusion at this point in the draft is curious. The placement of the word in a gap suggests that S. added the word after he had written the lines in TL. The marginal gloss also carefully avoids TL draft and appears to be in a different ink from that used for Srumfredevi, suggesting S. may had added the gloss some time after the word, to remind himself of its meaning. It is unlikely that S. intended to include the word Srumfredevi in TL, and especially not at this point (which seems to require an adjective). GM (TL) argues that ‘By accident the blank is ludicrously filled’, while TL (Reiman) argues that ‘this notation may tell us something about Shelley’s attitude toward Davy as well as the nature of the adjective for which Shelley was searching. . . [S.] may have set up Davy in his own mind as a symbol of the same kind of ruler-of-minds as is the Aristotle of the poem’. What the apparently witty Srumfredevi is supposed to tell us about S.’s attitude to Davy is unclear, but it is possible that S. had considered including a figure from modern science in the triumph, and that Davy, who Byron called ‘the Man of Chemistry’ (Byron L&J vii 78) would have been a suitable figure, were it not for the fact that he was still living. S. may have been familiar with Davy’s abstract pantheistic poem ‘The Spinosist’, which has some resonances with the opening of TL, and was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine lxxvi: 2 (1806) p. 1148. The poem begins: Lo! o’er the earth the kindling spirits pour The flames of life, that bounteous Nature gives The limpid dew becomes the rosy flower, The insensate dust awakes, and moves, and lives. It is also possible that S. was simply told or reminded of this amusing nickname for Davy while this piece of paper was to hand, on which he then wrote Srumfredevi at an available gap. twain,] 1824; twain Box 1. 261. The tutor and his pupil] Aristotle and Alexander the Great. The source for the belief that Aristotle tutored Alexander in his youth is Diogenes, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, v 1 4: ἐντεῦθέν τε γενέσθαι ἐν Μακεδονίᾳ παρὰ Φιλίππῳ καὶ λαβεῖν μαθητὴν παρ᾿ αὐτοῦ τὸν υἱὸν Ἀλέξανδρον (‘next that he stayed in Macedonia at Philip’s court and received from him his son Alexander as his pupil’). S. mentions the Alexander legend in OL 217–8, ‘Lift the victory-flashing sword,/And cut the snaky knots of this foul gordian word’, and there is an extensive discussion of Alexander by Caleb and Falkland in Godwin, Things as They Are; Or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) (Godwin Novels iii 98–101). The two argue over how and why Alexander came to be called ‘Great’, and their debate on how we commemorate those who use and misuse power is relevant for those chained to the triumph. Falkland sees Alexander as a civilising force, who ‘formed to himself a sublime image of excellence, and his only ambition was to realise it in his own story’ (98), whereas Caleb sees him as a tyrant and claims ‘Man is surely a strange sort of creature, who never praises any one more heartily than him who has spread destruction and ruin over the face of nations!’ (99). 262. Alexander had such power that he could make dominion his pet, unlike the fallen Napoleon discussed in ll. 216–24. 265. Fame singled as her] Fame singled out for her 1824 (as is written over for in Box 1; there is no authority for ‘out’).

856

shelley: selected poems ‘The other long outlived both woes and wars Throned in new thoughts of men, and still had kept The jealous keys of truth’s eternal doors

270

‘If Bacon’s spirit [          ] had not leapt Like lightning out of darkness; he compelled The Proteus shape of Nature’s as it slept ‘To wake and to unbar the caves that held The treasure of the secrets of its reign. — See the great bards of old who inly quelled

267. new] the 1824 (new is written above the uncanc. in Box 1). 268. keys] key 1824. 269. Bacon’s] Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), English philosopher, statesman, and author, was a proponent and practitioner of the scientific method and is considered to be the father of empiricism. Voltaire devoted the twelfth of his Letters Concerning the English (1733) to Bacon and called him ‘the scaffold with which the new philosophy was raised’ (p. 87). Bacon was foundational to S.’s outlook, and Bacon’s work is mentioned frequently in his prose, e.g. On Christianity (Prose Works 261), L&C (no. 143) Preface ll. 165–8, PU Preface ll. 72–82, DP (Reiman (2002) paras 8, 36). In PVR S. writes The exposition of a certain portion of religious imposture, drew with it an enquiry into political imposture, and was attended with an extraordinary exertion of the energies of intellectual power. Shakespeare and Lord Bacon and the great writers of the age of Elizabeth and James the 1st were at once the effects of this new spirit in men’s minds, and the causes of its more complete development (SC vi 966–7) Bacon’s spirit] Bacon’s eagle spirit 1824 (there is no authority for eagle in Box 1.) 270. compelled] Cp. Adonais 381–3: the one Spirit’s plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there, All new successions to the forms they wear; 271. The] That TL (GM). The That preferred by GM is written above The Proteus in Box  1 and is cancelled, but appears to be part of a previous incomplete draft of l. 271 beginning If that. Proteus] In Greek mythology, Proteus is a prophetic sea-god who lurks in caves, and is capable of changing shape to elude capture; he will only give a prophecy if captured and compelled to do so by someone able to overcome his shape-changing (see Odyssey iv 380–424, Ovid Met. viii 730–7); hence protean, ‘versatile; capable of assuming different forms’. See also ‘Proteus Wordsworth, who shall bind thee?’ (Longman iii 160–1, no. 243). S. may have in mind the thirteenth part of Bacon’s De sapientia veterum (The Wisdom of the Ancients) (1609) 49–52, entitled ‘Proteus sive Materia’ (Proteus, or Matter), in which the myth of Proteus is said to ‘ad abdita naturae et conditiones materiae pertinere’ (pertain to the hidden secrets of nature and the conditions of matter). Nature’s] Nature 1824. The apostrophe has two possible functions: it could be linked to ‘If Bacon’s spirit’ in l. 269 to mean ‘Nature’s’ spirit, or it could be a reflexive construction meaning ‘Nature’s’ Protean shape. 272. To wake, and lead him to the caves that held 1824; To wake and follow to the caves that held TL (GM). 273. reign. —] reign — Box 1. 274. See the great bards of elder time, who quelled 1824. 274–6. the great . . . known] See Dante’s encounter with his poetic forbears in Inferno iv 79–90, 94–6:

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275 ‘The passions which they sung, as by their strain May well be known: [their living melody] Tempers its own contagion to the vein ‘Of those who are infected with it — I Have suffered what I wrote, or viler pain! — 280 ‘And so my words were seeds of misery —

Intanto voce fu per me udita: ‘Onorate l’altissimo poeta; l’ombra sua torna, ch’era dipartita.’ Poi che la voce fu restata e queta, vidi quattro grand’ ombre a noi venire: sembianz’ avevan né trista né lieta. Lo buon maestro cominciò a dire: ‘Mira colui con quella spada in mano, che vien dinanzi ai tre sì come sire: quelli è Omero poeta sovrano; l’altro è Orazio satiro che vene; Ovidio è’l terzo, e l’ultimo Lucano. . . Così vid’ i’ adunar la bella scola di quel signor de l’altissimo canto che sovra li altri com’ aquila vola. (‘Meantime a voice I heard: “Honour the bard Sublime! his shade returns that left us late!’ No sooner ceas’d the sound, than I beheld Four mighty spirits towards us bend their steps, Of semblance neither sorrowful nor glad. When thus my master kind began: “Mark him, Who in his right hand bears that falchion keen, The other three preceding, as their lord. This is that Homer, of all bards supreme: Flaccus the next in satire’s vein excelling; The third is Naso; Lucan is the last.” So I beheld united the bright school Of him the monarch of sublimest song, That o’er the others like an eagle soars.’) 276. known:] known, Box 1. [their living melody]] for their soft melody TL (GM); their living melody TL (Reiman) (without brackets). The words their living melody are cancelled in Box 1; for their [?soft] are not, but their distribution in the MS and the doubt about soft makes the present reading, also in 1824, preferable. 278–82. There are insufficient rhymes to continue the terza rima at this point in Box 1, but S. did leave a gap in the MS into which he could later insert a line to end-rhyme with ‘misery’ and ‘I’. We follow TL (GM) and TL (Reiman) in opting for an irregular two-line stanza (ll. 278–9) followed by a complete rhyming tercet (ll. 280–2). 1824 forms a tercet from ll. 278–280 and then inserts three lines of asterisks, before resuming at ‘he pointed to a company’ (l. 282). 280. my words were seeds of misery] See the opening of Ugolino’s speech at Inferno xxxiii 7–9:

858

shelley: selected poems Even as the deeds of others.’ — ‘Not as theirs?’ I said — he pointed to a company

In which I recognized amid the heirs Of Caesar’s crime, from him to Constantine, 285 The Anarchs old whose force and murderous snares Had founded many a sceptre-bearing line And spread the plague of blood and gold abroad, And mitre-cinctured phantoms, men divine

‘Ma se le mie parole esser dien seme che frutti infamia al traditor ch’i’ rodo, parlare e lagrimar vedrai inseme.’ (‘ “But if words, That I may utter, shall prove seed to bear Fruit of eternal infamy to him, The traitor whom I gnaw at, thou at once Shalt see me speak and weep.” ’) were] have 1824. 281. others . . .  . theirs?] others — . . . theirs. Box 1. 282. said — he] said he Box 1; said, and TL (GM). 284. Caesar’s] Julius Caesar (100 BC-44 BC), Roman statesman whose appointment as dictator in 49 BC meant he was the first to wield the kind of power that was later held by the emperors of Rome. crime, . . . Constantine,] crime . . . Constantine Box 1; crime, . . . Constantine; 1824. It is unclear which Constantine is referred to. The last Roman Emperor was Constantine XI (1449–53), so in this reading the ‘crime’ ranges from the begetter of the Roman empire to its last emperor. Reiman (2002) claims S. refers to Constantine I, who ruled from 306–337 AD. This reading is persuasive: Constantine I was the first emperor to make Christianity a state religion, which explains the transition from ­‘sceptre-bearing’ anarchs to ‘mitre-cinctured . . . men divine’ in l. 288, but this reading does not offer the chronological range implied by ‘from him to Constantine’. 285. The Anarchs old] The anarch chiefs, 1824. Anarchs] See note to l. 237. In Paradise Lost ii 988 Chaos is described as the ‘anarch old’. 287. blood and gold] gold and blood 1824; a frequent collocation to represent oppression in S.’s work, e.g. PU I 531, MA 65, 298, Mazenghi (Longman ii 352–61, no. 166) ll. 19–20, OL 43, and Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon l. 35. abroad,] abroad Box 1. 288. mitre-cinctured] I.e. wearing a mitre (the headdress of a bishop). Cp. Gray, The Progress of Poesy l. 62: ‘Their feather-cinctured chiefs’. 288–92. men divine .  .  . quenched] The imagery here is reminiscent of the attack on priests in OL 226–40: O, that the wise from their bright minds would kindle Such lamps within the dome of this dim world, That the pale name of PRIEST might shrink and dwindle Into the hell from which it first was hurled, A scoff of impious pride from fiends impure; Till human thoughts might kneel alone Each before the judgement-throne

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Who rose like shadows between Man and god, Till that eclipse, still hanging under Heaven, Was worshipped by the world o’er which they strode, For the true Sun it quenched. — ‘Their power was given But to destroy,’ replied the leader — ‘I Am one of those who have created, even

295 ‘If it be but a world of agony.’ — ‘Whence camest thou and whither goest thou? How did thy course begin,’ I said, ‘and why? ‘Mine eyes are sick of this perpetual flow Of its own aweless soul, or of the power unknown! O, that the words which make the thoughts obscure From which they spring, as clouds of glimmering dew From a white lake blot heaven’s blue portraiture, Were stripped of their thin masks and various hue And frowns and smiles and splendours not their own, Till in the nakedness of false and true They stand before their Lord, each to receive its due. See also Cowper’s description of priests in Task ii 462–3, ‘He that negotiates between God and man,/ As God’s ambassador’, and Southey, Letters from England (1808) iii 135: Swedenborg teaches that these residents. . . built Heavens for themselves, which. . . intercepted the spiritual light and heat, that is divine love, in their way from Heaven to Earth. At length this eclipse become total; there was no faith in the Christian church[.] 288. And Gregory and John, and men divine, 1824; And Gregory, and John, and men divine, TL (GM); And Gregory and John and men divine TL (Reiman). The 1824 reading takes the words above the cancelled second and third words in the first draft of this line in Box 1 (And every hierarch). It seems more likely, however, that the uncancelled words below the line represent S.’s latest intentions (phantoms is written above shadows canc.). By 1822 Gregory was a name chosen by fifteen Popes, including Gregory I (known as ‘Gregory the Great’), and John had been chosen by twenty-one. S.’s earlier attempt at the line could be referring to a specific ‘Gregory’ or ‘John’, but, more likely, S. chose the names for their common usage, so as to convey a number of Popes (as he does in l. 497). 289. Man and god,] Man and god Box 1; man and God; 1824. 290. eclipse, . . . Heaven,] eclipse . . . Heaven Box 1. under] over 1824. 291. strode,] strode Box 1. 292. quenched. —] quenched — Box 1. 293. destroy,] destroy: Box 1. 296–7. Whence camest thou . . . and why?] The questioning by the narrator of Rousseau is typical of the interaction between Dante, Virgil, and those they meet in the Commedia, e.g. Inferno xix 31–48 and Purgatorio v 85–96 and xvi 22–54. In Cyprian (Longman vi, no. 441) S. renders Calderón’s ‘dime quién eres, siquiera/por la piedad que me das’ (EMP ll. 1287–8) (‘tell me who you are, even if only for the pity that you cause in me’ trans. Jonathan Thacker) as, ‘Who art thou? & whence comest thou?/[& why?]’ (see l. 106 and n.) so that the Spanish imperative dime is turned into the string of questions, which then become a central characteristic of TL. See also Job i 7 ‘And the Lord said unto Satan, “Whence comest thou?” Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it”.’ 296. camest] comest 1824.

860

300

shelley: selected poems Of people, and my heart of one sad thought. — Speak.’ — ‘Whence I came partly I seem to know ‘And how and by what paths I have been brought To this dread pass, methinks even thou mayst guess; Why this should be my mind can compass not —

‘Whither the conqueror hurries me still less. 305 But follow thou, and from spectator turn Actor or victim in this wretchedness ‘And what thou wouldst be taught I then may learn From thee — now listen . . . In the April prime When all the forest tips began to burn 310

‘With kindling green, touched by the azure clime Of the young year, I found myself asleep

300. Speak!” — “Whence I am, I partly seem to know, 1824. 302. guess;] guess Box 1. 304. less.] less Box 1. 305–6. and from spectator turn/Actor or victim] See Gibbon, ‘Upon the Triumphs of the Romans’, Miscellaneous Works (1796) iii 159, where he claims the Roman Triumph ‘converted the spectators into actors’. Cp. Adonais 184–6: Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene The actors or spectators? Great and mean Meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow. 307–8. S. first wrote And I from thee may then the secret which he cancelled and wrote the present l. 307 beneath it. He began the next line From thee — There is a cavern and cancelled all but From thee and wrote — now listen . . . beneath. 309. tips] tops TL (Reiman). 310. green,] green Box 1. 310–11. touched . . . year] A periphrastic construction to describe the spring sunlight shining on the trees, in which azure refers to the ‘clear blue colour of the unclouded sky’ (OED 4), and ‘clime’ refers to the atmosphere (see OED 3). 311–8. GM in SN (1962) 108–9 points out that the landscape Rousseau describes shares something with Les Charmettes, the idyllic estate that Rousseau and Madame de Warens leave Annecy for in 1736 described in Confessions v: ‘Entre deux coteaux assez elevés est un petit vallon nord et sud au fond duquel coule une rigolle entre des cailloux et des arbres’ (Oeuvres complètes i 224; ‘Between two rather high hills is a little dale running north and south, at the bottom of which runs a channel among the stones and trees’, trans. Christopher Kelly). 311. Of the young year’s dawn, I was laid asleep 1824; Of the young season, I was laid asleep TL (GM). ‘The apparent apostrophe after “year”, which (assisted the impossible) 1824 reading, is really a comma after “season” above’ (GM). None of year, season, dawn or laid asleep are cancelled in Box 1 so the

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Under a mountain, which from unknown time ‘Had yawned into a cavern high and deep, And from it came a gentle rivulet 315 Whose water like clear air in its calm sweep ‘Bent the soft grass and kept for ever wet The stems of the sweet flowers, and filled the grove With sound which whoso hears must needs forget 320

‘All pleasure and all pain, all hate and love, Which they had known before that hour of rest: A sleeping mother then would dream not of ‘The only child who died upon her breast At eventide, a king would mourn no more The crown of which his brow was dispossessed

325 ‘When the sun lingered o’er the Ocean floor To gild his rival’s new prosperity. — Thou wouldst forget thus vainly to deplore ‘Ills, which if ills, can find no cure from thee, The thought of which no other sleep will quell, 330 Nor other music blot from memory —

reading in TL (GM) is credible. However, the case for taking year and found myself as S.’s latest draft is persuasive. 313. deep,] deep Box 1. 317. sweet flowers] Written above jonquils canc. in Box 1. 318. sound] sounds, 1824 (the terminal s of sounds is clearly cancelled in Box 1). whoso hears] all who hear TL (Reiman). 319. pain, . . . love,] pain . . . love Box 1. 320. rest:] rest Box 1. 321–4. See Robert Burns, ‘Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn’, ll. 73–6: The monarch may forget the crown That on his head an hour has been; The mother may forget the child That smiles sae sweetly on her knee 322. The] Her 1824. 324. brow] brow, Box 1; brows 1824. 325. the Ocean] his ocean 1824. 328. Ills, which if ills] A similar syntax occurs at Paradiso x 113: ‘che, se’l vero è vero’ (‘if truth be truth’). thee,] thee Box 1. 329. quell,] quell Box 1.

862

shelley: selected poems ‘So sweet and deep is the oblivious spell. — Whether my life had been before that sleep The Heaven which I imagine, or a Hell

‘Like this harsh world in which I wake to weep, 335 I know not. I arose and for a space

331–48. Rousseau’s sleep and awakening from the oblivious spell resembles Adam’s Edenic awakening in Paradise Lost viii 253–66, 270–1: As new waked from soundest sleep Soft on the flowery herb I found me laid In balmy sweat, which with his beams the sun Soon dried, and on the reeking moisture fed. Straight toward heaven my wondering eyes I turned, And gazed a while the ample sky, till raised By quick instinctive motion up I sprung, And thitherward endeavouring, and upright Stood on my feet; about me round I saw Hill, dale, and shady woods, and sunny plains, And liquid lapse of murmuring streams; by these Creatures that lived, and moved, and walked, or flew, Birds on the branches warbling; all things smiles, With fragrance and with joy my heart o’erflowed.. . . But who I was, or where, or from what cause, Knew not; 331. oblivious] ‘Of or relating to forgetfulness’ (OED 3). 332. Whether my life] And whether life 1824 (a legitimate alternative reading since And is uncancelled; my is inserted with a caret in Box 1). 334. harsh world] See Hamlet’s death speech at Hamlet V ii 348–9: ‘in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain/To tell my story’. wake to weep] A phrase repeated at l. 430 and found in R&H (Longman ii, no. 144) 775, Hellas ll. 227–8, and Charles the First I iii 33–4. See also Thomas Campbell, ‘Love and Madness, An Elegy’ (1795) ll. 2–4, ‘Roused from drear visions of distempered sleep,/Poor B[roderic] k wakes — in solitude to weep!’, and Robert Southey, ‘Poems on the Slave-Trade, Sonnet IV’ Poems (1797) 36, ll. 2–4, ‘The wretched Slave, as on his native shore,/Rests on his reedy couch: he wakes to weep!’. A similar phrase occurs in a passage from Faust: Nur mit Entsetzen wach’ ich Morgens auf, Ich möchte bittre Thränen weinen, Den Tag zu sehn, der mir in seinem Lauf Nicht Einen Wunsch erfüllen wird, nicht Einen, (Faust 1554–7) (‘In the morning I wake only to horror. I could fain weep bitter tears to see the day, which in its course will not accomplish a wish for me, no, not one,’ trans. Hayward 53) These lines are one of the four passages which Claire transcribed in her journal after beginning to read Faust in October 1821, and they may have been suggested to her for close attention by S. (see discussion in headnote to May-day Night (Longman vi, no. 440)). weep,] weep Box 1. 335. not.] not . . . TL (GM). TL (GM) offers a perfectly plausible interpretation of the array of punctuation marks after not in Box 1; a colon is also possible.

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The scene of woods and waters seemed to keep, ‘Though it was now broad day, a gentle trace Of light diviner than the common Sun Sheds on the common Earth, but all the place 340

‘Was filled with many sounds woven into one Oblivious melody, confusing sense Amid the gliding waves and shadows dun;

‘And as I looked the bright omnipresence Of morning through the orient cavern flowed, 345 And the sun’s image radiantly intense ‘Burned on the waters of the well that glowed Like gold, and threaded all the forest maze With winding paths of emerald fire — there stood ‘Amid the sun, as he amid the blaze

336–7. keep, . . . day,] keep . . . day Box 1. 337–9. a gentle . . . common Earth] Cp. Wordsworth ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, ll. 71–6: The Youth, who daily farther from the East Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day. 338. light .  .  . Sun] See Pierre de Ronsard, ‘Remonstrance au peuple de France’ (1562) quoted in Montaigne, Essais II xii ‘la lumiere commune,/L’oeil du monde’ (‘The common light,/the world’s eye’, trans. John Florio, 3rd edn (1632)). common Sun] See Thomas Gray, ‘Ode on the Pleasure Arising from Vicissitude’, ll. 47–8: ‘The common sun, the air and skies,/To him are opening paradise.’ 339. but] and 1824 (but is written above a cancelled ampersand in Box 1). 340. many] magic 1824; mazy TL (GM) (mazy appears to have been changed to many in Box 1 so as not to echo maze in l. 347). 341. Oblivious] see note to l. 331. 342. Amid the gliding waves & amid the shadows dun Box 1. ‘Probably inadvertent repetition: the two halves of the line are written on different strata owing to cancellation’ (GM). dun;] dun Box 1. See note to l. 92. 344. orient] eastward facing. flowed,] flowed Box 1. 346. Burned on the waters] See Antony and Cleopatra II ii 191–2: ‘The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,/Burnt on the water.’ The ‘scene of woods and waters’ and the ‘shape all light’ herself echo Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra (II ii 190–208). 347. forest] forest’s 1824, TL (GM). 349. sun,] sun Box 1.

864 350

shelley: selected poems Of his own glory, on the vibrating Floor of the fountain, paved with flashing rays, ‘A shape all light, which with one hand did fling Dew on the earth, as if she were the Dawn Whose musical rain forever seemed to sing

355 ‘A silver melody on the mossy lawn,   And still before her on the dusky grass Iris her many-coloured scarf had drawn. — ‘In her right hand she bore a crystal glass

351. rays,] rays Box 1. 353–85. The account of the shape all light appearing by a stream, and its power to erase memory, seems to be influenced by Dante’s first sight of the lady (who Beatrice subsequently calls Matilda) gathering flowers by ‘un rio’ (‘a rill’) in Purgatorio xxviii. S. translated Purgatorio xxviii 1–51 in the summer of 1820, and gave Matilda’s appearance thus, And then appeared to me — even like a thing Which suddenly for blank astonishment Dissolves all other thought, A solitary woman, and she went Singing and gathering flower after flower With which her way was painted and besprent. (Dante’s Purgatorio Canto XXVIII, 1–51 (Longman iii 478–83, no. 331) ll. 37–43) 352. A  shape all light] Cp. WA 81–2, ‘A lovely lady garmented in light/From her own beauty’, and 137–9, ‘her beauty made/The bright world dim, and every thing beside/Seemed like the fleeting image of a shade’. shape] We follow Box 1 and 1824 in giving a lower-case s to the shape here and in its later appearances in ll. 369, 379, 412, 425, 432. 353. Dew] See note to l. 67. 354. And the invisible rain did ever sing 1824. 1824 gives the cancelled first draft of this line in Box 1. musical] invisible TL (Reiman). 355. melody] music 1824, TL (Reiman). S. first wrote melody upon and cancelled this phrase, writing music above. He also wrote tune upon the flowery lawn beneath the line, and cancelled tune, the first two letters of upon and flowery (which he replaces with mossy written above). He then cancelled music and wrote melody again. This second melody appears to be cancelled but is not: as TL (JEGP) 604 notes, ‘music is indeed cancelled, but not melody — this “cancellation” is a tercet-ruling’. lawn,] TL (GM), TL Reiman; lawn Box 1. 356. her] me 1824. 357. Iris] The goddess of the rainbow in Greek mythology. Cp. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV lxxii ll. 1–3: ‘on the verge,/From side to side, beneath the glittering morn, / An Iris sits’, and Byron’s note to Manfred II ii 1. many-coloured scarf] scarf is here being used figuratively to describe a rainbow which appears in the shape of a broad strip of woven material (see OED 3). See also Ceres’ description of the ‘Rich scarf ’ of Iris in The Tempest IV i 82.

70  the triumph of life

360

865

Mantling with bright nepenthe; — the fierce splendour Fell from her as she moved under the mass ‘Of the deep cavern, and with palms so tender Their tread broke not the mirror of its billow,

359–66. Cp. Byron’s account of Parnassus in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I lxii ll. 6–9: the Muses’ seat, art now their grave Some gentle spirit still pervades the spot, Sighs in the gale, keeps silence in the cave, And glides with glassy foot o’er yon melodious wave. 359. Mantling] Winking TL (GM). S. seems to be using ‘mantling’ to mean ‘bubbling’, as in Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770) l. 250: ‘the mantling bliss’ of a cup of ale. A similar use of the term occurs in a poem contemporary with TL: Felicia Hemans, The Vespers of Palermo (1823) IV ii 29–31: In the flowers which wreathe Its mantling cup there is a scent unknown, Fraught with some strange delirium[.] nepenthe] ‘A drink, potion, or drug bringing, or supposed to bring, forgetfulness of trouble or grief ’ (OED 1a), that originates in the pain-banishing Egyptian opiate termed φάρμακον νηπενθές (‘nepenthe pharmakon’) which Helen gives Telemachus in Odyssey iv 219–35. See also Spenser’s Cambina in Faerie Queene IV iii 37–43 who arrives ‘in a charet of straunge furniment’ (38 l. 4) and in her ‘other hand a cup she hild,/The which was with Nepenthe to the brim vpfild’ (42 ll. 8–9). In Faerie Queene IV iii 43 Spenser defines the substance: Nepenthe is a drinck of souerayne grace, Deuized by the Gods, for to asswage Harts grief, and bitter gall away to chace, Which stirs vp anguish and contentious rage: In stead thereof sweet peace and quiet age It doth establish in the troubled mynd. Few men, but such as sober are and sage, Are by the gods to drinck thereof assynd; But such as drinck, eternall happinesse do fynd. S. mentions the plant supposed to supply the drug, also called nepenthe, in PU II iv 84. Two passages in WA (177–84; 593–600) show the Witch carrying ‘liquors clear and sweet’ (177) and a ‘strange panacea’ (594) that seems to have a similar effect to nepenthe. 361. Out of the deep cavern, with palms so tender, 1824. 1824 offers a viable reading but TL Reiman notes that ‘ “Out” is more firmly cancelled (twice) than is “&” ’. tender] tender, Box 1. 362–6. See the description of Urania in Adonais 208–12: Out of her secret Paradise she sped, Through camps and cities rough with stone, and steel, And human hearts, which to her aery tread Yielding not, wounded the invisible Palms of her tender feet where’er they fell[.]

866

shelley: selected poems Glided along the river, and did bend her

‘Head under the dark boughs, till like a willow 365 Her fair hair swept the bosom of the stream That whispered with delight to be their pillow. — ‘As one enamoured is upborne in dream O’er lily-paven lakes mid silver mist To music [        ], so this shape might seem

S. also uses palm for ‘sole of the foot’ in PU IV 123–4, ‘Our feet now, every palm,/Are sandalled with calm’ and in The bat and the owl like barn-door fowl (Longman vi, no. 442) ll. 42–4: ‘Though our feet were well shod/Yet the sunbeams we trod/Were too sharp and too hard for our delicate palms.’ This usage is quite unusual in English, although it is used for the sole of the feet of quadrupeds (see OED n. 2 4a). See also Sabrina’s song in Comus 895–8: Whilst from off the waters fleet Thus I set my printless feet O’er the cowslip’s velvet head, That bends not as I tread, 363. Glided] She glided 1824. 366. their] its 1824, GM (TL). 1824 apparently rejects the Box 1 reading on the grounds that the possessive pronoun must refer to hair (l. 365) rather than Head (l. 364) as well. 367. enamoured] enamoured, Box 1. 368. lily-paven lakes] In early drafts of the opening lines, S. includes descriptions of the light emitted by aquatic flowers, e.g. ‘the flowers which pave/The valleys [of the earth], or interwreathe/With mimic stars the caverns of the wave’ (Lines Connected with The Triumph of Life Appendix B ll. 23–5); see also Appendix C ll. 9–11. In SP l. 33 S. calls the lily ‘wand-like’ and in SP 80–1 supports Erasmus Darwin’s belief (Darwin II iii 45) that certain flowers, including the lily, emit light: ‘The beams which dart from many a star/Of the flowers whose hues they bear afar’. This suggests that the lily-paven lakes may sparkle from their stamen, which appear like stars. 369. To music [        ],] Box 1; To wondrous music, 1824, TL (Reiman); music wondrous TL (GM). S. wrote sweetest music in Box 1 then cancelled sweetest and wrote planetary which he then cancelled for wondrous. He then cancelled wondrous and wrote angel and sweetest below. At this point he cancelled these adjectives and music before beginning the line again with To [?]mus which he cancelled before re-writing music. This leaves To and music as the only uncancelled parts of the phrase. The line in its present form is missing a metrical foot and it seems likely S. would have filled this gap in later drafting. He may have intended to maintain the original order of ‘music’ preceded by an adjective, but his latest intention (as TL (GM) suggests), seems to be a change in the order so that ‘music’ is followed by an adjective. 370–1. tread the waves . . . foam] The shape is associated with Venus by her walking on water and the presence of foam. The Venus Anadyomene (‘Venus rising from the Sea’) was an iconic representation of the goddess, painted famously by Apelles (see the story of Pancaste and Alexander the Great narrated in Pliny, Nat. Hist. xxxv 36) and later by Sandro Botticelli in The Birth of Venus (c. 1486). S. describes a Venus Anadyomene in his ‘Notes on Sculptures’ (Julian vi 320–1) calling it ‘perhaps. . . the finest personification of Venus’. It was also thought that Venus was born from sea-foam, see Varro, De Lingua Latina v 63 ‘Poetae de Caelo quod semen igneum cecidisse dicunt in mare ac natam “e spumis” Venerem’ (‘The poets, in that they say that the fiery seed fell from the Sky into the sea and Venus was born “from the foam-masses” ’.) See also Hesiod, Theogony, 188–200.

70  the triumph of life 370

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‘Partly to tread the waves with feet which kissed The dancing foam, partly to glide along The airs that roughened the moist amethyst

‘Or the first morning beams that fell among The trees, or the soft shadows of the trees; 375 And her feet ever to the ceaseless song ‘Of leaves and winds and waves and birds and bees And falling drops, moved in a measure new Yet sweet, as on the summer evening breeze 380

‘Up from the lake a shape of golden dew Between two rocks, athwart the rising moon, Dances i’ the wind where eagle never flew. —

370. feet] palms is written faintly above feet uncanc. in Box 1. 372. The air which roughened the moist amethyst, 1824. moist amethyst] dewy amethyst TL (GM). In Box 1 moist and amethyst are cancelled and an indecipherable word is written above moist (GM is doubtful of his reading in TL (GM)). This phrase is used figuratively to describe the sparkling water that comes into contact with the air. See Keats, Endymion i 739–45: the crystal heavens darken, I watch and dote upon the silver lakes Pictured in western cloudiness, that takes The semblance of gold rocks and bright gold sands, Islands, and creeks, and amber-fretted strands With horses prancing o’er them, palaces And towers of amethyst — 373. first] faint 1824, TL (GM); slant Reiman (2002). The word is written over soft in Box 1. 374. trees;] trees Box 1. 375. ceaseless] In Box 1 S. wrote ceaseless then cancelled it and wrote opiate above. He then reinstated ceaseless with an underlining, but left opiate uncancelled. 377–81. S. could be describing a meteorological phenomenon, which normally occurs in cool mornings in autumn, whereby a mist rises from a warm lake. Here, at evening, the mist then plays in the breeze across the view of the moon, unlike the eagle, which traditionally flies towards the sun. 377. falling] dancing is written faintly, and in a small hand, above falling uncanc. in Box 1. drops,] drops Box 1. in] to 1824. 380. rocks,] rocks Box 1. the rising moon,] 1824. In Box 1 a uncanc. and planet uncanc. are written above the canc. and moon canc. respectively. The 1824 reading is required by the rhyme. 381. Dances i’ the wind] Moves up the east, TL (Reiman). where eagle never flew] See William Lisle Bowles’s description of the North Pole in ‘Spirit of Discovery by Sea’, Poems (1809) v 123–6: Beyond,’tis silent boundless ice, Impenetrable barrier, where all thought Is lost; where never yet the eagle flew, Nor roam’d so far the white-bear through the waste. eagle never] never eagle 1824.

868

shelley: selected poems ‘And still her feet, no less than the sweet tune To which they moved, seemed as they moved, to blot The thoughts of him who gazed on them; and soon

385 ‘All that was, seemed as if it had been not, As if the gazer’s mind was strewn beneath Her feet like embers, and she, thought by thought ‘Trampled its fires into the dust of death, As Day upon the threshold of the east 390 Treads out the lamps of night, until the breath ‘Of darkness reillumine even the least Of heaven’s living eyes — like day she came, Making the night a dream; and ere she ceased ‘To move, as one between desire and shame 395 Suspended, I said — “If, as it doth seem, Thou comest from the realm without a name, ‘ “Into this valley of perpetual dream, Show whence I came, and where I am, and why — Pass not away upon the passing stream.” 400

‘ “Arise and quench thy thirst,” was her reply. And as a shut lily, stricken by the wand Of dewy morning’s vital alchemy,

382–90. And still . . . of night] See Ginevra (Longman iv 203–17, no. 398) ll. 26–8: Whose pale bead images her light fair feet Erased [as] when fleet footsteps of the [sun] Tread out the sparks of night[.] 382. feet,] feet Box 1. 384. them;] them, Box 1. 385. not,] not Box 1. 386. As if] And all 1824. 388. fires] sparks 1824, TL (GM). fires — barely decipherable — is written above sparks canc. in Box 1. death,] death Box 1. 391. reillumine] reillumines TL (GM), TL (Reiman). 392–405. The sole authority for these lines is 1824 (see headnote). 394–5. Cp. A fresh fair child stood by my side (Longman v, no. 418) ll. 41–2: ‘Between desire and fear, thou wert/A wretched thing’. 400–4. It is unclear whether Rousseau drinks from the cup, and therefore whether it is his drinking or his not drinking that leads to the events which culminate in him becoming one of the ‘multitude’ at l.

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‘I rose; and, bending at her sweet command, Touched with faint lips the cup she raised, 405 And suddenly my brain became as sand ‘Where the first wave had more than half erased The track of deer on desert Labrador, Whilst the empty wolf from which they fled amazed ‘Leaves his stamp visibly upon the shore 410   Until the second bursts — so on my sight Burst a new Vision never seen before. — ‘And the fair shape waned in the coming light As veil by veil the silent splendour drops

405–11. The power of the shape all light to strip the mind and then fill it with different thoughts, and the use of snow imagery, is similar to the power of celestial light described by Beatrice at Paradiso ii 106–11: ‘Or, come ai colpi delli caldi rai de la neve riman nudo il suggetto e dal colore e dal freddo primai, così rimaso te ne l’intelletto voglio informar di luce sì vivace, che ti tremolerà nel suo aspetto.’ (‘ “Now, as the substance of the snow, smitten by the warm rays, is left bare both of its former colour and its cold, so I would inform thee, left this bare in thy mind, with a light so living that it will sparkle in thy sight” ’, trans. Sinclair). The image of the erasing wave also appears in a speech of the ‘Lady’ in Fragments of an Unfinished Drama (Longman vi, no. 436) ll. 184–7: Not until my dream became Like a child’s legend on the tideless sand Which the first foam erases half, and half Leaves legible. 407–9. The track . . . shore] See the ‘troops of wolves’ discussed in 1817 172, and in Mont Blanc ll. 69–70, ‘when the eagle brings some hunter’s bone/And the wolf watches her’. Labrador is a large, often frozen, peninsula in Eastern Canada. The peninsula is discussed in Edward Chappell, Voyage of His Majesty’s Ship Rosamond to Newfoundland and the Southern Coast of Labrador (1818). Chappell’s comment on the wildlife of Labrador may be S.’s source for the wolf: This country abounds in wild animals; such as, bears, wolves, foxes, hares, martens, deer, lynxes, squirrels, and porcupines. . .Wolves and foxes are seldom seen, except in winter; when hunger forces them to seek their food even at the very doors of settlements. (p. 140) 407. on] in BSM. Labrador,] Labrador Box 1. 408. empty] fierce TL (Reiman). Written above the word lean canc. in Box 1. Uses of ‘empty’ to mean ‘hungry’ are glossed in OED (see ‘empty’ 7b). See also Charles the First I ii 136–7: ‘And Opportunity, that empty wolf/Flies at his throat who falls.’ wolf] wolf, Box 1. 412. shape] shape, Box 1. light,] light Box 1.

870

shelley: selected poems From Lucifer, amid the chrysolite

415 ‘Of sunrise ere it strike the mountain tops — And as the presence of that fairest planet, Although unseen, is felt by one who hopes ‘That his day’s path may end as he began it In that star’s smile, whose light is like the scent 420 Of a jonquil when evening breezes fan it

414–23. A series of interwoven images about the planet Venus. Venus is Lucifer and the fairest planet, which can be seen at the end and beginning of day as either the Evening Star (Hesperus or Vesper) or the Morning Star (Phosphorus or Lucifer). Venus is also known as the folding star, as its appearance in the evening suggests to the shepherd that it is time to put their sheep in folds, as in Eclogues vi 85–6, ‘cogere donec ovis stabulis numerumque referre/iussit et invito processit Vesper Olympo’ (‘till Vesper gave the word to fold the flocks and tell their tale, as he set forth over an unwilling sky’), and Comus l. 93, ‘The star that bids the shepherd fold’. The strange feeling Rousseau suggests is experienced by this hopeful man in the presence of Venus may be related to Hazlitt’s similarly strange claim in a letter to the Morning Post in 1814 that, He who has seen the evening star set over a poor man’s cottage, or has connected the feeling of hope with the heart of man, and who, although he may have lost the feeling, has never ceased to reverence it — he, Sir, with submission and without a nickname, is the true Jacobin. (Hazlitt Works vii 370) 414. chrysolite] ‘olivine, a silicate of magnesia and iron found in lava. Its colour varies from pale yellowish-green (the precious stone) to dark bottle-green’ (OED 1a). In Revelation xxi 20 the seventh of the twelve foundation stones of the New Jerusalem is made from chrysolite. See Unused stanzas for Adonais (Longman iv, no. 403 Appendix) C l. 8, ‘Pierced deep, as stars of burning chrysolite’, and O l. 5, ‘thunder smoke, whose skirts were chrysolite’. See also, Southey, The Curse of Kehama vii 17–18: ‘Or fix upon the Sun thy strenuous sight/Till thou hast reach’d its orb of chrysolite.’ 415. strike] In Box 1 S. first wrote strikes and then wrote tinge and touch as uncancelled alternatives above. Perhaps concerned about the alliteration these alternatives would create with ‘tops’, S. cancelled the last letter of strikes and underlined the word to reinstate it. 416–7. planet, . . . unseen,] planet . . . unseen Box 1. 420. jonquil] ‘A species of Narcissus having long linear leaves and spikes of fragrant white and yellow flowers’ (OED 1). In 1818 S. and Mary visited a meadow and S. complained that an ‘excess of sweetness’ in the air caused by jonquils nearly made him faint (see Medwin (1913) 198). See also Epipsychidion 450–2 (and note): And from the moss violets and jonquils peep, And dart their arrowy odour through the brain Till you might faint with that delicious pain.

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‘Or the true note in which his dear lament The Brescian shepherd breathes, or the caress That turned his weary slumber to content. — ‘So knew I in that light’s severe excess 425 The presence of that shape which on the stream Moved, as I moved along the wilderness, ‘More dimly than a day-appearing dream, The ghost of a forgotten form of sleep, A light from Heaven whose half-extinguished beam 430

‘Through the sick day in which we wake to weep Glimmers, forever sought, forever lost — So did that shape its obscure tenour keep

421–3. In 1824 Mary writes a footnote to this tercet that states: ‘The favourite song, “Stanco di pascolar le peccorrelle” is a Brescian national air’. The title is normally given as ‘Stanco di pascolar le pecorelle’ (I am tired from pasturing the sheep). The song was popular in Regency Britain: it was published with a score for the harp (Six Venetian Airs for the Voice (?1817) 4–5) and for pianoforte by Vincenzo Pucitta, Stanco di pascolar le pecorelle with the title translated as ‘My eyes in slumber closing’) (?1810); it was also part of the repertoire of Angelica Catalani, the famous soprano who S. disparages for her ‘squall’ in Second Letter to Edward Fergus Graham (Longman i 169–70, no. 57) l. 14. The first verse and chorus in English from the Pucitta score are as follows: My eyes in slumber closing I pressed the verdant ground & while I lay reposing My lambkins gazed around Of sleep the vision flying A melting voice and dear A melting voice and dear A voice with sorrow sighing With sorrow pierced my ear. (Stanco di pascolar le pecorelle 21–2). In a letter to Harry Buxton Forman of 27 March 1877 Robert Browning records the following from a conversation with Leigh Hunt: He had been singing to his own accompaniment the old Stanco di pascolar le pecorelle. I observed: ‘Do you know Shelley has mentioned that air?’ He did not, though he said it had been a great favourite with Shelley. (Letters from Robert Browning to Various Correspondents, ed. Thomas J. Wise (1895) 49). 421. true note] soft note 1824, TL (Reiman). In the first draft of this line in Box 1, S. wrote soft music, cancelled these two words and wrote sweet melody, then cancelled sweet melody above. In the second draft he wrote sweet notes, cancelled sweet and wrote soft above, and cancelled notes and wrote tune above; soft is uncanc., tune is canc. Beneath sweet notes canc. he wrote true note. 425. shape] 1824 Shape Box 1. See note to l. 352. 427. dream,] dream Box 1. 428. sleep,] sleep Box 1. 429–31. See ll. 30–3. 429. from Heaven] of heaven, 1824. 430. wake to weep] See l. 334 and note.

872

shelley: selected poems

‘Beside my path, as silent as a ghost; But the new Vision and its cold bright car 435 With solemn speed and stunning music crossed ‘The forest, and as if from some dread war Triumphantly returning, the loud million Fiercely extolled the fortune of her star. — 440

‘A moving arch of victory the vermilion And green and azure plumes of Iris had Built high over her wind-winged pavilion ‘And underneath etherial glory clad The wilderness, and far before her flew The tempest of the splendour which forbade

445 ‘Shadow to fall from leaf or stone; — the crew Seemed in that light like atomies that dance 434. its] the 1824. car] See note to l. 105. 435. With savage music, stunning music, crost TL (Reiman). solemn speed] see l. 106. stunning] ‘That stuns or stupefies; dazing, astounding, deafening’ (OED 1). Cp. Paradise Lost ii 952, ‘Of stunning sounds and voices all confused’, and L&C 2920, ‘A stunning clang of massive bolts redoubling’. 437. returning,] returning Box 1. 439–40. moving arch . . . Iris] Arches were built to commemorate and record triumphal processions. The Arch of Titus at Rome is one example and S. discusses this arch in a letter to Peacock of March 23 1819 (L ii 89) (see headnote), and in a prose fragment tentatively dated by Nora Crook between the first quarter of 1820 and the spring of 1821. In the fragment S. describes the arch: Titus is represented standing in a chariot drawn by four horses, crowned with laurel, and surrounded by the tumultuous number of his triumphant army, and the magistrates, and priests, and generals, and philosophers, dragged in chains beside his wheels. Behind him stands a Victory eagle-winged. (Julian vi 309) A later incarnation of such a victory arch is the Arc de Triomphe that Napoleon commissioned to celebrate his victory at Austerlitz (see also Byron’s mention of an unfinished arch in Byron L&J v 114: ‘Close to Milan is the beginning of an unfinished triumphal arch — for Napoleon — so beautiful as to make one regret it’s non-completion’). Here S. transmutes the beauty and power of these permanent structures into a mobile colourful arch, which he likens to the curve of a rainbow (Iris is a Greek Goddess associated with rainbows, see note to l. 357). There is a similar image of the rainbow as triumphal arch in The Cloud ll. 67–70: The triumphal arch, through which I march With hurricane, fire, and snow, When the Powers of the Air are chained to my chair Is the million-coloured Bow; 446–7. Cp. the description of the sylphs in Pope, The Rape of the Lock ii 59–64: Some to the Sun their Insect-Wings unfold, Waft on the Breeze, or sink in Clouds of Gold. Transparent Forms, too fine for mortal Sight,

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Within a sunbeam. — Some upon the new ‘Embroidery of flowers that did enhance The grassy vesture of the desert, played, 450 Forgetful of the chariot’s swift advance; ‘Others stood gazing till within the shade Of the great mountain its light left them dim. — Others outspeeded it, and others made ‘Circles around it like the clouds that swim 455 Round the high moon in a bright sea of air; And more did follow, with exulting hymn, ‘The chariot and the captives fettered there, But all like bubbles on an eddying flood Fell into the same track at last and were 460

‘Borne onward. — I among the multitude Was swept; me sweetest flowers delayed not long, Me not the shadow nor the solitude, ‘Me not the falling stream’s Lethean song, Their fluid Bodies half dissolv’d in Light. Loose to the Wind their airy Garments flew, Thin glitt’ring Textures of the filmy Dew;

Cp. also Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp’ ll. 36–7: ‘Whilst thro’ my half-clos’d eye-lids I behold/The sunbeams-dance, like diamonds, on the main’. 446. atomies] ‘particles of dust rendered visible by light’ or motes in a sunbeam (see ‘atomy’ OED 1). that] to 1824. 450. advance;] advance Box 1. 455. air;] air Box 1. 456. hymn,] hymn Box 1. 457. there,] there Box 1. 460. This ambiguity has been the subject of critical debate. Baker 267 argues that he does not quench his thirst, while Harold Bloom (Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959) 268–9) argues that S. is simply using a periphrastic construction to say that Rousseau did drink and was thus seduced. GM (SN (1962) 116–9) argues that it is ‘reasonable to suspect that if Shelley did not make the issue clear, it cannot greatly matter whether Rousseau drinks or not. The Shape’s command was: “Arise and quench thy thirst”, in response to which Rousseau “Touched with faint lips the cup”. Whether or not he tastes the contents, it is evident that he has not done what he was told to do; he fails through timidity. . .Had Rousseau quenched his thirst at the cup, as he was commanded, the fair Shape’s influence would not have been so weakened by the experience that followed; he would have known enough to resist Life’s seduction’. While GM’s reading is persuasive, there does seem to be a chain of causes from the shape’s Arise, to Rousseau’s rose, touched, and became that suggest he does follow her instruction to drink, and that the subsequent vision is a consequence of this. 460. I] I, Box 1. 461. long,] long Box 1. 463. the] that 1824. Lethean] Pertaining to the river Lethe in Hades whose water had the ability to make the dead forget their existence on earth. song,] song Box 1.

874

shelley: selected poems

Me not the phantom of that early form 465 Which moved upon its motion, — but among ‘The thickest billows of the living storm I plunged, and bared my bosom to the clime Of that cold light, whose airs too fierce deform. 470

‘Before the chariot had begun to climb The opposing steep of that mysterious dell, Behold a wonder worthy of the rhyme ‘Of him who from the lowest depths of Hell Through every Paradise and through all glory Love led serene, and who returned to tell

475 ‘In words of hate and awe the wondrous story How all things are transfigured, except Love; For deaf as is a sea which wrath makes hoary ‘The world can hear not the sweet notes that move

464. Me not] Me, not Box 1, 1824, TL (GM), TL (Reiman). This is the third consecutive line opening Me not, but the only one with a comma in the middle of it. GM and Reiman keep this manuscript comma, and Mary goes back to add commas between Me and not in the openings of ll. 463 and 462. This comma breaks the anaphora and seems redundant grammatically. It may be explained by the drafting of l. 464: S. initially wrote Me not that fairest shape then cancelled this and wrote Me, delayed not that below, which he then struck through leaving only Me, before writing not the phantom of that early form beneath. The redundant comma in Box 1 may be left over from his second attempt at the line in which he broke the run of Me not openings. 465–7. but . . . plunged] See note to ll. 43–6. 465. but] first TL (GM). 466. the] that 1824. 468. fierce] soon 1824, TL (Reiman) (soon is cancelled in Box 1). deform.] deform — Box 1. 470. dell,] dell Box 1. 471. rhyme] Cp. two occasions of S. calling his own works ‘visionary rhyme’, in WA 7–8, ‘Prithee, for this one time,/Content thee with a visionary rhyme’, and LMG 166–8, ‘how/You listened to some interrupted flow/Of visionary rhyme’. 472. him] Dante Alighieri (?1265–1321), the author of the Commedia (1308–1320) in three cantiche: Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise). See headnote for the influence of Dante on S.’s use of the terza rima in TL and on how the conversations of the narrator and Rousseau resemble those of Dante’s pilgrim and Virgil. 475. In words of hate and awe] The words of hate and care; 1824. See Daemon (Longman i 489–508, no. 115) i 91: ‘From hate and awe thy heart is free’. 476. Love;] Love Box 1. 478–9. See ll. 1–2 of Dante’s canzone which opens Convivio ii, ‘Voi che’ntendendo il terzo Ciel movete’ (‘O you who move the third heaven by intellection’, trans. Richard H. Lansing), which S. translated between 25 August 1820 and 16 February 1821 as: ‘Ye who [  ] the third Heaven move/Hear the discourse which is within my heart’ (Ye who [  ] the third Heaven move (Longman iv, no. 390) ll. 1–2).

70  the triumph of life

480

875

The sphere whose light is melody to lovers — A wonder worthy of his rhyme: the grove ‘Grew dense with shadows to its inmost covers, The earth was grey with phantoms, and the air Was peopled with dim forms, as when there hovers

479. lovers —] lovers. — Box 1. 480. rhyme:] TL (GM); rhyme — Box  1. The cancelled first draft of this line reads: Behold I  sing a wonder, for the grove. GM glosses the punctuation in TL (GM) thus: ‘The cancellation emphasizes that 480 is simply a resumption of 471, and that the wonder referred to in both lines is not Dante’s but the vision of shadows that is to follow. The pointing of the text (like that of 1847) tries to clarify this meaning, which is quite obscured in other editions’. 480–543. the grove .  .  . abide] Rousseau’s account of the apparitions surrounding him — variously called ‘forms’ (l. 483, 517) ‘phantoms’ (ll. 487, 534) and ‘shadows’ (ll. 481, 528, 541) — is based on Lucretius’ discussion of ‘simulacra’ (‘images’) in De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) iv 26–89, see especially iv 30–7:   esse ea quae rerum simulacra vocamus; quae, quasi membranae summo de corpore rerum dereptae, volitant ultroque citroque per auras, atque eadem nobis vigilantibus obvia mentes terrificant atque in somnis, cum saepe figuras contuimur miras simulacraque luce carentum, quae nos horrifice laguentis saepe sopore excierunt[.] (‘there exist what we call images of things; which, like films drawn from the outermost surface of things, flit about hither and thither through the air; it is these same that, ­encountering us in wakeful hours, terrify our minds, as also in sleep, when we often behold wonderful shapes and images of the dead, which have often aroused us in horror while we lay languid in sleep’). S.’s focus on the macabre possibilities of these ‘shadows’ may be inspired by the fresco cycle at the Campo Santo in Pisa, attributed to Buonamico Buffalmacco (active 1315–1336). Much of the cycle was destroyed by bombing in 1944, but that which remains shows The Triumph of Death. This fresco has all of the chaos of S.’s description, and features (on the left) a procession on horseback heading towards coffins and (on the right) winged angels and demons snatching away humans from earth. Leigh Hunt discusses the frescoes in ‘Letters from Abroad: Letter I — PISA’ in The Liberal I i 111–15, and comments on, the profusion of attitudes, expressions, incidents, broad draperies, ornaments of all sorts, visions, mountains, ghastly looking cities, fiends, angels, sybilline old women, dancers, virgin brides, mothers and children, princes, patriarchs, dying saints. . .Even in the very rudest of pictures, where the souls of the dying are going out of their mouths in the shape of little children, there are passages not unworthy of Dante (p. 114). 481. shadows] shadows, Box 1.

876

shelley: selected poems

‘A flock of vampire-bats before the glare 485 Of the tropic sun, bringing ere evening Strange night upon some Indian isle, — thus were ‘Phantoms diffused around, and some did fling Shadows of shadows, yet unlike themselves, Behind them, some like eaglets on the wing 490

‘Were lost in the white blaze, others like elves Danced in a thousand unimagined shapes Upon the sunny streams and grassy shelves; ‘And others sate chattering like restless apes On vulgar hands, and voluble as fire;

484–6. A  flock .  .  . isle] See the sonnet ‘To the Bat’ given to Blanche by Emily in Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 4 vols (1794) IV, ch. xii, esp. ll. 13–4: ‘From Indian isles thou com’st, with Summer’s car,/Twilight thy love — thy guide her beaming star!’. 484. vampire-bats] Family Desmodontidae, a small bat that feeds on the blood of mammals or birds using its fangs, found mainly in tropical America. Given the mention of an ‘Indian isle’ on l. 486, S. may be thinking of bats of the family Megadermatidae, which includes the Indian false vampire bat which is native to Asia. In The Economy of Vegetation ii 356 (which influenced the opening of OL), Darwin portrays the colonial British as ‘struggling Vampires’ flying away from Benjamin Franklin’s sword (Darwin i 91). S. associated bats with the sky at evening and twilight e.g. Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa l. 2, ‘The bats are flitting fast in the grey air’, and Epipsychidion l. 532, ‘the quick bats in their twilight dance’. 486. Indian isle] An island in present-day Malaysia, Indonesia, Borneo, or the Philippines, called the ‘Indian archipelago’ in the nineteenth century (see, e.g., John Crawfurd, History of the Indian Archipelago (1820)). An Indian isle is also the setting given in Mary Copybk 1 for Fragments of an Unfinished Drama. isle, —] vale; — 1824. 488. themselves,] themselves Box 1. 490. blaze,] day; 1824. 493–4. sate . . . hands] I.e. they crouched on all fours, keeping their weight on both their hands and feet, as is the habit of apes. S.’s idea of the vulgarity or unrefined nature of an ape’s hands, and their habit of standing on all fours, is based on Aristotle De Animalibus ii 8, 502b4–21, which observes

χεῖρας καὶ δακτύλους καὶ ὄνυχας ὁμοίους ἀνθρώπῳ, πλὴν πάντα ταῦτα ἐπὶ τὸ θηριωδέστερον.. . .καὶ διὰ τὸ τοὺς πόδας ἔχειν ὁμοίους χερσὶ καὶ ὡσπερανεὶ συγκειμένους ἐκ χειρὸς καὶ ποδός — ἐκ μὲν ποδὸς κατὰ τὸ τῆς πτέρνης ἔσχατον, ἐκ δὲ χειρὸς τἆλλα μέρη· καὶ γὰρ οἱ δάκτυλοι ἔχουσι τὸ καλούμενον θέναρ — διατελεῖ τὸν πλείω χρόνον τετράπουν ὂν μᾶλλον ἢ ὀρθόν· (‘[T]he ape has hands, fingers and nails like a man, except that all these parts tend to be more beastlike.. . . [i]t has feet which are similar to hands and consist as it were of hand as well as foot (of foot so far as the extremity of the heel is concerned, and of hand for the remainder, for even the toes have what is called a palm), [and] because of all this the ape spends most of its time on all fours rather than upright’). Cp. WA 633–7:

The king would dress an ape up in his crown And robes, and seat him on the glorious seat, And on the right hand of the sunlike throne Would place a gaudy mock-bird to repeat The chatterings of the monkeys.

494. hands, and voluble as fire;] hands, * * * * * 1824; hands, or over shoulders’ fire; TL (GM); paws and voluble like fire. TL (Reiman); hands and voluble like fire. Reiman (2002). None of the endings of the several cancelled drafts of this line are punctuated in Box 1.

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495 Some made a cradle of the ermined capes ‘Of kingly mantles, some upon the tiar Of pontiffs sate like vultures, others played Under the crown which girt with empire 500

‘A baby’s or an idiot’s brow, and made Their nests in it; the old anatomies Sate hatching their base brood under the shade ‘Of demons’ wings, and laughed from their dead eyes To reassume the delegated power Arrayed in which these worms did monarchize

505 ‘Who make this earth their charnel. — Others more Humble, like falcons sate upon the fist Of common men, and round their heads did soar, ‘Or like small gnats and flies, as thick as mist On evening marshes, thronged about the brow

496. upon the tiar] across the tire 1824.The tiar is the high diadem encircled with three crowns worn by the Pope. 497. pontiffs] pontiffs, Box 1. sate like vultures] rode, like demons; 1824. 498–504. Cp. the speech of Richard in Richard II III ii 145–77, which begins ‘Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs’, and goes on to discuss the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits, Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, Allowing him a breath, a little scene, To monarchize (ll. 160–5) 498–9. Cp. Paine, The Rights of Man Part the Second p. 19, where he characterises hereditary monarchy as ‘an office, which any child or idiot may fill’. 498. Under] Within TL (GM), TL (Reiman). 500. nests] nests, Box 1. anatomies] OED has two relevant meanings: withered or emaciated creatures, living beings (6a) or corpses shrunken or dried to skin and bone, i.e. mummies (5a). 501. base brood] bare broods 1824; bare brood TL (GM), TL (Reiman); base broods Reiman (2002). 502. demons’] demon’s 1824. demon TL (Reiman). Whether or not there is a terminal s is difficult to ascertain from Box 1. 504. these] those 1824 (these is altered from the or those in Box 1.) 505. charnel. —] charnel — Box 1. 506–7. like falcons . . . common men] Falconry is traditionally a courtly and royal pursuit. In the macabre last vision of TL, the phantoms (who play with symbols of royalty in ll. 495–500) seem to be obedient to ‘common men’. 507. soar,] soar Box 1. 508–9. small gnats . . . marshes] These lines recall two earlier images at ll. 46 and 377–81. 509. marshes,] marshes Box 1 (S. has cancelled a comma after marshes in Box 1).

878 510

shelley: selected poems Of lawyer, statesman, priest and theorist, ‘And others like discoloured flakes of snow On fairest bosoms, and the sunniest hair Fell, and were melted by the youthful glow

‘Which they extinguished; for like tears, they were 515 A veil to those from whose faint lids they rained In drops of sorrow. — I became aware ‘Of whence those forms proceeded which thus stained The track in which we moved; after brief space From every form the beauty slowly waned; 520

‘From every firmest limb and fairest face ‘The strength and freshness fell like dust, and left The action and the shape without the grace

‘Of life; the marble brow of youth was cleft With care, and in the eyes where once hope shone 525 Desire like a lioness bereft ‘Of its last cub, glared ere it died; each one Of that great crowd sent forth incessantly

510. lawyer, statesman, priest and theorist] Cp. the presence in the triumph of Anarchy in MA 66 of ‘Lawyers and priests, a motley crowd’. lawyer, statesman,] lawyer statesman (altered from lawyers statesmen) Box 1. theorist] The term has two meanings — ‘A person who formulates or develops theories. . . Sometimes depreciative’ (OED 1) and ‘An expert in the theoretical side of a subject; a person who is influenced primarily by theory rather than practical experience’ (OED 2) — both of which were in established usage in 1822. Theorists might refer to those who established the principles behind the French revolution: in Reflections, Burke calls the best of those elected to the Tiers État ‘only men of theory’ (91) and upbraids the ‘clumsy subtilty of their political metaphysics’ (109); and in J&M Maddalo mocks Julian’s French revolutionary opinions by claiming ‘ “You talk Utopia” ’ (l. 179), after which Julian defends himself, and Maddalo replies, saying, ‘ “How vain are such aspiring theories” ’ (l. 201). The presence of a theorist in this list also hints at the convoluted philosophy of contemporary metaphysics (Cp. Byron’s portrayal of Coleridge ‘Explaining metaphysics to the nation —/I wish he would explain his Explanation’ (Don Juan ‘Dedication’ ll. 15–16)), which seems to be behind S.’s mention of Kant (see note to l. 236). 514. for] and, 1824. 519. waned;] waned Box 1. 523. life;] life, Box 1. marble brow of youth] Unmarked by signs of ageing, see 2 Henry VI V iii 4, ‘like a gallant in the brow of youth’. 524. the] those 1824. 525–6. Desire . . . cub] See Ovid, Met. xiii 547, ‘Utque furit catulo lactente orbata leaena’ (‘As a lioness rages when her suckling cub has been stolen from her’). 526. its] her 1824.

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These shadows, numerous as the dead leaves blown 530

‘In autumn evenings from a poplar tree. — Each like himself and like each other were At first, but soon distorted seemed to be ‘Obscure clouds moulded by the casual air; And of this stuff the car’s creative ray Wrought all the busy phantoms that were there

535 ‘As the sun shapes the clouds — thus on the way Mask after mask fell from the countenance And form of all, and long before the day ‘Was old, the joy which waked like Heaven’s glance The sleepers in the oblivious valley, died, 540 And some grew weary of the ghastly dance ‘And fell, as I have fallen by the wayside, Those soonest from whose forms most shadows passed And least of strength and beauty did abide.’ — ‘Then, what is Life?’ I said . . . the cripple cast

528. shadows] The fifth and sixth letters of shadows are cancelled in Box 1 prompting the speculation in TL (GM) that S. may have intended shades. 529. autumn] Autumn Box 1 evenings] evening 1824, TL (Reiman). tree. —] tree — Box 1. 530–2. Cp. Virgil’s retort at Inferno vii 52–4: ‘Vano pensiero aduni: la sconoscente vita che i fé sozzi, ad ogne conoscenza or li fa bruni.’ (‘ “Thou harbourest a vain thought; the undiscerning life that made them foul now makes them obscure to all discernment” ’, trans. Sinclair) 530. Each . . . were] Each, . . . were, Box 1. 531. soon] some 1824. 532. air;] air Box 1. 534. Wrought] Wrapt 1824. were] flew TL (GM). 535. thus] thus, Box 1. 538. old,] old Box 1. 539. died,] died Box 1. 541. wayside,] way side Box 1. 542. soonest] soonest, Box 1. 544–8. Of this passage, only part of l. 544 was published in 1824; the whole was first published in Locock 1911 (see headnote). 544. what is Life?] The narrator’s question may be inspired by Calderón’s La vida es sueño (‘Life is a dream’), which S. first read in 1819, and a passage from which was translated in what appears to be

880 545

shelley: selected poems His eye upon the car which now had rolled Onward, as if that look must be the last, And answered . . . ‘Happy those for whom the fold Of

Medwin’s hand in Nbk 18 in winter 1821–22 (see headnote to It is a singular world we live in — and (Longman vi, Appendix E)). Whether or not S. influenced the Nbk 18 translation is impossible to determine but it includes a rendition of La vida es sueño ll. 2182–7: ¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí. ¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión, una sombra, una ficción, y el mayor bien es pequeño; que toda la vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son. These lines are translated in It is a singular world we live in — and ll. 16–22 as: What is this life — that we should covet it? What is this life that we should cling to it? A phantom-haunted frenzy — a false nature, A vain and empty shadow, all the good We prize or aim at only turns to evil — All life and being are but dreams, and dreams Themselves are but the dreams of other dreams. S.’s question is also close to the popular Methodist hymn ‘The Mystery of Life’ by John Gambold, published in John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739) pp. 7–8. The hymn states in its opening verse, O what is Life! and this dull Round To tread, why was a Spirit bound? The hymn concludes six verses later, O what is Death? — ’tis Life’s last Shore, Where Vanities are vain no more; Where all Pursuits their Goal obtain, And Life is all retouched again; Where in their bright results shall rise Thoughts, Virtues, Friendships, Griefs, and Joys. 544. said] cried.” — 1824. 546. last,] last Box 1. 547. answered . . . ] answered . . .  . Box 1. 547–8. Happy those . . . Of] Rousseau’s curtailed reply to the narrator’s ontological question takes the form of a beatus ille, a rhetorical formulation made famous by Horace in Epodes ii 1–4: Beatus ille, qui procul negotiis, ut prisca gens mortalium, paterna rura bobus exercet suis, solutus omni faenore (‘Happy the man who, far from business concerns, works his ancestral acres with his oxen like the men of old, free from every kind of debt’)

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71  To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’) S.’s draft of To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’) is in Box 1, on three separate pages, f. 56r (ll. 1–10), f. 33v (ll. 11–18), and f. 38v reverso (ll. 19–24), which are interspersed among various passages of the draft of TL. The TL draft is mostly on Italian paper bearing the watermark ‘BENEDETTO PARODI’; it is greenish-yellowish paper in sheets measuring approximately 255 x 390 mm, which have been folded once to form a conjugate pair of leaves (i.e. a booklet of four pages). When placed with the fold to the left from the writer’s perspective, page 1 of the booklet shows the watermark PARODI correctly (backwards on page 2), while page 4 shows the BENEDETTO watermark correctly (backwards on page 3). It is almost certainly the case that S. used this paper between no earlier than the end of May 1822 and his departure for Livorno on 1 July to meet the newly arrived Leigh Hunt and his family. ‘The keen stars’ must therefore date from this period, but as with all of the material in the 40 leaves which comprise the TL draft (including, in addition to this poem, The earthquake is rocking (Longman vi, no. 451), Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven, and The hours are flying (Longman vi, no. 455)), establishing a more specific date of composition within that period is difficult (see headnote to TL). It may however be conjectured that ‘The keen stars’ was written on or about 4 June, when there was a full moon which rose at 20:21, the only full moon within the composition period, following a day of ‘excessive heat’ (Gisborne Jnl 153). The draft of the opening 10 lines of the poem on f. 56r is written on the bottom half of the third page of the Parodi bifolium ff. 55r-56v, the top half of which contains draft of S.’s discarded opening B to TL (see Lines connected with The Triumph of Life (Longman vi, no. 452 Appendix) Appendix B), which was probably written around 28 May (the draft of B covers

See also Horace, Odes iii 29, ll. 41–45 and Virgil, Georgics ii 490. The beatus ille has a long history in poetry. Famous instances include: Inferno i 129; Paradise Lost vi 641–49; Pope ‘Ode on Solitude’; Cowper, Task ii 161–5; Faust 1064–5; and Wordsworth, ‘Calais, August 15th, 1802’, ll. 12–14. Rousseau’s final words also recall the aphoristic ending of Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven ll. 55–8: Too happy, they whose pleasure sought Extinguishes all sense and thought Of the regret that pleasure [] Seeking life alone not peace. 547. fold] An enclosure in which a shepherd keeps his sheep. The term is often used in a Christian sense to mean the spiritual enclosure in which God keeps his followers, or flock (e.g. Ezekiel xxxiv 14, ‘I will feed them in a good pasture, and upon the high mountains of Israel shall their fold be: there shall they lie in a good fold, and in a fat pasture shall they feed upon the mountains of Israel’, and John x 16, ‘And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd’). According to Trelawny, in Pisa a month before his death, S. had claimed: Religion itself means intolerance. The various sects tolerate nothing but their own dogmas. The priests call themselves shepherds. The passive they drive into their folds. When they have folded you, then they are satisfied, they know you fear them; but, if you stand aloof, they fear you. Those who resist they consider as wolves, and, where they have the power, stone them to death. (Records ii 231–2)

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the first three pages of the booklet, with S.’s first attempt A to write the opening of TL on the fourth page, f. 56v. S. therefore began to use the booklet ‘right way up’, then inverted it — i.e. so that the watermarks appear upside-down and backwards — such that the ‘correct’ page 4 became page 1). The draft of ‘The keen stars’ is written in the blank space left as S.’s draft of discarded TL opening B peters out, and at right angles to it; the ink draft of‘The keen stars’ slightly crosses over the bottom line of the TL draft and therefore postdates it. To continue his draft of ‘The keen stars’, S. then used another Parodi bifolium, ff. 32r-33v; this bifolium is part of a gathering which S. formed by enclosing 2 bifolia within a third, to create a twelvepage booklet ff. 29r-34v (S. may have created this longer booklet to facilitate his renewed effort to make progress with TL after returning to his draft after a pause of a week or so in the first half of June: see headnote to TL). It is therefore possible that the positioning of this booklet within the current foliation of the TL MS, where it contains draft of TL 252–80, gives a misleading impression that the draft of ‘The keen stars’ ll. 11–18 on f. 33v was written at the same time as the surrounding TL draft (i.e. sometime in the second half of June). In fact, S. probably simply utilised a new Parodi booklet to continue the poem (in early June he would not have been concerned about conserving the paper, as he clearly did become towards the end of the TL composition period), and then later repurposed the unused remainder of the booklet when he marshalled the paper into the twelve-page booklet ff. 29r-34v. The remainder of the draft of ‘The keen stars’, ll. 19–24, also presents something of a puzzle. This is on another Parodi booklet, ff. 37r-38v, which on its inside two pages contains draft of TL 281–306, again appearing to imply a date in the second half of June. But the first page of this Parodi booklet, f. 37r, contains various calculations in ink in S.’s hand, and the dates ‘June 4’ (twice) and ‘July 4’; also on this page is S.’s pencil draft of The hours are flying (see headnote to that poem). The draft of ‘The keen stars’ ll. 19–24 is written in ink reverso on the back page of the booklet, f. 38v, suggesting that S. first used the booklet to finish drafting ‘The keen stars’, then reversed it to make calculations, before at a subsequent date realising he needed more paper to continue the draft of TL and using the blank inside pages for that purpose. Thus, all three separate pages containing draft of ‘The keen stars’ are consistent with a date in early June, notwithstanding their contiguity with TL draft which is later. At some point in June 1822, S. made a fair copy of To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’), evidently based directly on the draft in Box 1, and presented it to Jane Williams. This MS, clearly headed To Jane, is on one side of a single leaf of the Parodi paper (i.e. it has been neatly torn on the left edge and represents the right-hand side — viewed so that the watermark is correctly legible — of a bifolium of the sort containing the draft of TL). The leaf has been folded four times, and in its folded state would have constituted a very small object, measuring approximately 48.25 by 66 mm. The presentation copy also bears the following note, written sideways down the right-hand side of the page: I sate down to write some words for an ariette which might be profane —. But it was in vain to struggle with the ruling spirit, who compelled me to speak of things sacred to yours & Wilhelmeister’s indulgence —. I commit them to your secrecy & your mercy & will try & do better another time. This note, and the poem itself, are both undated in the MS (Jones, L ii 437, dates it ‘[Lerici, c. 18 June 1822]’ on the basis of its affinities with S.’s letter to Gisborne of 18 June), but it obviously belongs to the period following S.’s work on a translation of Faust, when Goethe and his works (including the novel Wilhelm Meister) would have formed a part of daily conversation in S.’s immediate circle (see headnotes to nos 440 and 447 in Longman vi). The fair copy MS of To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’) was in Jane Williams’s possession at the

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time of S.’s death. At some point it came into the possession of Trelawny (like several other of the poems written for Jane by S.), and after his death it passed to his daughter Laetitia Call, who presumably presented it to John Rylands University Library, Manchester (probably in 1907, at the same time as other of the Trelawny MSS were given by her to various libraries). The MS is now kept in Box A in the Special Collections section of the John Rylands Library. S.’s letter to John Gisborne of 18 June seems to echo both the atmosphere and some specific elements of the poem: I have a boat here which. . .is swift and beautiful, and appears quite a vessel. Williams is captain, and we drive along this delightful bay in the evening wind, under the summer moon, until earth appears another world. Jane brings her guitar, and if the past and the future could be obliterated, the present would content me so well that I could say with Faust to the passing moment, ‘Remain, thou, thou art so beautiful’. (L ii 435–6) S.’s reference to Faust also connects with S.’s lyric evocation of Jane accompanying herself singing. Jones in L ii 436 n. 2 identifies S.’s quote from Goethe in the letter as a reference to Faust Part II, Act V, scene vi, but this cannot be correct (Part II was published after S.’s death). S.’s reference is to Faust Part I, ‘Studirzimmer II’ (‘The Study II’), ll. 1699–1700: ‘Werd’ ich zum Augenblicke sagen:/Verweile doch! du bist so schön!’ (‘If I ever say to the passing moment — “Stay, thou art so fair!” ’, trans. Hayward 58)). The elements of moonlight, Jane Williams playing her guitar (see headnote to With a guitar. To Jane, and the sense of earth as a world transformed like ‘some world far from ours’ (‘The keen stars’ l. 22) are all here suggestively combined. But these contented evenings were probably being recalled by S. as they had been enjoyed in late May and early June, soon after the arrival of the Don Juan and in a period of calm moonlit seas. The Don Juan was in fact out of commission for refitting throughout the second half of June (Gisborne Jnl 154–6). Mary must have known of the drafts for To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’), as she worked long and hard at the TL MS in which they are interspersed; but it may be she did not or could not connect them together as a single poem. The poem was first published by Thomas Medwin in The Athenaeum cclxiv (17 November 1832) 746, in a version omitting the first 6 lines, and with some verbal alterations from the fair-copy MS, made in Medwin’s characteristic manner (see notes), under the title ‘An Ariette for Music. To a Lady Singing to her Accompaniment on the Guitar’. The Athenaeum text clearly derives from the fair copy in Jane Williams’s possession, to which she must have permitted Medwin access, as she did in the case of other of S.’s poems presented to her. Mary included the Athenaeum version in 1839, including all of Medwin’s verbal alterations and omitting the first 6 lines, but in 1840 she published the poem complete but with the name ‘Jane’ in l. 3 replaced by a row of 3 asterisks, and with virtually all Medwin’s changes corrected. It is therefore all but certain that Jane Williams herself provided Mary with her MS, or a copy of it, at some point between the appearance of 1839, and 1840 going to press. Rossetti 1870 printed Jane’s name in l. 3 for the first time, from the MS by then in Trelawny’s possession. S.’s note to Jane accompanying his fair copy describes the lyric as ‘some words for an ariette’. ‘Ariette’ is a relatively technical musical term (more common in its Italian form ‘arietta’) denoting a short operatic song, simpler than an aria. S.’s usage suggests the sustained and almost nightly immersion in opera of the Pisan circle in 1821 and early 1822, and implies that S. intended the lyric to be set to music by Jane for her performance. The first stanza of ‘The keen stars’ plays on the idea that the guitar is lifeless until informed by the soul of Jane’s playing, recalling the closing argument of With a guitar. To Jane (see ll. 59–61,

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79–86 and notes). S.’s accompanying note also apologises for (again) failing to produce something profane, i.e. irreverent or disrespectful of a sacred subject, with the implication that there is in play some kind of ‘sacred’ understanding between Jane, Edward Williams, and himself which must be kept secret (there is also an echo of S.’s use of the word in One word is too often profaned). The implication has obvious bearing on the context of Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven, written very close in time to ‘The keen stars’ (see headnote). Chernaik 166, in excellent commentary, observes how S.’s unusual stanza form in To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’) ‘with its ingenious verbal and metrical patterning, its rhythmical pauses, is an imitation of the song Jane might have played. . .the syncopated rhythm approximates the pattern of a voice singing against strummed chords’. Text from MS in University Archive: Box A—U87 in the Special Collections section of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, University of Manchester (M). Courtesy of The University of Manchester. Published in The Athenaeum cclxiv (17 November 1832) 746 (ll. 7–24 only; A); 1839, ll. 7–24 only (from A); 1840 complete (from M); MYRS viii 436–7 (facsimile and transcription of MS).

To Jane   The keen stars were twinkling And the fair moon was rising among them         Dear Jane.   The guitar was tinkling But the notes were not sweet ’till you sung them         Again. —   As the moon’s soft splendour O’er the faint cold starlight of Heaven

5

¶ 71. Title M is headed To Jane in S.’s hand. A (followed by 1839) gives the title as ‘AN ARIETTE FOR MUSIC/TO A LADY SINGING TO HER ACCOMPANIMENT ON THE GUITAR’; 1840 has ‘To — ’. 1–6. Omitted in A, 1839. 1. twinkling] twinkling, 1840. S. uses this word in several late poems: see TL 150, Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven l. 44, To Jane — The recollection l. 67. 2. them] them, 1840. 3. Dear Jane.] Dear ***! 1840. 4–12. Just as ‘the moon’s soft splendour’ enhances ‘the faint cold starlight’, so the guitar is a lifeless object until imbued with ‘soul’ by Jane’s playing and voice. Cp. With a guitar. To Jane ll. 59–61, 79–86 and notes. 4. tinkling] tinkling, 1840. 5. sung] BSM i reads S.’s draft in Box 1 f. 56r as ‘sang’, but the word seems to be sung, according with the rhyme on ‘among’ in l. 2. 6. Again. —] Again. 1840. 7–9. Cp. WA 397–400: All interwoven with fine feathery snow And moonlight splendour of intensest rime With which frost paints the pines in winter-time. 8. Heaven] heaven A, 1839.

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       Is thrown — 10   So your voice most tender To the strings without soul had then given        Its own.   The stars will awaken, Though the moon sleep a full hour later, 15        Tonight;   No leaf will be shaken While the dews of your melody scatter        Delight.   Though the sound overpowers 20 Sing again, with your dear voice revealing        A tone   Of some world far from ours, Where music and moonlight and feeling        Are one.

72  ‘Bright wanderer, fair coquette of heaven’ [Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici] Written in late June 1822, and perhaps S.’s last substantial poem. The sole source of Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven is a rough draft in Box 1, possibly copied in parts from draft elsewhere, written on a bifolium of the same paper on which most of the draft of TL is written. This paper, of Italian manufacture and watermarked ‘BENEDETTO PARODI’, consists of full sheets measuring approximately 255 x 390 mm, each folded once to create a 9. thrown —] thrown, A, 1839, 1840. In M, S. first wrote spread which is then heavily cancelled, with thrown — written to the right on the same line; spread is an odd mistake given the rhyme with own below (the draft in Box 1 f. 56r reads thrown). 10. So one voice sweet & tender Box 1 f. 56r. your] thy A, 1839. 11. soul had then given] soul has given A, 1839. 12. A clear space left in M after l. 12 indicates that the poem is divided into two 12-line stanzas; there is also a downward-sloping short dash which may be accidental, or intended as a further marker of the stanza-break. 14. later,] later A, 1839. 15. Tonight;] To night; M; To-night: A, 1839. 16. shaken] shaken, A. 17. While] Whilst Box 1 f. 33v, A, 1839, 1840. your] thy A, 1839. 19. overpowers] overpowers, A, 1839, 1840. 20. Sing again — for thy voice is revealing Box 1 f. 38v rev. your dear] thy sweet A, 1839. 22. ours] our’s M. 23. Where moonlight & music & feeling Box 1 f. 38v rev. 24. The draft in Box 1, f. 38v reverso appears to read Are won, although a variant on f. 33v does read When moonlight & music & feeling are one. ‘Won’ in context makes for a possible reading (‘won’ in the sense of ‘earned’); perhaps S. in his draft was experimenting with the effect of the homophone on the sense.

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pile of writing paper consisting of conjugate pairs of leaves each giving four pages. S. used the folded sheets with the hinged edge to his left so that the bifolium opened like a booklet (see headnote to TL). The draft of Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven covers all four pages of one bifolium, and is placed in the sequence of folded sheets containing the TL draft about halfway through it, on ff. 35r, 35v, 36r and 36v in Box 1. S. in fact began his draft on f. 36v with two cancelled attempts at a first line which now appear upside down and reverso relative to the order of bifolia in Box 1. The cancelled beginnings read She left me when the moon was and The moon was, and having cancelled them, he reversed the bifolium and wrote out what he then intended as the first line, She left me at the silent time, near the top of f. 35r (i.e. the top of the first page of the four-page booklet now became the bottom of the fourth page, containing the two cancelled attempts at an opening line upside down and reverso). The fact that S. left generous space above this line when beginning the draft possibly suggests that he was intending from the outset to compose further lines to make a different beginning. This, at any rate, is what he did, just squeezing in the six lines that begin the finished poem between the top of f. 35r and the original first line, which then became l. 7, although the sixth line of the new beginning is written all but overlapping the new l. 7, in small and cramped writing which is consequently difficult to read (and which apparently defeated Richard Garnett’s attempt to transcribe it; see below). The position within the sequence of drafts for TL of the bifolium containing Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven may have resulted from random placement or deliberate re-ordering, by S. or someone else, at any point between his work on the drafts and the deposit of them in Box 1 before, or after, it became part of Sir John Shelley-Rolls’s gift of Shelley MSS to the Bodleian Library in 1946 (the present folio numbers in Box 1 post-date the gift). It may, however, reasonably be supposed that its placement among the TL drafts is an indication of when S. broke off from composing his long poem to write a lyric to or about Jane Williams, as he clearly also did with To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’) (see headnote). The draft of Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven comes, relative to the surrounding TL drafts, soon after S. appears to have found it difficult to continue composition following the introduction of Rousseau and the ensuing account of various historical figures, i.e. after around l. 280 of TL. In the immediately preceding bifolia, there is draft for ‘apocryphal’ passages not adopted for the finished poem, and other odd scraps of composition, including rough draft for To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’). After the Bright wanderer draft, the TL draft continues from around l. 280. If the surmise is correct that S. began TL in late May, then broke off from composition for a period up to mid-June, resuming work through the second half of June, then this would place the probable composition date of Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven somewhere in the last week or so of June. GM argued (‘Shelley and Jane Williams’, RES xii (1961) 40–48, p. 44), that it was possible to establish a more exact date from astronomical and meteorological indications given in the poem. Richard Garnett used such evidence in a brief Preface to the poem on its first publication, and proposed a date of 1 or 2 May, assuming that the moon in the poem is ‘near the full, with little or no declination’ (Macmillan’s Magazine vi (June  1862) 122). GM’s argument, rejecting Garnett’s dating and proposing instead 22 or 23 June, may be summarised as follows. Weather conditions rule out 1 or 2 May (Edward Williams’s journal — not known to Garnett in 1862 — records ‘cloudy with rain’ on both days; Gisborne Jnl 146). The assumption that the poem describes a full moon is not compatible with the image of the moon as an albatross, a bird famous for the narrowness and immense length of its wings. To justify that simile, the occasion recorded in the poem must have taken place within five days of a new moon, and since the moon is visible in the poem after sunset, within five days

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after a new moon. Conditions of visibility therefore limit the possible dates to 23–26 April, 22–25 May, and 21–24 June (GM’s information on times of moonrise, moonset, and moon phases was provided by H. W. P. Richards of the Royal Greenwich Observatory). The April date is again precluded by weather conditions as recorded in Williams’s journal, ‘cloudy’ on both days (Gisborne Jnl 144). Williams and Jane were away house-hunting from 23–25 April (Gisborne Jnl 144–5), and on their return they found S. and Mary oppressed by the news of the death of Claire Clairmont’s daughter Allegra (Mary Jnl i 408–9); the party then broke up on 26 April for the journey to La Spezia (Mary Jnl i 409). There was consequently no opportunity to visit the coast at that period. 22–25 May also seems unlikely because of the weather, though 22 is a possibility (Gisborne Jnl 150–1). If, however, other details in the poem’s setting are regarded as grounded in reality, then there are further requirements in establishing a specific date. The time is well after sunset: it is a ‘silent time’ (l. 7) and a ‘purple night’ (l. 12), the flowers are ‘sleeping’ (l. 47), and lights are visible round the bay and from the fisherman’s lamp (ll. 50–54). The day has been warm (ll. 49–50), and the sea is dead calm (l. 40). This suggests a period of fine, settled weather. The description of the moon in ll. 7–14 cannot imply (as Garnett argued) that it is just at the meridian with little or no declination, because the ‘purple night’ in which it now hovers is deliberately contrasted with the ‘azure dome’ (l. 9) up which it has climbed. The moon in the poem must therefore have completed its climb up the day sky, and is now, after sunset, not at meridian but balanced just above the sea before setting into it (hence the continued pertinence of the sea-bird simile). And although the moon’s ‘wings of light’ (l. 11) are narrow, like those of an albatross, they are already broad enough to shed some moonlight: the ocean is ‘bright and wide’ (l. 38), and among the cancellations in the draft there lies ‘a thread of moon-light’ (see note to l. 46). All these conditions are best met on the night of 22 or 23 June: according to Mary ‘The heats set in in the middle of June; the days became excessively hot’ (‘Note on Poems of 1822’, 1839 iv 231); for 22 June Williams recorded in his journal: ‘Calm. Heat overpowering’ (Gisborne Jnl 155). There was a new moon on the morning of 19 June; on 22 and 23 the moon reached its meridian in the late afternoon and set from two to three hours after the sun had set at 19:46. On 23 June, at least, it would have been bright enough to give some moonlight but still narrow enough to be compared to a hovering albatross. GM’s concern to specify a date late in June bears on the biographical context he proposed for Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven (see the next section). Mary never published Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven; it is not included in 1824, 1839, or 1840, and she apparently never even transcribed it, even though in the period following S.’s death she explicitly committed herself to retrieving every legible scrap of his verse (‘I frankly own, that I have been more actuated by the fear lest any monument of his genius should escape me, than the wish of presenting nothing but what was complete to the fastidious reader’; Preface to 1824, p. viii). She must however have been aware of the poem because, as explained, it is placed unmissably in the midst of the TL draft, on which she would have worked long and hard while preparing her text of TL for publication in 1824. The possible significance of her decision not to publish is discussed below. Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven was first published in 1862, eleven years after Mary’s death, by Richard Garnett, who anticipated his inclusion of the poem in Relics by publishing a text in Macmillan’s Magazine vi (June 1862) 122–123 (there are some substantive differences between the texts in Macmillan’s and Relics, recorded in the notes, and numerous differences in punctuation, not recorded here). He introduced the title ‘Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici’, by which the poem has subsequently always been known, though S.’s draft has no title. However, Garnett’s text did not recognise that the six lines written above S.’s original

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first line were in fact intended as the first six lines of the poem. Garnett’s version of these lines, the sixth of which he was unable to decipher in full, he published separately in Relics 90–91 as no. xl of the ‘Miscellaneous Fragments’. Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven was first published complete in its correctly integrated 58-line form by GM (‘Shelley and Jane Williams’, RES xii (1961) 41–43). In that essay, and in his essay ‘On Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life” ’, Studia Neophilologica xxxiv (1962) 104–134, he also developed the hypothesis that the poem has a biographical context in a serious crisis of S.’s personal life, as his increasingly uncontrolled feelings for Jane Williams were accelerating towards a sexual relationship which may or may not have been consummated. GM questioned how it was otherwise possible to explain S.’s request for Prussic Acid made of Trelawny on 18 June 1822, ‘from the desire of avoiding needless suffering’ (L ii 433), at a time when S.’s health was never better and when he was also saying ‘my only regret is that the summer must ever pass’ (to Horace Smith, 29 June 1822, L ii 443). GM also pointed to ‘the extraordinary and mounting tension’ within the isolated household of Villa Magni in May and June, a tension that ‘developed to the point of hallucinations in Shelley and Jane, and to near-hysteria in Mary’ (for S.’s vision of a child in the sea on 6 May see Gisborne Jnl 147; Mary described the fraught atmosphere throughout June, including her miscarriage, S.’s hallucinations, and Jane Williams’s strange vision of S. on the terrace at Villa Magni, in her letter to Maria Gisborne, 15 August 1822, Mary L i 245–6). According to Edward Williams’s journal, during the night of 23 June S. ‘sees spirits and alarms the whole house’ (Gisborne Jnl 155). What appears to have been some kind of climactic psychological disturbance for S. accords with GM’s detailed argument for the composition of Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven on 22 or 23 June. It seems certain that the poem addresses S.’s relationship with Jane Williams, but it is now impossible to establish the exact nature of that relationship in the days preceding his departure for Leghorn on 1 July. GM argued for a graphic presence of Jane in the TL MS in Box 1 (see To — (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’), ‘General Headnote to S.’s Poems to Jane Williams’), and also conjectured a reading of an unusually heavily and carefully cancelled line following l. 27 in the present text of Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven as beginning with the name Jane (see BSM i 202–3 for a different conjectural reading). Walter Peck claimed to have seen ‘an unpublished letter written by Shelley to Byron’ which confirmed ‘the actual fulfilment of passion’ between S. and Jane ‘after an Italian fiesta which they together had attended’ (Peck ii 199). Williams’s journal confirms that the festa of St John was celebrated on 24 June, the day after GM’s date for the composition of Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven on 23 June, when during the night S. frightened the whole house by seeing spirits. The local peasants often alarmed Mary with their night-time revels on the beach outside Villa Magni: The natives were wilder than the place. Our near neighbours, of Sant’ Arenzo, were more like savages than any people I ever saw. Many a night they passed on the beach, singing or rather howling, the women dancing about among the waves that broke at their feet, the men leaning against the rocks and joining in their loud wild chorus. (1839 iv 229–30) Given such an atmosphere, it is at least credible that S. and Jane may have reached a critical stage of intimacy. Peck’s claim to have seen documentary proof was, however, for all its circumstantiality, carefully and persuasively discredited by Newman Ivy White (White ii 626–7), whose own discussion of the last weeks of S.’s relationship with Jane nevertheless speculated, very guardedly, that there was ‘a moment . . . when Shelley and Jane seem at least

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slightly to have overstepped the bounds of propriety’ (White ii 364). White proposed this as the context for the apparent emotional situation in Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven, where the poem’s speaker recalls the calming presence of one whose image when absent nevertheless prompts ‘demon’ thoughts. White further linked this to the lines ‘We meet not as then we parted’ (entitled That moment is gone for ever in Longman vi, no. 456A) which he characterised as a ‘sequel’, in which S. meditates regretfully on having made some kind of inappropriate declaration to Jane. This proposed link was further developed by Kenneth Neill Cameron, who in thoughtful commentary drew attention to the suggestive character of the last letters exchanged between S. and Jane. On 4 July he wrote to her from Pisa, recalling the times at Villa Magni: How soon those hours past, & how slowly they return to pass so soon again, & perhaps for ever, in which we have lived together so intimately so happily! — Adieu, my dearest friend — I only write these lines for the pleasure of tracing what will meet your eyes. (L ii 445) Jane’s reply, dated 6 July from Villa Magni, has a postscript which certainly suggests the ‘coquette’ of the first line of Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven: ‘Why do you talk of never enjoying moments like the past, are you going to join your friend Plato or do you expect I shall do soon?’ (Gisborne Jnl 161) Cameron comments that ‘this exchange, taken in conjunction with Jane’s letters to Williams and Shelley’s poems to Jane, indicates that there was no actual love affair but that Shelley was seriously turning toward Jane and that Jane was not quite closing the door on him’ (Golden Years 305). The unresolvable question that remains is, at what stage had this rapidly developing situation arrived by the time S. left on his last journey? S. had by the beginning of July presented several poems to Jane which deal directly with his feelings for her, and it is certain that Mary remained unaware of these poems for many years following S.’s death. She was, however, as explained, definitely aware of two of S.’s poems about Jane, To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’) and Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven, and it seems a reasonable inference that her failure to publish either of them in 1824 suggests they constituted a distressing reminder of her own relationship with S. as it stood in July 1822. Mary and Jane grew very close in mutual grief and support in the weeks and months following their bereavement, but Jane nevertheless readily shared unforgiving accounts, behind Mary’s back (and even before she left Italy in September 1822), of what she clearly regarded as the Shelleys’ rapidly deteriorating relationship in their last months together. These stories influenced Hunt against Mary, and were continued once Jane was back in England, where indeed they seem to have intensified once her relationship with Thomas Jefferson Hogg was established, when the couple apparently nursed a particular animus against Mary. Once Mary finally learned, four years after S.’s death, that Jane had been spreading stories of their life in Italy which cast her in an unfavourable light, she was devastated, finally confronting Jane and determining to end their friendship, which did however mend somewhat over time (see Jane’s letter to Leigh Hunt, 28 April 1824 (Gisborne Jnl 166), Mary Jnl ii 502, and Mary’s letter to John Howard Payne, 22 August  1827 (Mary L ii 568–9)). While it is presumably the case that Mary’s shock at discovering Jane’s betrayal of her was to do with the spreading of gossip, rather than the revelation of a sexual relationship with her husband (though that is a possibility), it remains an open question as to what Jane’s motivation may have been in sharing her sense of Mary’s coldness and hostility towards S. at Villa Magni (see ‘General Headnote to S.’s Poems to Jane Williams’).

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Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven, notwithstanding its unresolved conclusion (see note to l. 58), is a brilliantly realised poem. The octosyllabic couplets recall earlier works such as Lines Written among the Euganean Hills and Stanzas written in Dejection, but display a more advanced artistic maturity, combining vexedly meditative introspection with understated symbolism and a subtle sketching of emotional complexity and turmoil. Their metrical texture is enriched by complex cross-rhythms, the dominant iambic movement varied by trochaic substitutions, different weights of pause at the line-endings, and variations in the caesurae. The early part of the draft, covering f. 35r, suggests a rapid fluency of composition, with very little correction, and may perhaps have been copied from an earlier rough draft. Thereafter, and particularly as the poem comes on f. 35v to deal with S.’s state of mind as he recalls what has just passed between himself and the now-absent Jane, there is a strong sense of struggle and difficulty in the drafting, with many false starts to lines, cancellation, and substituted words. Although the poem is probably complete as it arrives at the bottom of the fourth page of the bifolium (see notes), S. omitted to settle on a final couplet, and the surviving draft offers no clear single reading of the final line. The poem’s atmosphere, and also its implied dramatic situation at a critical moment in S.’s relationship with Jane Williams, has curious affinities with Petrarch’s Trionfo della Morte. This poem is the third in the series which makes up the Trionfi, a work which S. clearly knew extremely well, and which was one major model for TL (see headnote), on which he was certainly working when he wrote Bright wanderer. In the Trionfo della Morte the poet’s idealised love, the resolutely chaste Laura, has died, but returns to him in a vision. She affirms her abiding love for the poet, even though she had never permitted herself to offer a sign of it while alive, in order to protect their good names and honour: — Deh, madonna, — diss’io — per quella fede che vi fu, credo, al tempo manifesta, or più nel volto di chi tutto vede, creovvi Amor pensier mai ne la testa d’aver pietà del mio lungo martire, non lasciando vostr’alta impresa onesta? che’ vostri dolci sdegni e le dolci ire, le dolci paci ne’ belli occhi scritte, tenner molti anni in dubbio il mio desire. — A pena ebb’io queste parole ditte, ch’io vidi lampeggiar quel dolce riso ch’un sol fu già di mie virtuti afflitte. Poi disse sospirando: — Mai diviso da te non fu’l mio cor, né già mai fia; ma temprai la tua fiamma col mio viso, perché a salvar te e me null’altra via era e la nostra giovenetta fama; (Trionfo della Morte ii 76–92) (‘ “Prithee, Madonna, by the faithfulness/That while you lived was manifest to you/And in the sight of God is now confirmed,/Did ever love create within your mind/The thought of taking pity on my plight,/Within the bounds your sense of honour set?/Your sweet reproaches and your sweet disdains/And the sweet signs of peace in your fair eyes/Kept my desire in doubt for many years.”/Scarce had I said these words when I beheld/The flashing of that smile so sweet to me,/That once had been a sun to cheer my spirit./Sighing, she

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answered: “Never was my heart/From thee divided, nor shall ever be./Thy flame I tempered with my countenance/Because there was no other way than this/To save us both, and save your youthful fame:” ’ trans. E. H. Wilkins) The consequent mingling of pleasurable reciprocity with painfully obstructed desire which is caught in Petrarch’s ‘vostri dolci sdegni e le dolci ire’ perhaps finds an echo in Bright wanderer l. 44, ‘Such sweet and bitter pain as mine’. Text from Box 1 ff. 35r-36v. Published in Macmillan’s Magazine vi (June 1862) 122–3 by Richard Garnett (omitting ll. 1–6, and adding the title ‘Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici’; M); Relics (omitting ll. 1–6 but printing them separately as no. xl of ‘Miscellaneous Fragments); GM, ‘Shelley and Jane Williams’, RES xii (1961) 41–43 (complete, retaining Garnett’s title); 1964; BSM i 200–207 (facsimile and transcription of MS)

‘Bright wanderer, fair coquette of heaven’ Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven, To whom alone it has been given To change and be adored for ever . . . Envy not this dim world, for never 5 But once within its shadow grew One fair as you but far more true. She left me at the silent time When the moon had ceased to climb The azure dome of Heaven’s steep, ¶ 72.  Title. The draft in Box 1 is untitled; Richard Garnett added the title ‘Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici’ when he published the poem for the first time in Macmillan’s Magazine, and subsequently in Relics (see headnote). 1–6. The poem as first drafted began at the present l. 7; these opening six lines (first published in Relics as no. xl of the ‘Miscellaneous Fragments’) were added later and squeezed into (generous) space left at the top of f. 35r in Box 1, above the original opening (see headnote). 1. After wanderer, S. first wrote two words which he then cancelled and wrote the rest of the line; they are hard to make out, but seem to read lovely canc. followed by change canc.; BSM i transcribes as ‘lovely [charge]’. 6. One fair as —. Relics. you] This word, like the whole line, is hard to read and written tight up against and partly over the line below, the original first line of the poem. 1964 reads ‘you’, followed by Major Works; Chernaik and Reiman (2002) read ‘[thou]’, presumably because the internal rhyme on ‘you’ and ‘true’ sounds so uncharacteristically clumsy, but there is no warrant in the MS for the reading ‘thou’ (BSM i transcribes the word as ‘you’, as did GM in his unpublished trancription; there is no comma in the MS). true.] true Box 1. coquette] S. contrasts the moon, figured as flirtatiously changeable, with Jane who is equally beautiful but ‘far more true’; perhaps implying that the poem has been prompted by an advance on S.’s part which has been rejected by the faithful Jane (although she was not married to Edward Williams, and not divorced from her legal husband either). 7–14. The new moon is setting into the sea in the evening, and is likened to an albatross with its long narrow wings; see headnote for discussion of astronomical and meteorological evidence for the date and time of the poem’s setting. 9. dome] path M, Relics; S. first wrote dome, then cancelled it and wrote path above, which is also cancelled with dome underlined to indicate reinstatement. steep,] S. first wrote deep with a comma, then

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10 And like an albatross asleep, Balanced on her wings of light Hovered in the purple night — Ere she sought her Ocean nest, In the chambers of the west. — 15 She left me, and I stayed alone Thinking over every tone, Which though now silent to the ear The enchanted heart could hear Like notes which die when born, but still 20 Haunt the echoes of the hill: And feeling ever — O too much — The soft vibrations of her touch As if her gentle hand even now Lightly trembles on my brow; 25 And thus although she absent were Memory gave me all of her

cancelled deep and wrote steep to the right, unpunctuated but understanding the comma from deep. 10. asleep,] asleep Box 1. 11. S. first began the line with Hovers, which is cancelled and used to begin the following line. After this line S. wrote the line And I, who sate beside her feet, which he then cancelled; presumably his first thought was to end the description of the setting moon at l. 12, and to introduce a memory of his time with Jane Williams. 13. sought her Ocean] Written above flew to seek her canc. 15. stayed] S. first wrote sate, then cancelled it and wrote staid above. 17. Which though silent to the ear, Relics. 18. Following this line S. first wrote Like music pauses which a, all of which is cancelled, with past written above pauses. 19–20. The remembered words of the woman are likened to the memory of music; S. was enchanted by Jane Williams’s singing and self-accompaniment on the guitar he had given her (see headnote to With a guitar. To Jane). 21. The line first began And the, with the cancelled. O too much —] o too much Box 1. 22. vibrations] vibration M, Relics. 23. The line first began with Even, which is cancelled. 24. trembles] Written after placed canc.; trembled M, Relics, 1964, Reiman (2002); ‘trembles’ is not grammatically consistent with the prevailing past tense, but it is clear in the MS; ll. 23–24 recall the touching hand so intensely that it seems a present experience. my] written over another word, possibly the or they. brow;] brow Box 1. After this line, which falls at the bottom of f. 35r in Box 1, S. continued at the top of the next page (f. 35v) with And thus contented with a lot/Which others, who have suffered not,; both lines are cancelled, but S.’s cancel through the second line actually looks more like an underlining; at this point he is clearly beginning to have difficulty with the draft as it moves closer to articulating his feelings for Jane. 26. S. first began the line with Fancy, which is cancelled with Memory written above; he uses fancy in the next line. Following l. 26 S. made three attempts to begin the next line, one beneath the other and all cancelled: the first reads I dare to, the second That fate, and the third I dare to.

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That even fancy dares to claim. — Her presence had made weak and tame All passions, and I lived alone, 30 In the time which is our own; The past and future were forgot As they had been, and would be, not. — But soon, the guardian angel gone, The demon reassumed his throne 35 In my faint heart . . . I dare not speak My thoughts; but thus disturbed and weak I sate and watched the vessels glide Along the ocean bright and wide, Like spirit-wingèd chariots sent

27. Following this line the draft becomes very tentative, with a series of aborted lines one beneath the other and all cancelled: And I was happy [?Jane] (the capital J seems clear but the rest of the word has been very heavily and elaborately cancelled; see headnote)/Thus I was happy, if the name,/Of happiness,/the wildest thoughts,/Her presence,/Within her presence,/Charmed by her presence, meek and tame,/The demon of my spirit lay; these last two lines anticipate the ‘demon’ of l. 34, and appear to clarify that S.’s sense is that he is able to control the ‘demon’ in his ‘faint heart’ (l. 35) when in Jane’s presence, but not when away from her. 28. Following this line S. first wrote Desire & fear — I [was] thought no more/Of pleasures lost or sorrows; all but the initial Of is then cancelled, with All passions, and written above the first half of the first line, and I lived alone, written between the second half of both lines. 29. passions] The terminal s seems clear in the MS, but BSM i does not record it. 30. is] Written above was canc. own;] own Box 1. 31–2. Cp S.’s letter to John Gisborne, 18 June 1822: Williams is captain, and we drive along this delightful bay in the evening wind, under the summer moon, until earth appears another world. Jane brings her guitar, and if the past and the future could be obliterated, the present would content me so well that I could say with Faust to the passing moment, ‘Remain, thou, thou art so beautiful’ (L ii 435–6). 32. had been] Written after would be [?] canc. S. wrote and then cancelled But now I desired, — I dare not after this line. 33. gone,] gone Box 1. 35. faint] Written above weak canc. speak] Written after tell canc. 36. S. first began the line The canc. 37. sate and watched] sat and watched M; sat and saw Relics. 38. wide,] wide Box 1. Following this line S. made two attempts at the next, both cancelled: Like chariots of an element [with oer uncanc. above of], and Elysian [?]. Cp. Wordsworth, ‘The Thorn’ ll. 181–5: For one day with my telescope, To view the ocean wide and bright, When to this country first I came, Ere I had heard of Martha’s name, I climbed the mountain’s height: 39. spirit-wingèd] spirit winged Box 1.

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40 O’er some serenest element To ministrations strange and far; As if to some Elysian star They sailed for drink to medicine Such sweet and bitter pain as mine. — 45 And the wind that winged their flight 40. serenest] Written above diviner canc. 41. To] Written over On in Box 1; For M, Relics, 1964. 43–4. Cp. S.’s letter to Trelawny, 18 June 1822: should you meet with any scientific person capable of preparing the Prussic Acid, or essential oil of bitter almonds I should regard it as a great kindness if you could procure me a small quantity. It requires the greatest caution in preparation & ought to be highly concentrated; I would give any price for this medicine. You remember we talked of it the other night, & we both expressed a wish to possess it; my wish was serious, & sprung from the desire of avoiding needless suffering. I need not tell you I have no intention of suicide at present, — but I confess it would be a comfort to me to hold in my possession that golden key to the chamber of perpetual rest — (L ii 432–3) 43. S. first wrote They went for some clear, then cancelled all but the first word and wrote sailed for drink to medecine below. M and Relics omit ‘They’ and begin the line with ‘Sailed’. 44. Following this line S. made two aborted beginnings, one beneath the other and both cancelled: I saw the dark rocks and I watched the dark rocks frown & yawn [.] For this line’s possible resonance with Petrarch’s Trionfo della Morte, see headnote. 45–50. Keach 231 speculates whether S. could have been using Petrarch, Rime sonnet 164, ‘as a way of trying to formalize or stabilize the poem’s emotional turmoil at this point’: Or che’l cielo e la terra e’l vento tace, e le fere e gli augelli il sonno affrena, notte il carro stellato in giro mena, e nel suo letto il mar senz’onda giace; vegghio, penso, ardo, piango, e chi mi sface sempre m’è innanzi per mia dolce pena; The translation by Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, cited by Keach, is also resonant: Alas, so all things now do hold their peace! Heaven and earth disturbèd in no thing; The beasts, the air, the birds their song do cease, The nightès car the stars about doth bring; Calm is the sea; the waves work less and less: So am not I, whom love, alas! doth wring, Bringing before my face the great increase Of my desires, whereat I weep and sing, In joy and woe, as in a doubtful case. For my sweet thoughts sometime do pleasure bring: But by and by, the cause of my disease Gives me a pang that inwardly doth sting, When that I think what grief it is again To live and lack the thing should rid my pain. 45. S. began a word with fr canc. before writing winged.

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From the land came fresh and light, And the scent of sleeping flowers And the coolness of the hours Of dew, and the sweet warmth of day 50 Was scattered o’er the twinkling bay; And the fisher with his lamp And spear, about the low rocks damp Crept, and struck the fish who came To worship the delusive flame: 55 Too happy, they whose pleasure sought

46. light,] light Box 1. Following this line in Box 1 the following cancelled lines (editorially redacted) are drafted at the bottom of f. 36r: So that on the sifted sand Which divided sea & land Like a thread of moonlight lay On the disentangled spray These are followed at the top of the next page, f. 36v, by two further cancelled lines: And the warmth of day had strewn And the breath of night 47. sleeping] wingèd Relics. 49. O f dew, and sweet warmth left by day M, Relics. sweet] Written after light canc. 50. Was scattered o’er] Were scattered over M, Relics. bay;] bay Box  1. Following this line are two attempts to begin the next line: Which canc., and I [saw the dark roc canc.]. 51–5. Cp. Edward Williams’s journal entries for May and June 1822: May 2 . . . Went out with S in the boat — fished on the rocks — bad sport — . . . May 4. Went fishing with S — no sport — Loitered away the whole day. In the evening tried the rocks again and I had no less than 30 baits taken off by the small fish — . . . June 11 . . . Sailed in the evening and fished on the rocks till 10 — no sport. (Gisborne Jnl 146–7, 154) 51. S. first wrote And the fishermen with their lamp then changed fishermen to fishers before changing to fisher with a cancel line and writing his above their canc. Following this line S. began a new line with In [the dark rocks canc.] leaving a space before writing in the (cancelled) rhyme-word damp. 52. Following this line is a cancelled start on the next line: Watching to destroy the (see note to l. 58). 53. who] which M, Relics. 54. worship] Cancelled with a very faint pencil line, with the first letter of a new word written above, possibly g. flame:] flame Box 1. Following this line is a cancelled start on the next line: Poor things its beauty. 55–58. ‘The fish, in choosing Life (active enjoyment) rather than peace (mere placid existence), are happy because the pleasure they seek blinds them to the price they will pay for it. But Too happy cuts both ways, meaning “fatally happy” as well as “enviably happy” ’ (GM). D. H. Reiman however

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shelley: selected poems Extinguishes all sense and thought Of the regret that pleasure [        ] Seeking life alone not peace.

argues (‘Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’: The Biographical Problem’, PMLA lxxviii (1963) 536–50) that whichever of the alternative readings Destroying and Seeking (see note to l. 58) are chosen, ‘the basic implications of the figure are not drastically altered’ (538). As Keach observes, ‘On one reading (“Seeking”), those who die in the instinctive, unreflective pursuit of pleasure are interested only in living, not in living peacefully; on the other reading (“Destroying”), these same creatures, when they die, lose only their life and not a peacefulness of which they were never aware’. 55. S. first wrote Too happy, who the pleasure sought, then cancelled who and wrote one after it, and above the line wrote they [these] whose. 57. The line is left uncompleted in Box 1; Of the regret that pleasure leaves M, Relics (i.e. ‘leaves’ is Garnett’s invention). 58. Destroying life alone, not peace! M, Relics; Seeking Life alone, not peace. 1964; Seeking life not peace. Chernaik; Destroying life alone not peace. Reiman (2002); Seeking life alone, not peace. Webb (1995), Major Works. The line is a difficult crux. S. first wrote Destroying life not peace. BSM i 207 reads the punctuation mark after peace as a colon, but what is seen as the upper dot of a colon in fact seems to be a slight thickening of ink at the end of the upstroke on S.’s terminal e. S. cancelled the first seven letters of Destroying, and wrote Seeking below, set slightly further in from the left margin, but with a clear capital letter suggesting that this word was intended to begin a line. He also wrote alone above not peace; the words not peace however are underlined, which Chernaik reads as a reinstatement indicator (i.e. assuming that alone was intended as an alternative to not peace, which S. then decided against) and consequently omits ‘alone’, thus rendering the line ametrical. GM reads the underlining as emphatic, and accordingly printed ‘not peace’ in italic in 1964. Reiman (2002) prints ‘Destroying’ rather than ‘Seeking’, presumably on the grounds that Destroying is only partially cancelled, the punctuation at the end of the line could be a colon, and Seeking may have been intended as the start of a new line. Seeking is the bottom word on f. 36v so it is possible that S. was temporarily halted in work on the poem by running out of space (see headnote). However, as Chernaik 276 notes the poem’s last four lines read as ‘an unmistakable final quatrain, similar in its aphoristic tone to the final quatrain of To Jane — The recollection (a poem which Reiman (2002) 470–71 also considers incomplete).

Index of Titles

A Lament (‘O World, O Life, O Time’) 623 A Lament (‘Swifter far than summer’s flight’) 766 A New National Anthem 427 ‘A widowed bird sate mourning for her love’ 736 Adonais 628 Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude 8 An Exhortation 383 ‘Arethusa arose’ 420 ‘Arethusa was a maiden’ 425 ‘Art thou pale for weariness’ 739 Autumn: a Dirge 730

Mutability (‘We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon’) 7

‘Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven’ [Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici] 885

Prometheus Unbound 93

England in 1819 350 Epipsychidion 571 Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa 446 ‘God save the Queen!’ [A New National Anthem] 427 Goodnight 379 Hymn to Intellectual Beauty 39 Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation 270 Letter to Maria Gisborne 449 Lines (‘When the lamp is shattered’) 771 Lines to a Critic 496 Lines to a Reviewer 418 Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October, 1818 74 Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici 885 Love’s Philosophy 368 Mont Blanc. Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni 47 Mutability (‘The flower that smiles today’) 734

‘O World, O Life, O Time’ 623 ‘O! there are spirits of the air’ 4 Ode to Heaven 342 Ode to the West Wind 353 On a Dead Violet: To ——376 On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, In the Florentine Gallery 364 ‘One word is too often profaned’ 770 Ozymandias 62

Remembrance 766 ‘Rose leaves, when the rose is dead’ [To —— (‘Music, when soft voices die’)] 567 Song (‘Rarely, rarely comest thou’) 431 Song of Apollo 433 Song of Pan 435 Song: To the Men of England 385 Sonnet (‘Lift not the painted veil which those who live’) 69 Sonnet: Political Greatness 599 Stanzas written in dejection – December 1818, near Naples 89 Stanzas. – April, 1814 3 ‘Swifter far than summer’s flight’/Remembrance [A Lament] 766 The Aziola 717 The Cloud 437 ‘The flower that smiles today’ [Mutability] 734 The Indian Girl’s Song 725 The magnetic lady to her patient 790 The Mask of Anarchy 310 The Sensitive-Plant 391

898

index of titles

The Triumph of Life 798 The Two Spirits. An Allegory 72 The Witch of Atlas 499 ‘Thou art fair, and few are fairer’ 372 To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’) [To Edward Williams] 740 To —— (‘Corpses are cold in the tomb’) 388 To —— (‘Music, when soft voices die’) 567 To —— (“I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden’) 374 To —— [Lines to a Critic] 496 To —— [Lines to a Reviewer] 418 To —— [the Lord Chancellor] 491 To a Sky-Lark 482 To Constantia (‘Thy voice, slow rising like a Spirit, lingers’) 66 To Edward Williams 740 To Jane — The Recollection 761 To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’) 881

To Jane. The invitation 755 To Night 307 To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh] 347 To Wordsworth 6 Verses written on receiving a Celandine in a letter from England 36 ‘What men gain fairly, that they should possess’ 381 ‘When passion’s trance is overpast’ 625 ‘When the lamp is shattered’ [Lines] 771 With a Guitar. To Jane 779 Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon 720 ‘Ye hasten to the [grave]! What seek ye there?’ 566

Index of First Lines

A Sensitive-plant in a garden grew 398 A widowed bird sate mourning for her love 738 Alas! good friend, what profit can you see 420 An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king 351 Arethusa arose 422 Arethusa was a maiden 426 Ariel to Miranda; – Take 784 Art thou pale for weariness 739 As from their ancestral oak 349 As I lay asleep in Italy 318 Away! The moor is dark beneath the moon 3 Best and brightest, come away 757 Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven 891 Chameleons feed on light and air 383 Corpses are cold in the tomb 390 ‘Do you not hear the Aziola cry? 719 Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood! 13 From the forests and highlands 436 God! prosper, speed and save 429 Goodnight? No love, the night is ill 380

In day the eternal universe of things 52 It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky 366 Lift not the painted veil which those who live 70 Many a green isle needs must be 77 Men of England, wherefore plough 386 Monarch of Gods and Dæmons, and all Spirits 110 Nor happiness, nor majesty nor fame 564 Now the last day of many days 761 O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being 356 O World, O Life, O Time 625 O! there are spirits of the air 5 One word is too often profaned 778 Palace-roof of cloudless nights 344 Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know 6 Rarely, rarely comest thou 431 Rose leaves, when the rose is dead 569

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! 484 Honey from silkworms who can gather 499 How, my dear Mary, are you critic-bitten 511

‘Sleep, sleep on, forget thy pain 795 Sweet Spirit! Sister of that orphan one 585 Swift as a spirit hastening to his task 822 Swifter far than summer’s flight 769 Swiftly walk o’er the western wave 308

I arise from dreams of thee 729 I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers 440 I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden 375 I met a traveller from an antique land 65 I rode one evening with Count Maddalo 277 I thought of thee, fair Celandine 37 I weep for Adonais – he is dead! 656

The awful shadow of some unseen Power 44 The everlasting universe of things 56 The flower that smiles today 735 The Fountains mingle with the River 371 The keen stars were twinkling 884 The lovely shadow of some awful Power 41 The odour from the flower is gone 378 The serpent is shut out from Paradise 750

900

index of first lines

The sleepless Hours who watch me as I lie 434 The spider spreads her webs, whether she be 457 The sun is set, the swallows are asleep 447 The sun is warm, the sky is clear 91 The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing 733 Thou art fair, and few are fairer 373 Thou who plumed with strong desire 72 Thy country’s curse is on thee, darkest Crest 493 Thy voice, slow rising like a Spirit, lingers 67

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon 7 What men gain fairly, that they should possess 382 What! alive and so bold, oh Earth? 722 When passion’s trance is overpast 627 When the lamp is shattered 774 Ye hasten to the [grave]! What seek ye there? 567