The notes give the primary manuscript (MS) or printed authority for each poem, as well as its dates of composition and of first publication. The commentaries aim to identify literary, historical and personal allusions and to furnish such additional information (e.g. prosodic, scientific) as clarifies or enhances the understanding of a text or passage. References are provided to works of criticism offering comment and interpretation of particular importance. Textual variants of substance only are recorded.
Unless otherwise attributed, translations from modern foreign languages are the editors’. Translations from Greek and Roman authors are taken from the Loeb Classical Library editions unless otherwise indicated; the Bible is cited from the Authorized King James Version (1611); Shakespeare’s works from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Throughout, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley are abbreviated as PBS and MWS.
A. Volumes published in PBS’s lifetime (for a complete list with full bibliographical details, see Appendix)
B. Later editions
| BSM | The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, general ed. Donald H. Reiman, 23 vols (New York and London: Garland, 1986–2002) |
| Massey | Posthumous Poems of Shelley: Mary Shelley’s Fair Copy Book, ed. Irving Massey (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1969) |
| MYR (Shelley) | The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics: Shelley, general ed. Donald H. Reiman, 9 vols (New York and London: Garland, 1985–96) |
| ELH | English Literary History |
| KSJ | Keats-Shelley Journal |
| KSMB | Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin |
| KSR | Keats-Shelley Review [continuing KSMB from 1986] |
| MLR | Modern Language Review |
| PMLA | Publications of the Modern Language Association of America |
| RES | Review of English Studies |
| SiR | Studies in Romanticism |
Text from 1810, where it is dated October 1809. PBS’s first poetic engagement with Irish politics, ‘The Irishman’s Song’ was written before his initial visit to Ireland in 1812; it should be compared with other fruits of that expedition: the poems ‘On Robert Emmet’s Tomb’ and ‘The Tombs’ (1812), as well as the pamphlets An Address to the Irish People (1812) and Proposals for an Association of … Philanthropists (1812). The overtly revolutionist sentiments of the ‘Song’ anticipate a comparable strain in PBS’s later poetry on Ireland, a militant stance in marked contrast to the gradualist tenor of the Address and Proposals. The poem’s ancestry reaches back to the plangent laments for departed Gaelic heroes in the poems that the Scot James Macpherson (1736–96) attributed to the ancient bard Ossian, of which the best known was the epic Fingal (1762). More recent verse on Celtic themes also left its mark on PBS’s ‘Song’, in particular Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) from which 1810 borrows its epigraph: ‘Call it not vain: – they do not err, / Who say, that when the Poet dies, / Mute Nature mourns her worshipper’ (V.i.1–3). Scott goes on to imagine that, rather than Nature, it is those valiant and gentle souls whose memory has been given the second life of poetry who mourn the passing of the bard who bestowed it on them. The theme of forgotten heroism recovered in verse is shared by many of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies (1808), from which PBS also drew inspiration, and where dormant Irish culture is celebrated and its harp called to reawaken. Both Scott and Moore assert an intimate link between the well-being of a people and the vigour of its poetry. The degree to which PBS adopts the idiom of national song from these two current contemporary best-sellers can be appreciated by comparing his final stanza with: ‘Forget not our wounded companions, who stood / In the day of distress by our side; / While the moss of the valley grew red with their blood, / They stirr’d not, but conquer’d and died’ (‘War Song’, ll. 17–20, in Irish Melodies); and with ‘The phantom Knight, his glory fled, / Mourns o’er the field he heap’d with dead; / Mounts the wild blast that sweeps amain, / And shrieks along the battle-plain’ (Lay of the Last Minstrel V.ii.13–16).
12 Sloghan: From the Gaelic sluagh-ghairm = battle-cry (literally ‘host-shout’). In The Lay of the Last Minstrel the word is spelled ‘slogan’ and defined as ‘the war-cry, or gathering word, of a Border clan’ (I.vii).
15–16 The ‘heroes’ of l. 13 are either lying in the throes of death or their ghosts are already riding on the passing wind. Poems I emends 1810’s ‘Or’ to ‘As’.
Text from 1810, where it is dated December 1809. The clear verbal and metrical debt to the ‘wild and sad’ air sung by the squire Fitz-Eustace in Walter Scott’s Marmion (1808), III.x–xi, is noted by Poems I. PBS refashions his literary model, a complaint against a deceiving lover who abandons his true maiden, by transferring the guilt to Laura (a name established in lyric tradition as that of the beloved celebrated by the Italian humanist Petrarch (1304–74) in many of the poems of his Canzoniere) and having the song sung by her faithful and despairing lover.
Text from Esdaile, where it is dated 1810. PBS spent much of the period 16 April to 5 May of that year in the company (chaperoned) of his fifteen-year-old cousin, Harriet Grove – an intense romantic attachment had developed between them – both at his home in Sussex and at her brother’s house in London; the poem no doubt derives from these ‘impassioned’ days. Harriet’s Diary for 1809 and 1810 (including entries for this period) is transcribed in SC II. Her relationship with PBS is recounted in detail in Desmond Hawkins, Shelley’s First Love (London: Kyle Cathie, 1992). PBS follows established conventions of love poetry in deploying musical (ll. 6–7) and vernal (ll. 23–4) analogies while perhaps also alluding to actual conditions: Harriet Grove and the Shelley family shared a music teacher; PBS heard her play at a musical evening on 1 May; and the poem seems to want the completion of a musical setting. Physical love is de-emphasized throughout: in stanza 3 the lovers do not wish to prolong the moment of desire; instead they imagine it completing its course in the eternal spring of Heaven.
2 rapt: Enraptured.
5–8 More even than impassioned music, eyes summon rapture.
19–20 The sense seems to be: ‘We burn for the eternity of “Heaven’s unfading spring” (l. 23) when our love will be fulfilled.’
Probably composed in summer 1810; published as the final poem in 1810, from which the title is taken. A slightly different and untitled version, the text given here, appears in chapter 1 of PBS’s Gothic romance St. Irvyne (1811), which he published anonymously while he was an undergraduate at Oxford. It is possible that PBS originally intended the ‘Fragment’ for the place it occupies in St. Irvyne, following the example of some Gothic novelists of the period, especially Anne Radcliffe (1764–1823), who embedded songs and poems at dramatically appropriate moments in their narratives. Certainly he provides a conventionally sublime setting for it: an evening among high Alpine peaks clad with dark pine forests where the noble Wolfstein, whose past includes an unspecified ‘dreadful’ event, has wandered to soothe the agitation of mind caused by his having joined a troop of bandits who are about to commit a savage robbery: ‘At last he sank on a mossy bank, and, guided by the impulse of the moment, inscribed on a tablet the following lines; for the inaccuracy of which, the perturbation of him who wrote them, may account … Overcome by the wild retrospection of ideal [i.e. imaginary] horror, which these swiftly-written lines excited in his soul, Wolfstein tore the paper, on which he had written them, to pieces, and scattered them about him’ (Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2002), pp. 165–6). By the early nineteenth century the fragment had acquired currency as a poetic form and could be presented (as it is here) as the product of an exceptionally heightened state of mind. Coleridge referred to ‘Kubla Khan or, A Vision in a Dream’ (written sometime between 1797 and 1800; published 1816) as both a ‘fragment’ and a ‘psychological curiosity’, while the final quarter of Byron’s The Giaour (1813) is delivered by the despairing title-character in incomplete and disconnected recollections.
15 upholding: Raising up.
16 Victoria: The pedigree of the name in Gothic fiction is given in Kim Ian Michasiw’s edition of Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or The Moor (Oxford: OUP World’s Classics, 1997), p. 269. It is also the female form of ‘Victor’, the nom de plume adopted by PBS as joint author of 1810, as well as the name later to be given by MWS to the creator of the monster in Frankenstein (1818).
17 1810 reads: ‘Her right hand a blood reeking dagger was bearing’.
Written late summer/early autumn 1810, published in chapter 9 of PBS’s Gothic romance St. Irvyne, which supplies our text. The orphaned Eloise de St. Irvyne has resisted the sinister but fascinating Nempere’s attempts to seduce her (he will later succeed); playing her harp, she sings ‘Ah! faint are her limbs’ to him, explaining afterwards that ‘’tis a melancholy song; my poor brother wrote it, I remember, about ten days before he died. ’Tis a gloomy tale concerning him; he ill deserved the fate he met. Some future time I will tell it you; but now, ’tis very late.—Good-night’ (Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, ed. Behrendt (see headnote to previous poem), p. 232). The stanza and rhyme scheme are those of Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Helvellyn’ (1805), which features a corpse exposed to the elements.
5 whortle: A low shrub bearing the bilberry.
6 myrtle: The common myrtle, traditionally sacred to Venus, is an evergreen shrub.
7 kirtle: A gown, skirt, or outer petticoat (OED).
Dated 1810 in Esdaile, which provides our text, and probably composed in November or December of that year; published in Esdaile 1964. Lines 21–32, alluding to the Irish patriot Robert Emmet, might have been added following PBS’s visit to Dublin (12 February–4 April 1812), as Complete Poetry II suggests. The poem was evidently prompted by the coincidence of two events: a recurrence of the illness and mental derangement from which George III had suffered intermittently since 1787 and the death of his daughter, the Princess Amelia, on 2 November. The king having been diagnosed as mentally incapable, a Regency Bill was introduced in Parliament on 20 December and passed on 5 February 1811, effectively ending George III’s reign, although he survived until January 1820. As the title makes clear, the poem looks forward to the king’s death and burial in Westminster Abbey (the ‘Gothic … cathedral’ of stanza 3). PBS’s prose pamphlet An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte similarly combines regret for a royal death and indignation at the injustices of the current social and political system.
21–32 Erin’s ‘uncoffined slain’ is Robert Emmet, already the subject of ‘lays’ like Robert Southey’s ‘Written Immediately after Reading the Speech of Robert Emmet’ (1803) and Thomas Moore’s ‘Oh! breathe not his name’ (1807), as well as PBS’s own ‘On Robert Emmet’s Tomb’. Unclaimed after his execution by the British in September 1803, Emmet’s body was buried in the paupers’ graveyard in Dublin, whence it was later removed to an unknown location.
33 Yet: Poems I reads the word as ‘Yes’, which is possible.
34 lay: An alternative for ‘lie’, found in contemporary poets as a rhyme word.
38 Who will extort taxes from the poor in order to live in luxury?
57–8 The king’s buried corpse fertilizes the earth. Poems I compares Erasmus Darwin’s Temple of Nature (1803), IV.383–99: ‘Hence when a monarch or a mushroom dies, / Awhile extinct the organic matter lies / … The wrecks of Death are but a change of forms; / Emerging matter from the grave returns.’
Undated in Esdaile, which supplies the text; probably written sometime before Christmas 1811 during PBS’s stay at Keswick (November 1811–January 1812), though possibly while he was at Tremadoc in north Wales (November 1812–February 1813); published in Esdaile 1964. The poem takes a spring-like day in winter as the occasion for a meditation, conventional enough at first glance, on the ‘transitory’ (l. 29) – with a traditional closing emphasis on seizing the day. But PBS gives the poem a personal signature by linking the themes of Genius (in stanza 3, which has only six lines) and Passion (stanza 4). The struggle to realize high artistic aspirations and the troubles that beset early erotic attachment are topics much in evidence in his letters of the period from Keswick (Letters I, pp. 174–246), while in Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) he had read of the trials that attend high creative gifts in both youth (e.g. ‘Resolution and Independence’) and age (‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’). These matters had immediate significance for one who had been expelled from Oxford for publishing critical views on religion, married against the wishes of his family, and seen his best friend (T. J. Hogg) make sexual advances to his new wife, while continuing to cherish ambitious plans for literary and political works to benefit his fellow beings.
1 mockest: The sense is of mimicry, deceptive imitation, in contrast to the sense of ‘mockery’ in l. 20.
7 balm: Balmy, i.e. soft and fragrant; the adjectival usage appears to be PBS’s coinage.
26–7 In the inverted word order, ‘springs’ is the subject of the verb ‘tell’, i.e. ‘declare’ or ‘reveal’.
Text from Esdaile, published in Esdaile 1964. Composed on or before 14 February 1812, when Shelley included it in a letter to Elizabeth Hitchener, untitled and without the fourth stanza, which, if then written, would have been out of keeping with the letter’s vision of a ‘society of peace and love’ achieved through ‘toleration and patience’ (Letters I, pp. 251–5). Commentators have pointed out the poem’s geographical vagaries. The MSS and PBS’s letters (I, pp. 235, 272) indicate that the poem originally meant to celebrate liberation struggles in Spanish colonies in Central and South America, especially Mexico and perhaps Venezuela. In Esdaile PBS altered the ‘New Spain’ in the title to ‘North America’. Poems I suggests that PBS may ultimately have wished his poem to address all republicans on both American continents.
15–16 The lines would be particularly appropriate to Dublin Castle, home of the British administration in Ireland, and to the squalor among Dublin’s poor, which shocked PBS.
21 Cotopaxi: PBS’s invocation of this active volcano in present-day Ecuador is an early instance of what would become his recurrent use of volcanic eruption as an emblem of revolution: e.g. Prometheus Unbound II.iii.1–10; The Mask of Anarchy, ll. 364–7; and ‘Ode to Liberty’, ll. 181–7.
35–6 An allusion to Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac’s celebrated speech to the French National Convention in 1792, advocating the death penalty for Louis XVI: ‘L’arbre de la liberté ne croît qu’arrosé par le sang des tyrans’ (The tree of liberty only grows when fed with the blood of tyrants).
40 A parody of Psalm 103:8: ‘The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy.’
45–50 The inversions in these lines can obscure the sense: ‘When the patriot, whose immortal spirit will be forgiven for violence in the cause of liberty, dies, bereaved Earth may not speak his praise but can mourn him with a tear.’
In a letter of c.16 April 1812, PBS mentions having written ‘some verses on Robert Emmet’ (Letters I, p. 282); the lines, probably composed shortly before or just after the end, on 4 April 1812, of his first visit to Ireland, were later included in Esdaile, from which the present text is taken. Lines 21–8 were published in Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1886), the entire poem in Esdaile 1964. Long admired by Shelley, Emmet was the leader of a short-lived insurrection in Dublin in July 1803 which aimed to establish a provisional government in hopes of galvanizing the country to a general uprising against British rule. He was executed on 20 September, having been arrested while lingering in the city for an answer to his declaration of love for Sarah Curran, the daughter of the prominent lawyer John Philpot Curran, whom PBS met in Dublin in March 1812. Curran had acted as defence counsel for some members of the Society of United Irishmen, the nationalist movement of which Emmet himself was an active member, and which had carried out the unsuccessful insurrection of 1798 with military aid from France.
The circumstances of Emmet’s arrest, together with his youth (he was twenty-five) and the eloquence of his final speech from the dock, won him both popular and poetic acclaim as a Romantic exemplar of patriotic nationalism. Robert Southey’s ‘Written Immediately after Reading the Speech of Robert Emmet’ (1803) and Thomas Moore’s ‘Oh! breathe not his name’ (1807) and ‘She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps’ (1811) are only three of the many lyric responses to Emmet’s fate. As well as the sentiments, PBS’s poem shares the line of four anapaests (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one) of the first of Moore’s poetic tributes mentioned above and the stanza rhyming abab of the second. Lines 21–4 allude to Emmet’s celebrated last injunction, which tradition has preserved with variations: ‘let no man write my epitaph … and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times, and other men, can do justice to my character; – when my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then – let my epitaph be written’ (cited in Marianne Elliott, Robert Emmet: The Making of a Legend (London: Profile Books, 2003), p. 85). The location of Emmet’s unmarked tomb (‘distinguished in lowliness’, l. 10) was, and remains, unknown; in the early nineteenth century it was presumed to be the only blank slab in St Michan’s churchyard in Dublin, which PBS visited, but some now suggest that it is in Glasnevin cemetery. The poem expands upon the revolutionist sentiments in PBS’s other poetic reactions to the condition of Ireland, including ‘The Irishman’s Song’.
7 shamrock: The three-leaved national symbol of Ireland.
10 relics: Remains.
17–24 PBS suggests that the responses elicited by the lowliness and anonymity of Emmet’s burial place are guarantors of Ireland’s eventual freedom. Compare the similar view of the patriot’s grave in ll. 21–5 of ‘To Liberty’.
18 Recalling Emmet’s speech from the dock: ‘I am going to my cold and silent grave … I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world, it is the charity of its silence!’ (Elliott, Robert Emmet, p. 85).
23 caressed: Spelled ‘carest’ in Esdaile.
26–7 its lifespring … their memory: The ‘lifespring’ of Emmet’s name, the ‘memory’ of his ‘foes’ (l. 23).
Text from Esdaile, published in Dowden, Life (see headnote to previous poem). The exact date of composition is unknown, but strong verbal and thematic similarities suggest a time shortly before PBS began work on Queen Mab in spring 1812. The ‘Tyrant’ of stanzas 1–3 may have been suggested by Napoleon, who in the period mid 1810–late 1811 reached the zenith of his power in Europe; but the stanzas have an evident general application as well. PBS’s generation inherited a rich literary and pictorial tradition that attributed symbolic value to ruins. The tenor of stanzas 4 and 5 – which anticipate Canto IX of Queen Mab and parallel the sentiments and images of T. L. Peacock’s poem Palmyra (1806) – derives particularly from Les Ruines, ou Méditation sur les révolutions des empires (1791) by Constantin, Comte de Volney (1757–1820): the defining assertion, by a French revolutionary theorist, of the transience of monarchical authority as evidenced in its decayed monuments. Volney’s book, translated as Ruins of Empires (1795), had considerable currency in England from the late 1790s and was a favourite of the young Shelley. Lines 21–5 can be compared with ‘On Robert Emmet’s Tomb’ and ‘The Tombs’ (1812), poems which similarly invest the grave of the patriot with the power to inspire revolutionary revenge, a defiant note which somewhat abruptly heralds the dawn of ‘Virtue, Truth and Peace’ (l. 45) in the present poem. PBS developed such a moral evolution in detail in Prometheus Unbound: see especially I.218–305, III.iii.
16 pure: Complete Poetry II and Esdaile 1964 read the word, ambiguously formed in the MS, as ‘free’.
28 her Atlantic throne: America.
36–9 Both Volney’s Ruines and his Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte (1787) express indignation at the cost in human suffering of constructing the pyramids, as does Peacock’s Palmyra.
38 footstone: The foundation stone of the pyramid; or – perhaps the meaning here – its base.
Probably composed in spring 1812 at Nant Gwyllt (‘Wild Brook’ in Welsh, pronounced nant guithlt) in central Wales, near PBS’s cousin Thomas Grove’s estate at Cwm Elan (the valley of the Elan river, pronounced coom eelan), where PBS had stayed for about four weeks the previous summer. The text is from Esdaile, first publication in Esdaile 1964. Poems I notes the resemblance between ll. 1–2 and the opening lines of Fragment VII in Sydney Owenson’s The Lay of an Irish Harp; or, Metrical Fragments (1807) – ‘There was a day when simply but to BE, / To live, to breathe, was purest ecstasy’ – which develop a conventional opposition between carefree childhood and careworn age. The contrast in PBS’s poem is rather between self-consciousness and that self-forgetfulness (the ‘strange mental wandering’ of l. 1) in which mind and feeling become as one under the influence of exquisitely pleasurable sensations offered by the natural world – a state which anticipates the pure bliss of Heaven. This Shelleyan theme modifies the evident debt to Wordsworth’s early poems, such as ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ and ‘Lines written at a small distance from my house’. David Duff, ‘Shelley’s “Foretaste of Heaven”’, Wordsworth Circle 31 (2000), pp. 149–58, provides an informative consideration of the poem, its sources and its place in PBS’s poetic development.
5 unpercipient: Not perceiving; the word appears to be PBS’s coinage.
10 it: The ‘mental wandering’ of l. 1.
11 it: The antecedent is ‘Sensation’ (l. 8).
15 the frame: The body.
Text from Esdaile, published in Esdaile 1964. Date of composition uncertain but probably spring 1812. PBS and his wife Harriet spent the period from mid April to late June in Wales, at Nant Gwyllt and Cwm Elan (see headnote to previous poem), in the country of mountains and valleys through which the river Elan (named in l. 10) flows; ll. 30–33 set the poem in spring. In ‘Dark Spirit’ PBS imagines a natural scene near his current residence as expressing what eighteenth-century aesthetics had defined as the ‘sublime’ – a relation between an observer and a landscape in which the fear and awe inspired by such phenomena as the dark woods and jagged peaks of the present poem convey insights inaccessible to reason. See headnote to ‘Mont Blanc’. The poet’s search for a natural equivalent of the genius loci, or presiding spirit of the place, settles at last on the oak (traditional symbol of royalty), which, blasted by lightning, represents all kings, who despoil their subjects, yet themselves waste away. Milton had compared the fallen Satan to a ‘scathed’ oak in Paradise Lost I.612–15; PBS is probably also remembering Coombe-Ellen, a poem written by the Reverend William Lisle Bowles in 1798 while a guest of PBS’s cousin Thomas Grove at Cwm Elan. See note to l. 35 below.
Title ‘desart’ is the usual spelling in PBS’s verse.
1–15 Grammatically the lines make a single sentence, addressing a question (‘Art thou … ?’, ll. 12–15) to the ‘Dark Spirit’ (l. 1) that ‘Wavest … force’ (l. 11).
6 jetty: Jet-black.
12 sooty and fearful fowl: A raven.
35 desolate Oak: Cp. Bowles’s Coombe-Ellen, ll. 54–7: ‘Upon the adverse bank, wither’d and stript / Of all its pleasant leaves, a scathed oak / Hangs desolate; once sov’reign of the scene, / Perhaps, proud of its beauty and its strength.’ To Bowles the barren oak stands as a reminder of the inevitable coming of age and infirmity.
45 that race: The race of kings.
Composed between early May and mid June 1812 while PBS and his wife Harriet, just returned in disappointment from their first campaign for reform in Ireland, were staying in Wales at Nant Gwyllt, then at nearby Cwm Elan (see headnote to ‘Written on a Beautiful Day in Spring’). The text is from Esdaile: lines 15–168 were first published in Edward Dowden’s Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1886), the complete poem in Esdaile 1964. The previous year PBS had spent about four weeks (early July to early August) at Cwm Elan. Expelled from Oxford in March, at odds with his father, anxious about his health, and contemplating an elopement with Harriet, his mental state had been intensely agitated, even to entertaining suicidal thoughts (Letters I, pp. 117–31). ‘The Retrospect’ develops from a contrast between the two sojourns which produced in him, he wrote to William Godwin on 25 April 1812, a divided consciousness: ‘the place where we now reside is in the neighbourhood of scenes marked deeply on my mind by the thoughts which possessed it when present among them. The ghosts of these old friends have a dim & strange appearance when resuscitated in a situation so altered as mine is, since I felt that they were alive’ (Letters I, p. 287).
PBS took the occasion to give imaginative form in a condensed poetic narrative to what he regarded as the chief formative elements of his life to date. He would undertake such a self-examination in verse at later periods – in, for example, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, the Dedication before Laon and Cythna and Epipsychidion. His poem works a variation on a type practised by the earlier generation of Romantic poets, a meditative review of the author’s personal life set in a particularized landscape. It shares the title and other features of Southey’s ‘The Retrospect’ (1795) and shows the influence of Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798) and ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807). David Duff analyses the poem in ‘“The Casket of my Unknown Mind”: The 1813 Volume of Minor Poems’, in The Unfamiliar Shelley, ed. Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 55–60.
5–7 In ancient Greek myth, the Titan Kronos, traditionally assimilated to Chronos (Time), devoured his children to prevent them from usurping his place in the heavens. PBS’s reference to Time as feminine may appropriate the sex of the earth as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet XIX.1–2: ‘Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws, / And make the earth devour her own sweet brood.’
15 wildered: Lost, gone astray.
24–8 The rushing of the ‘wild brook’, as internalized in the mind of the poet, drives out his baleful thoughts.
65–70 In 1810 an informal engagement between PBS and his cousin Harriet Grove (see headnote to ‘How eloquent are eyes!’) was terminated against his wishes, Harriet’s family regarding his opinions, writings and conduct as unsuitable for her. PBS considered that both she and they had betrayed him.
73 The biblical language recalls two passages from Psalms: ‘As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God’ (42:1); and ‘If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me’ (139:9–10).
78–83 The allure of his family name attracted many but they neither perceived nor influenced his inner self.
84–91 The patriot willing to perish for freedom’s sake could never find friends among those who benefit from tyranny.
95 of unprofitable mould: Of a kind that brought no worldly reward.
112–13 Adapting ll. 8–9 of ‘Dark Spirit of the desart rude’. Other adaptations of PBS’s own verse up to l. 123 are noted in Poems I and Complete Poetry II.
120–21 In Classical myth, the nymph Echo, rejected by Narcissus, concealed herself in the woods to hide her grief.
136–43 PBS imagines his change from summer 1811 to summer 1812 as the metamorphosis of a grave-worm into a butterfly. Cp. ‘Written on a Beautiful Day in Spring’, l. 18.
Originally conceived in December 1811 as a portrait of ‘a perfect state of society; though still earthly’ (Letters I, p. 201), and written mostly between spring 1812 and spring 1813, Queen Mab (QM) was not offered for sale but printed in a limited edition of 250 copies and distributed privately, to avoid the risk of prosecution for the poem’s forthright anti-monarchical and anti-religious opinions. Our text is from this edition (1813). The Queen Mab of the title is the ‘fairies’ midwife’ who is evoked in a celebrated passage of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (I.iv.53–95) as the architect of sleepers’ dreams, and who features in the title of popular eighteenth-century collections of fairy tales and stories for children. The visionary frame of the poem intends to recall these precedents as well as the scenes of instruction delivered by a supernatural being in ancient and modern epics such as Virgil’s Aeneid VI and Milton’s Paradise Lost XI–XII. The polemical conspectus of past, present and future that Mab unveils to the spirit of the sleeping Ianthe in QM II–IX draws upon a long tradition of critical thought. Its principal sources range from the Roman poet Lucretius (98–c.55 BC) through the French materialist Baron d’Holbach (1723–89) and the revolutionary theorist Constantin, Comte de Volney (1757–1820) to the sceptical empiricism of the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76) and the English political radicals Thomas Paine (1737–1809), William Godwin (1756–1836) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) – and extends to contemporary writers on astronomy, diet and health. Ideas gathered from these form the chief intellectual underpinning of Mab’s revelations as well as of the seventeen prose notes, which provide a further dimension of philosophical and scientific authority.
In furnishing his poem with notes, PBS was following the example of such didactic works as Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden … With Philosophical Notes (1791), in which an imaginative survey in verse is supported with extensive references to botanical science and plant lore. The style mixes what PBS described as ‘blank heroic verse’ and ‘blank lyrical measure’: that is, unrhymed lines of ten syllables whose dominant pattern is an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable, varied by shorter unrhymed lines of different lengths and stress patterns (Letters I, p. 352); he cites as precedents the flexible verse of the choruses of Greek tragedies, of Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671) and of Robert Southey’s narrative poem Thalaba the Destroyer (1801). For the many additional influences Poems I and Complete Poetry II may be consulted.
The 1813 edition of QM was a finely produced and relatively expensive volume which might, PBS claimed, be read by aristocratic youth (Letters I, p. 361). The appearance of cheaper pirated editions from 1821, of which PBS disapproved (Letters II, p. 298), attracted both fiercely vituperative attacks on him and prosecution for some of the poem’s publishers. But, having thus illegitimately been introduced to a broad readership, QM gained remarkable currency among Chartists, socialists, Marxists and freethinkers right through the nineteenth century.
General introductions to QM may be found in Carlos Baker, Shelley’s Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), and in the works by Kenneth Neill Cameron, David Duff and Stuart Sperry listed under ‘Critical Sources’ in Further Reading (p. xxxix). PBS’s vegetarianism is considered in Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Bouthaina Shaaban, ‘Shelley and the Chartists’, in Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 114–25, investigates PBS’s presence in the journals of that movement.
Epigraph 1 Voltaire frequently ended his letters with this injunction, which may be translated ‘Crush the vile thing’, where ‘thing’ = ‘superstition and intolerance’.
Epigraph 2 The opening lines (1–7) of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), Book IV: ‘I wander through a pathless region of poetry where no one has trod before me. I delight to approach virgin springs, to drink from them and to pluck unfamiliar flowers [PBS omits the phrase ‘seeking an illustrious crown for my head’] with which the Muses have never yet wreathed anyone’s brows. First, because I teach lofty matters, then because I go on to free the mind from the tight knots of superstition’ (editors’ translation).
Epigraph 3 ‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.’ This celebrated remark, attributed to the Greek mathematician, astronomer and physicist Archimedes (c.287–212 BC), had been adopted by radical writers as a slogan for the power of ideas to bring about change, and notably by Thomas Paine at the beginning of Rights of Man, Part II (1792).
The dedicatory poem is addressed to Harriet Westbrook, PBS’s wife since August 1811: ‘flowers’ (l. 11) and ‘Each flowret’ (l. 15) refer to the shorter poems in Esdaile which PBS at first planned to publish with QM. The Dedication before Laon and Cythna, addressed to MWS, offers an interesting comparison.
11 wilding: Wild, uncultivated.
15 flowret: i.e. floweret, a small flower.
I.2 In Classical mythology, Death and Sleep were the children of Night. Line 1 revises the opening line of Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801): ‘How beautiful is night!’
I.27 Ianthe: PBS’s and Harriet’s first child, born 23 June 1813, was named Eliza Ianthe. The name derives from the Greek, ‘violet flower’. An ocean nymph in Greek mythology, Ianthe, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is a beautiful girl of Crete loved by another girl, Iphis, who is transformed into a young man in order to marry her. Carlos Baker, Shelley’s Major Poetry, p. 26, lists other possible sources.
I.43 parasite: Any climbing plant could be designated as such.
I.52 that strange lyre: An Aeolian or wind harp, conventional emblem of poetic inspiration. See Alastor, ll. 39–49.
I.53 genii: Spirits or minor deities associated with natural phenomena. See Prometheus Unbound I.42.
I.61 pennons: Wings.
I.82–3 Purely translucent, the fairy chariot does not bend light by refraction.
I.98 fair star: The planet Venus as the morning star.
I.102 purpureal: ‘Purple’, and possibly (a secondary Latin sense) ‘bright’, ‘shining’.
I.108 amaranth: A mythical flower that never fades.
I.128 day-stars: Both the morning star and the sun are so called.
I.134 Instinct with: Quickened by, energized by, as in I.271.
I.188 immurement: Confinement, as if within walls. See II.61.
I.200 disparted: Dispersed.
I.242–3 See PBS’s Note [1].
I.252–3 See PBS’s Note [2].
I.259 Hesperus: The planet Venus as the evening star.
II.21 fane: Temple.
II.37 circumambient: Surrounding.
II.51–4 The meaning of these lines turns on the sense of ‘for’ in l. 52. Locock, taking ‘for’ as ‘on account of’, understands that Ianthe does not refrain from tasting the ‘varied bliss’. Poems I takes ‘for’ as ‘despite’, so that Ianthe chooses not to enjoy the pleasures of the palace which are the reward of virtue and wisdom. Complete Poetry II, reading ‘for’ as ‘in order to obtain’, concludes that Ianthe refrains from raising virtuous scruples in order to enjoy the delights the palace affords.
II.59 meed: Reward.
II.98 intellectual eye: The mind’s eye.
II.108 chain of nature: The totality of interconnected causes and effects operating in the universe.
II.110 Palmyra: An important ancient trading city on the east–west caravan route through the Syrian desert which reached the height of its affluence and power in the third century AD – when, having engaged in conflict with Rome, it was conquered and destroyed by the emperor Aurelian (reigned AD 270–75). The extensive remains of Palmyra furnished matter for reflections on the transience of human prosperity and grandeur in Volney’s Les Ruines (1791), translated as Ruins of Empires (1795; see headnote to ‘To Liberty’), and Peacock’s Palmyra (1806).
II.132 scite: Site, an unusual contemporary spelling.
II.137–48 The building at Jerusalem (Salem) of a magnificent and lavishly appointed temple during King Solomon’s reign in the tenth century BC was accomplished by imposing heavy taxation on the king’s subjects and by large-scale forced labour. See 1 Kings 5–8 and 2 Chronicles 2–5.
II.148 a dotard’s: Solomon’s.
II.149–61 In order to enforce a similar judgement on the Israelites of the Old Testament in the pamphlet A Refutation of Deism (1814), PBS cites their savage treatment of the Midianites, in obedience to God’s command to Moses in Numbers 31:1–18 (Prose Works I, p. 102).
II.153 Promiscuous: Indiscriminately.
II.155 he: Moses.
II.158–60 tales … credits: Which religion repeats to frighten its adherents into believing them.
II.176 Where Socrates expired: i.e. Athens.
a tyrant’s slave: Local rulers in Greece were subject to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.
II.179–81 The Rome that once produced courageous, wise and benevolent figures is now home to the Pope, leader of a fraudulent religion. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) was a rational enquirer over a range of topics and a political orator. Antoninus may refer either to Antoninus Pius, emperor AD 138–61, admired for integrity and gentleness; or to Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, emperor AD 161–80, Stoic philosopher and author of Meditations.
II.182–210 As Poems I points out, some features of the ‘stately city’ (l. 187) appear to have been suggested by Tenochtitlán (built on the site of the present Mexico City), capital of the Aztec empire, which was described in D. F. S. Clavigero’s History of Mexico (trans. 1787). Robert Southey’s narrative poem Madoc (1805), which PBS had read, introduces the fictional city Aztlan as the capital of the Aztecs, citing authorities in footnotes.
II.182 ten thousand: A rhetorical exaggeration.
II.231 viewless: Invisible.
III.17 imbecility: Weakness, feebleness.
III.32 nickname: Here and in IV.212 (where it is a noun) the word signifies ‘(to conceal with) a deceptive verbal mask’.
III.46 palled: Diminished, dulled.
III.110 mechanic: Manual labourer.
hind: Agricultural worker.
III.111 stubborn glebe: Resistant soil – a phrase borrowed from Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751), l. 26.
III.124 genders: Engenders.
III.157 impassive: Both the senses ‘invulnerable’ and ‘immovable’ are possible.
III.182 Lowered: Scowled, frowned.
IV.10 depend: Hang down.
IV.14 idly: Motionless.
IV.24 vesper: Hesperus, the evening star.
IV.33–70 This scene of war has been taken as evoking the siege and occupation of Moscow by the French in August 1812, the setting fire to the city by the Russians and the debacle of the French retreat. But, as Complete Poetry II points out, although some details are consistent with those events, others are not – so that the passage is better understood as a general condemnation of the horrors of war bearing some analogy to recent events.
IV.66 outsallying: A ‘sally’ is ‘a sudden rush (out) from a besieged place upon the enemy’ (OED).
IV.82–3 PBS’s prophecy combines two references common in contemporary radical writers: to John the Baptist’s accusation of the Pharisees and Sadducees in Matthew 3:7–10: ‘O generation of vipers … the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire’; and to the upas tree, supposed to poison the atmosphere and lay waste the country round it, according to legend. The latter is developed further in IV.262–5, V.44–52, VI.207–8.
IV.86 the serpent’s famine: ‘The Upas-tree’s hunger for its victims’ (Poems I).
IV.98 Partial in: Inclined/biased towards.
IV.102 But: Only, merely.
IV.122 tenement: Abode (in a human body).
IV.127–38 The newborn soul’s oppression by customary power parallels the lot of the child factory-worker sequestered from fresh air and daylight.
IV.178–9 See PBS’s Note [3].
IV.212 nick-name: See note to III.32.
IV.240 thy master: Jesus.
IV.255 nerveless: Listless, lacking vigour.
IV.262–5 See note to IV.82–3.
V.1–2 See PBS’s Note [4].
V.4–6 See PBS’s Note [5].
V.13 lawn: Glade, open space among trees.
V.34 impassive by: Not responsive to.
V.44 See note to IV.82–3.
V.58 See PBS’s Note [6].
V.64–8 Referring principally, though not exclusively, to the production of sugar on West Indian estates worked by African slaves and the military conflicts between European powers in the region. See PBS’s Note [17].
V.72 slaves: Exploited factory labourers are primarily intended, as ll. 76–7 indicate.
V.80 wealth of nations: Recalling the title of Adam Smith’s landmark work of political economy An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), the classic analysis of the working of free and open markets and the role of capital in promoting them; but PBS’s specific target here is the withering effect of commercial greed.
V.93–4 See PBS’s Note [7].
V.98–101 See note to VII.33–6 and PBS’s Note [15].
V.112–13 See PBS’s Note [8].
V.116 famished offsprings scream: Complete Poetry II makes a good case for retaining the 1813 reading ‘offsprings’, ‘scream’ then being a verb and ‘offsprings’ an acceptable early nineteenth-century plural.
V.135 plastic: Capable of being moulded.
V.137–46 The lines recall a well-known passage in Gray’s ‘Elegy’, ll. 45–76.
V.140 vulgar: Pertaining to ordinary or common people.
Cato: The Roman soldier, statesman and author Marcus Porcius Cato (234–149 BC), proverbially stern, upright and public-spirited, remained active into old age.
V.147–66 PBS’s elementary statement of the doctrine of Perfectibility is chiefly indebted to Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), where it is formulated as ‘the faculty of being continually made better and receiving perpetual improvement’ – without ever attaining perfection (1798 edn), ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), pp. 144–5.
V.166 mean lust: Petty cravings.
V.177 light of heaven: Poems I detects an allusion to an increased window tax reintroduced in 1797 to defray the cost of the war against France.
V.189–96 See PBS’s Note [9].
V.194–5 pestilence … sensualism: Venereal disease.
V.196 hydra-headed: In Greek myth, the Lernaean Hydra was a monstrous serpent with many heads and poisonous breath and blood.
V.223–7 The virtuous man’s actions for the general good require no other reward or recognition than those provided by his own feelings.
VI.4 periods: The rhetorical passages into which Mab’s lessons are divided.
VI.36–8 PBS again deploys the legend of the scorpion’s suicide when surrounded by fire in IX.43–5 and in The Cenci II.ii.70–71.
VI.41 The idea that the revolution of the seven planets in their orbits round the earth created harmonious music, emblem of cosmic concord, was a commonplace dating from antiquity. See VIII.17–30.
VI.45–6 See PBS’s Note [10].
VI.54–238 In 1839 MWS omitted the remainder of this canto and all of Canto VII.
VI.72–102 A slightly modified version of these lines appeared as an independent poem in 1816 under the title ‘Superstition’.
VI.74–9 That the uninformed and extravagant infant mind of humanity first attributed divinity to the great forms of nature, was a hypothesis maintained by contemporary critics of orthodox theology such as Holbach.
VI.111 Ironically recalling the words of Sin in Paradise Lost II.787–9: ‘I fled, and cried out Death; / Hell trembled at the hideous name, and sighed / From all her caves, and back resounded Death.’
VI.132 horrent: Shuddering with horror.
VI.154 sublunary: Beneath the moon, and so (according to traditional astronomy) subject to change and decay, unlike the immutable planets and stars.
VI.167 uprooted ocean-fords: ‘Ford’ can designate a shallow tract of the ocean (OED n. 2a); Complete Poetry II suggests that the phrase designates a waterspout, i.e. a gyrating column of mist, water and spray created by the action of a whirlwind on the sea (OED n. 3).
VI.171–3 See PBS’s Note [11].
VI.188 virtue: Strength, power.
VI.198 See PBS’s Note [12].
VI.207 poison-tree: See note to IV.82–3.
VI.220–38 The sense appears to be: ‘When inevitable change has destroyed the temples of sanguinary religion, a temple to the Spirit of Nature/Necessity (ll. 197–8) will subsist unalterably.’ This ‘fane’ is simply the sensitive extension of the world (l. 231), an elusive phrase that may mean either the world as perceived by the senses or – more likely – the world of sentient beings.
VII.13 An ironic rejoinder to Psalm 14:1: ‘The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.’ See PBS’s Note [13].
VII.15–26 The passage affirms the view that the infinity of interlinked causes evident in nature denies the hypothesis that there is a first cause, God, which created the world.
VII.23 exterminable: The reasoning of the passage seems to demand a meaning opposite to the usual sense of the word, ‘that may be exterminated’. OED remarks: ‘used by Shelley for “illimitable”’.
VII.30 PBS’s principal source for these names appears to have been Volney’s Ruins, which identifies Seeva (Shiva), representing destruction (but also generation), as one of the trinity of Hindu gods together with Vishnu and Brahma. ‘Buddh’ is Buddha and ‘Foh’ the Chinese form of ‘Buddha’. Jehovah or Yahweh is the Hebrew god of the Old Testament, sometimes addressed or referred to as ‘Lord’ (Hebrew ‘Adonai’).
VII.33–6 Recalling the Hindu procession of Juggernaut, from Jagannath, a title of the god Vishnu; an image of the god was pulled along on a huge wagon attended by Brahmins (members of the priestly cast) under the wheels of which devotees were said to throw themselves. See V.98–101.
VII.43 iron age: PBS adapts the ancient commonplace (as in Ovid, Metamorphoses I) of accounting for the imperfection of the world by imagining that it has declined from a golden through a silver and then a bronze age to the present age of iron.
VII.49–59 The knowledge that Ianthe has so far acquired has been called up from a complete and accurate record of time indistinctly present in all minds and which needs only to be awakened to be recognized as true.
VII.53 Tablets: Here the word signifies a notebook (as Poems I points out) – in which the lessons the pupil Ianthe has learned are permanently inscribed.
VII.65 purblind: Myopic; figuratively ‘dull’ or ‘stupid’.
VII.67 Ahasuerus: See PBS’s Note [14]. One of the names by which the Wandering Jew of legend was known. In the Preface to PBS’s early poem The Wandering Jew (1810) the subject is described as ‘an imaginary personage, noted for the various and contradictory traditions which have prevailed concerning him’ (Poems I, p. 41). He appears again in Hellas, ll. 738 ff.
VII.99 paeans: Hymns.
VII.100 A murderer: Moses, who kills an Egyptian in Exodus 2:12 and in 32:26–8 directs the sons of Levi to slaughter in God’s name 3,000 idolatrous Israelites.
VII.119 woman’s blood: Probably alluding to the slaughter of captive Midian women by the Israelites in Numbers 31:14–18.
VII.135–6 See PBS’s Note [15].
VII.149 reprobation: The condition of being condemned to, specifically predestined to, eternal damnation.
VII.156 Alluding to Matthew 22:14: ‘For many are called, but few are chosen.’
VII.170–72 Ahasuerus’ interpretation of Christ’s words in Matthew 10:34: ‘I came not to send peace, but a sword.’
VII.192 ghastily: Adverbial form of ‘ghastly’.
VII.195–9 Appropriating Satan’s defiant ‘Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven’ and his determination ‘To wage by force or guile eternal war / Irreconcilable, to our grand foe’ (Paradise Lost I.263, 121–2).
VII.208 So: ‘So did they’ or perhaps ‘Therefore’.
VII.218 Recalling the prophetic vision in Revelation 14:18–19: ‘Thrust in thy sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth; for her grapes are fully ripe. And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God.’
VII.219 the red cross: Symbol of militant Christianity.
VII.221 exterminated faith: One of the Christian heresies eradicated by the bloody persecution of its adherents.
VII.232–3 Those fanatics who slaughtered in God’s name believed they acted guiltlessly.
VII.241–53 The freedom that has begun to emerge following the progress of reason has mitigated the worst impulses of the zealous, frustrating divine malevolence.
VII.259–60 The fallen angels are described as ‘forest oaks’ scathed by ‘heaven’s fire’ in Paradise Lost I.612–15.
VIII.3–5 Kronos the Titan, associated with Chronos (‘Time’), devoured his children as soon as they were born, it having been foretold that one of them would dethrone him. Kronos’ sister and wife, Rhea, tricked him by wrapping a stone in infant’s clothes and giving it to him to swallow instead of her newborn son Zeus, whom she concealed. Once grown, Zeus made Kronos vomit up the children he had eaten; together they and Zeus defeated him and ruled in his stead.
VIII.17–30 See note to VI.41.
VIII.37 Glow mantling: Suffused with the ‘glow of health’.
VIII.86 basilisk: Alluding to the prophecy of an age of peace in Isaiah 11:8: ‘And the suckling child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den.’ The ‘cockatrice’, another name for the basilisk, was a legendary reptile (supposedly hatched by a serpent from a cock’s egg, i.e. a hen’s egg without a yolk) whose poisonous look and breath were deadly.
VIII.108 consentaneous: Mutual, concurring.
VIII.115 mantles: Spreads foaming over the surface.
VIII.120–21 There will be no more winter.
VIII.124–8 Recalling Isaiah 11:6–7: ‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them … and the lion shall eat straw like the ox’ – examples of PBS’s contention in Note [17] that abstaining from flesh in favour of a vegetable diet would result in moral improvement.
VIII.129–30 nightshade’s … Poisons no more: The beautiful plant with poisonous berries ceases to be toxic. Cp. Prometheus Unbound III.iv.78–85.
VIII.132 mantles: Foams.
VIII.183–6 Referring to the British military campaigns of 1798–1807 against the French in Egypt, regarded as the birthplace of the fraudulent monopoly of power by a league of priests and kings.
VIII.194 the train-bearer of slaves: The menial servant of tyrants, who are themselves the true slaves. See III.32, IV.246, IX.94.
VIII.203–7 Him, still … eternity: A slightly altered version of these difficult lines in 1813 serves as the key to PBS’s Note [16]:
Him, (still from hope to hope the bliss pursuing,
Which, from the exhaustless lore of human weal
Dawns on the virtuous mind,) the thoughts that rise
In time-destroying infiniteness, gift
With self-enshrined eternity, &c.
The convoluted syntax in each version obscures both the order of subject, predicate, object – ‘thoughts’, ‘gift’, ‘Him’ – and the sense: ‘Hope prompts him to seek the happiness that leads the virtuous mind to educate itself in the knowledge of human well-being; and the unbounded thoughts that arise from this pursuit endow him with an autonomous immortality.’
VIII.211–12 See PBS’s Note [17].
VIII.222 prune: Preen.
VIII.226–7 prerogative … equals: Man ceases to kill animals, regarding them as his fellow-creatures.
IX.29–30 A theme amply developed in ‘Ozymandias’.
IX.48 MWS omitted this line from 1839 and did not restore it, as she did other censored passages, in 1840.
IX.76 sweet bondage: Sexual love.
IX.86 senselessness: Absence of sensual feeling.
IX.130 wreck: The remains of something ruined.
IX.149–63 PBS here conceives of human destiny in its broadest terms by combining the idea of perfectibility with that of metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls through successive material existences.
IX.154 Bicker: Flash, gleam.
IX.175 gulph-dream: A dream of falling into a gulf.
Editorial summaries of excised passages of significance are given in italics within square brackets.
[1] The astronomical information is taken from the source that PBS credits in Note [2], William Nicholson’s The British Encyclopedia, or Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1809).
[2] p. 83 awful: Awe-inspiring.
p. 84 necessity … itself: See VI.197 ff. and Note [12].
The works of his fingers: Ironically alluding to the praise of God in Psalm 8:3–9: ‘When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers … how excellent is thy name in all the earth!’
[3] The first three paragraphs are taken with minor variations from William Godwin’s The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (1797). The verse dialogue, one of the titles that PBS collected in Esdaile but did not publish, appears to have been composed before he began to work on QM. Commentators have found models for the poem in the exchange between the witches in Macbeth I.iii.1–35 and in Coleridge’s castigation of the war policy of William Pitt in ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ (1798).
p. 84 trepanned: Inveigled, tricked.
[4] Quoted with minor inaccuracies from Ecclesiastes 1:4–7.
[5] The Greek quotation from Homer’s Iliad is translated by Robert Fagles (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 200, as follows: ‘Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. / Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, / now the living timber bursts with the new buds / and spring comes round again. And so with men: / as one generation comes to life, another dies away.’
[6] The Latin quotation from Lucretius, De Rerum Natura II.1–14, is translated by R. E. Latham in On the Nature of the Universe (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1951), p. 60, as follows:
What joy it is, when out at sea the stormwinds are lashing the waters, to gaze from the shore at the heavy stress some other man is enduring! Not that anyone’s afflictions are in themselves a source of delight; but to realize from what troubles you yourself are free is joy indeed. What joy, again, to watch opposing hosts marshalled on the field of battle when you have yourself no part in their peril! But this is the greatest joy of all: to stand aloof in a quiet citadel, stoutly fortified by the teaching of the wise, and to gaze down from that elevation on others wandering aimlessly in a vain search for the way of life, pitting their wits one against another, disputing for precedence, struggling night and day with unstinted effort to scale the pinnacles of wealth and power. O joyless hearts of men! O minds without vision!
[8] The two Latin verses are from Lucretius, De Rerum Natura III.85–6: ‘Many a time before now men have betrayed their country and their beloved parents in an effort to escape the halls of Hell’ (trans. Latham, On the Nature of the Universe, p. 98).
[9] p. 92 one tenth of the population of London: An extreme, perhaps exaggerated, estimate of the number of prostitutes in the metropolis.
[13] This note reproduces, with some additions and modifications, The Necessity of Atheism (NofA), the pamphlet jointly authored by PBS and his friend and fellow-undergraduate Thomas Jefferson Hogg, which led to their expulsion from Oxford in March 1811. The most significant additions to the text of the pamphlet are: the first paragraph; ‘of the relation … bear to each’ (third paragraph); ‘(A graduated scale … attached to them)’; ‘But the God of Theologians is incapable of local visibility’ (‘1st … the senses’); ‘We must prove design before we can infer a designer’ and ‘beyond its limits’ (‘2d. Reason’); ‘or involuntarily active’ (‘3d. Testimony’); ‘creative’ (final paragraph). Important excisions from and alterations to NofA are given in the notes below.
p. 95 least incomprehensible: ‘less incomprehensible’ (NofA).
there must have been a cause: After this phrase, NofA reads: ‘But what does this prove?’
omnipotent being: ‘Almighty Being’ (NofA).
p. 96 either of: ‘any of’ (NofA).
neglect to remove: ‘willingly neglect to remove’ (NofA).
views any subject of discussion: ‘views the subject’ (NofA). At this point and before the final sentence NofA reads: ‘It is almost unnecessary to observe, that the general knowledge of the deficiency of such proof, cannot be prejudicial to society: Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind.—’
no proof of the existence of a Deity: As a concluding flourish NofA adds ‘Q.E.D.’ (abbreviating the Latin formula Quod erat demonstrandum, ‘Which was to be demonstrated’; i.e. ‘What was to be proved has been proven’).
[16] See note to VIII.203–7. The verse ‘Dark flood of time … unredeemed’ quotes lines 58–69 of PBS’s unpublished poem ‘To Harriet’ (‘It is not blasphemy to hope’), written in 1812 and included in Esdaile. The citations at the end of the note identify PBS’s principal sources, Godwin’s Political Justice (1793) and Nicolas de Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique (1795).
[17] This note is substantially identical to PBS’s pamphlet A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813), which appears to have been printed shortly before the notes to QM, as Complete Poetry II argues. PBS adopted a vegetarian diet at the beginning of 1812 and largely kept to it for the rest of his life. His principal sources for pamphlet and note were John Frank Newton’s The Return to Nature; or, A Defence of the Vegetable Regimen (1811), Joseph Ritson’s An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty (1802) and Dr William Lambe’s Reports on the Effects of a Peculiar Regimen on Scirrhous Tumours and Cancerous Ulcers (1809). Timothy Morton’s Shelley and the Revolution in Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) considers PBS’s vegetarianism in the context of contemporary debates on animal rights, diet and health.
The verse is from Paradise Lost XI.477–88, the words of the Archangel Michael (and not Raphael) to Adam prophesying the effects on humans of ‘intemperance … / In meats and drinks’.
The Latin verse is from Horace, Odes I.iii.25–33: ‘The human species, audacious enough to endure anything, plunges into forbidden sacrilege. The audacious son [Prometheus] of Iapetus by an act of criminal deception brought fire to the nations. After the theft of fire from its heavenly home, a wasting disease and an unprecedented troop of fevers fell upon the earth, and the doom of a distant death, which up to then was slow in coming, quickened its step.’
p. 99 the shambles: The slaughterhouse.
mouflon: Wild sheep.
p. 100 It is true … mass of human evil: This paragraph does not appear in A Vindication.
p. 102 Muley Ismael: Sultan of Morocco from 1672 to 1727, notorious for cruelty.
MWS printed this enigmatic lyric without date and with the title ‘To—–’ in 1824 and placed it among the poems of 1821 in 1839; earlier, in transcribing it from PBS’s draft, she had entitled it ‘To MWG’ (Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin) and dated it June 1814 before cancelling the initials. Some commentators and editors have considered the earlier year as the more likely, MWS as indeed the addressee, and composition to have taken place between the mutual declaration of love that PBS and the sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin (MWS) made on 26 June and their elopement on 28 July. Many details of the poem are susceptible of being understood in that context. See Poems I, pp. 442–3. But evidence that the poem is more likely to have been composed in 1820–21 and addressed to Claire Clairmont has been adduced by Nora Crook in ‘Mary Shelley’s Concealing “To—–”: (Re)addressing Poems’, Wordsworth Circle 43:1 (Winter 2012), pp. 12–20: see note to ll. 13–14. The present text, which differs in some respects from that in MWS’s editions of PBS’s poems and later ones, has been edited from Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 12, pp. 8–11, a rough draft, unfinished in places and not always confidently legible. Some punctuation has been supplied and some readings are conjectural.
6 into: ‘upon’ is an uncancelled alternative in the MS.
13–14 These lines are very difficult to decipher in the MS. The present text adopts the reading offered by Nora Crook after a detailed study of the MS (‘Mary Shelley’s Concealing “To —–”’, pp. 14–16), which gives the sense: ‘Only you saw the paleness in my face that otherwise went unseen, it having been intended for you alone.’ Other readings have been proposed, for example in Poems I: ‘Whilst you alone then not regarded / The tie which you alone should be’; i.e. ‘You alone, in loving me, disregarded the fact that I was married – you only, by virtue of our love, deserving to be my wife.’ 1824 reads: ‘Whilst thou alone, then not regarded, / The [ ] thou alone should be’.
15–18 Mary declared her love for PBS before he confessed his for her (Letters I, p. 403).
24 ‘Turning to bliss its wayward pain’ is an uncancelled alternative in the MS.
Published in 1816, from which the present text is taken; probably composed in 1815. MWS noted in 1839 that the poem ‘was addressed in idea to Coleridge, whom [PBS] 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 opinions 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, pp. 15–16). These remarks have influenced understanding of ‘O! there are spirits’ as addressed to a well-known writer who had adopted conservative views while remaining inwardly attached to his earlier progressive ones; as such it may be set against the more directly political confrontation of ‘To Wordsworth’, also published in 1816. PBS was well acquainted with Coleridge’s ‘France: An Ode’ (1798), which combines an account of the author’s solitary wanderings in nature with a statement of his altered political sympathies towards revolutionary France. But rather than treating politics explicitly, the moral portrait and condensed narrative of ‘O! there are spirits’ have largely to do with the complex, and hazardous, character of imaginative inspiration – its relation to nature, to love and to the self. Stanzas 3–6 might allude to the effects of the married Coleridge’s infatuation for Wordsworth’s sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson, which is implicit in ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (1802).
Title There is no title in 1816, the text being preceded solely by the epigraph; in 1839 MWS adopted ‘To * * * *’ as the title.
Epigraph ‘I shall endure in tears an unhappy lot’ – from Euripides, Hippolytus 1142–4. In 1816 the Greek is incorrectly printed; the text here is that edited by W. S. Barrett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). Preceded by the phrase ‘for your misfortune’, the words are spoken by the Chorus to Hippolytus, who has been banished by his father Theseus following a false accusation of rape by his stepmother Phaedra, who has hanged herself in despair at her love for her stepson.
1–6 Poems I notes a number of echoes of Coleridge’s poems in these lines.
9 inexplicable things: The ‘lovely ministers’ of the preceding stanza. Cp. Alastor, l. 6.
15–16 tame sacrifice / To a fond faith: The sense is obscure – perhaps either: (1) ‘You naïvely thought you could elicit a response to your love from one who was meant for another’; or (2) ‘Your orthodox religious convictions prevented you from finding outside marriage the love you might have enjoyed.’
25–6 The lines would be appropriate to the disappointments in love that PBS recounts as his own in ‘The Retrospect: Cwm Elan 1812’, ll. 65–70, and in the Dedication before Laon and Cythna, stanza 6.
Text from 1816, where the poem was first published. PBS, Mary Godwin (as MWS then was), T. L. Peacock and Claire Clairmont’s brother Charles visited Lechlade in the first week of September 1815, during a boating expedition on the Thames. They had originally intended to visit the river’s source, but shallow water prevented their going further than Lechlade, where they stayed for two nights before turning back. Years later, Peacock remembered that ‘A Summer-Evening Church-Yard’ was written during this stay. As well as the setting, the poem adopts the pensive and melancholy idiom of eighteenth-century ‘graveyard poetry’ – in comparing the onset of death to the fall of evening, for example – though such consolation as it offers involves no reference to religion, a conspicuous absence in view of the central position given to the church and surrounding graves.
5 Silence and twilight: The personifications are repeated in Alastor, l. 455.
9 own: Accept.
13–14 The church of St Lawrence, Lechlade, has a central spire surrounded by four smaller pinnacles.
pyramids of fire: The word ‘pyramid’ was thought to designate ‘flame-shaped’, its first syllable deriving from the Greek for ‘fire’.
15 their: Refers to ‘Silence and twilight’ of l. 5.
24 Its awful hush is felt inaudibly: Cp. Alastor, l. 30: ‘When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness’.
25–30 PBS reworks the elements of this stanza in the fourth stanza of ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection—December 1818, near Naples’, an example, among many, of self-revision in his poetry.
The original of this translation is Dante’s well-known sonnet ‘Guido, i’vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io’; the Italian text can be found, with English version and commentary, in Dante’s Lyric Poetry, ed. K. Foster and P. Boyde, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), I, pp. 30–31, II, pp. 52–4. The text there given, the one accepted by modern scholarship, differs slightly from the one translated by Shelley: see note to l. 10. Guido Cavalcanti and Lapo (the usual spelling) Gianni De’ Ricevuti were friends of Dante and fellow authors who shared his ideas on a modern vernacular style in lyric poetry. In thirteenth-century Florence, it was customary for poets to comment on each other’s poems in verse; Guido Cavalcanti’s reply to this sonnet is given in Dante’s Lyric Poetry I, pp. 30–32, and PBS’s translation of it in Poems I, pp. 453–4, and Complete Poetry III, pp. 325, 942–6. Timothy Webb examines Shelley’s rendering of Dante’s sonnet ‘Guido, i’vorrei che’ in relation to the original in The Violet in the Crucible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 281. The date of the sonnet is uncertain, though PBS may have composed it, as Poems I suggests, in early September 1815 shortly after returning from an excursion up the Thames by boat in company with T. L. Peacock, Mary Godwin (as MWS then was) and Claire Clairmont’s brother Charles (see headnote to previous poem). Dante’s sonnet provided a set of themes that PBS would celebrate throughout his verse: the idealized journey by boat, the small community bound together by love and intellectual friendship, the high excitement of ‘passionate talk’ (l. 12) – and the intricate connections of all these to the practice of poetry. Our text is from 1816.
8 strict: Close.
10 Editors have wondered whether ‘my’ might not be a mistake or misprint because it was Bice (the familiar form of ‘Beatrice’) who was Dante’s love. ‘Vanna’ is familiar for ‘Giovanna’. The two named women in standard modern texts are Vanna and Lagia, the beloved of Guido and Lapo respectively.
Published in 1816, from which the text is taken; composed between September 1814 and October 1815, when the Alastor volume went to press. In addition to its engagement with Wordsworth’s poetry generally, as indicated below, the poem may be regarded as PBS’s reaction to Wordsworth’s The Excursion (August 1814), in which the older poet dramatizes his disappointment with the outcome of the French Revolution while endorsing the post-war political and religious status quo in Britain. MWS’s journal entry for 14 September 1814 records that ‘Shelley … brings home Wordsworth’s “Excursion”, of which we read a part, much disappointed. He is a slave’ (MWS Journal I, p. 25). PBS never met Wordsworth, though he had hoped to do so during a stay at Keswick between November 1811 and January 1812. This sonnet laments Wordsworth’s apostasy, ironically applying a theme that Wordsworth had made his own – ‘That things depart which never may return’ (l. 2) – to an examination of Wordsworth’s own departure from his earlier support for humanitarian and libertarian ideals. PBS’s critical apostrophe may be regarded as an ironic revision of Wordsworth’s evocation of Milton’s austere and high-minded example in the sonnet ‘London, 1802’ (1807), l. 9 of which – ‘Thy soul was like a Star and dwelt apart’ – is echoed in l. 7 here. PBS’s ambiguous response to Wordsworth (‘That such a man should be such a poet!’, Letters II, p. 26) would continue throughout his career, notably in ‘Verses written on receiving a Celandine in a letter from England’ and Peter Bell the Third. PBS varies the pattern of the Shakespearean sonnet by placing the traditional final couplet in ll. 9–10.
1–4 Wordsworth’s most celebrated treatment of this theme occurs in the first stanza of his ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807): ‘It is not now as it hath been of yore;— / Turn whereso’er I may, / By night or day, / The things which I have seen I now can see no more.’
9–10 The lines adapt one of the cardinal sources of PBS’s conception of the philosopher-poet, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) II.1–14, in which the Roman poet imagines the pleasures of contemplating with a serene mind the blind struggles of ambition and greed. See editorial note to PBS’s Note [6] to Queen Mab V.58.
11 honoured poverty: In a letter of 15 December 1811, PBS wrote enthusiastically from Keswick that ‘Wordsworth … yet retains the integrity of his independance [sic], but his poverty is such that he is frequently obliged to beg for a shirt to his back’ (Letters I, pp. 208–9).
12 liberty: One of the sections in Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) is entitled ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’.
Published in 1816, which furnishes our text; date of composition uncertain but probably written in late 1815 as ll. 10–14 would be more appropriate to the harsh and restrictive post-Waterloo settlement imposed by the Allies on France than to the more generous terms of the Treaty of Paris of May 1814, which followed Napoleon’s first abdication the previous month. But Charles E. Robinson argues that an unnamed poem that PBS sent to Byron in June 1814 could be this one (KSJ 35 (1986), pp. 104–10). In a letter of late August 1815, PBS deplores ‘the enormities of their [i.e. the Allies’] troops’, adding: ‘In considering the political events of the day I endeavour to divest my mind of temporary sensations, to consider them as already historical’ (Letters I, p. 430) – a point of view consistent with the elevated and generalized idiom of this poem. Napoleon’s final defeat and exile to St Helena prompt PBS to recall the complex and ambivalent attitude towards the emperor which he shared with many radical and liberal contemporaries. He made numerous assessments of Napoleon in his poetry and prose: e.g. Letters I, pp. 345–6; ‘Ode to Liberty’ XII; ‘Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon’; The Triumph of Life, ll. 215–34; and A Philosophical View of Reform. See also Cian Duffy, ‘“The Child of a Fierce Hour”: Shelley and Napoleon Bonaparte’, SIR 43 (2004), pp. 399–416.
2 unambitious slave: The ironic paradox taxes the former emperor with a lack of those truly noble aspirations which would have prevented his moral enslavement to the vices of monarchs through the ages – territorial greed and the exercise of arbitrary power.
3 shouldst: Agrees with ‘thou’ rather than ‘slave’ (l. 2).
12 owns: Recognizes.
13–14 old Custom, legal Crime, / And bloody Faith: Referring to the provisions of the treaties restoring the Bourbon dynasty in France but with particular reference (‘bloody Faith’) to the Treaty of the Holy Alliance of September 1815 by which the rulers of Russia, Austria and Prussia claimed divine sanction for their authority and pledged to govern their nations according to the principles of Christian fraternity as set out in Holy Scripture. Liberals considered the Holy Alliance a cover of pious hypocrisy for the restoration of ‘legitimacy’, i.e. dynastic sovereignty, in Europe.
These polished verses with their dramatic closing paradox appeared in 1816, from which the text is taken. They are likely to have been written sometime during the year preceding publication of the volume in February 1816. PBS was keenly interested in the nature and functioning of the mind, returning to the subject at intervals in succeeding years: see ‘On Love’ and ‘On Life’. The ‘psychology’ of stanzas 2 and 3 derives from the empiricists John Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume (1711–76), in whose thought the mind is primarily a theatre for a succession of fleeting sense-impressions and the ideas arising from them – which leads Hume in particular to question traditional conceptions of a stable personal identity. See Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 13–43, 66–70. In a larger sense, PBS’s lyric takes up one of literature’s venerable themes, the unceasing change to which the world and human things are subject. Poems I cites Ovid, Metamorphoses XV.178–355 and Spenser’s ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ (Faerie Queene VII.vii.13–56) as relevant precedents; Complete Poetry III refers to one of PBS’s favoured texts, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), which imagines the universe as a perpetual flow of atomic particles. To these may be added The Philosophy of Melancholy (1812) in which PBS’s friend T. L. Peacock identifies the steady contemplation of universal mutability as promoting that ‘philosophical melancholy’ which is ‘the most copious source of virtue, of courage, and of genius’ (Peacock Works VI, p. 186). PBS returned often to the theme of ineluctable change – for example in ‘The flower that smiles today’, to which MWS gave the title ‘Mutability’ when she included it in 1824.
14 still is free: Is always open.
Composed in autumn–winter 1815 (the Preface is dated 14 December) during PBS’s residence at Bishopsgate, near Windsor; published the following February in a volume entitled Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude: and Other Poems (1816), together with eleven shorter poems, six of which are included here: ‘O! there are spirits of the air’, ‘A Summer-Evening Church-Yard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire’, ‘Sonnet. From the Italian of Dante’, ‘To Wordsworth’, ‘Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte’ and ‘Mutability’. Our text is taken from 1816.
PBS’s friend T. L. Peacock remembered suggesting the unusual title: ‘He was at a loss for a title, and I proposed that which he adopted … The Greek word ’Αλάστωρ is an evil genius [i.e. malevolent spirit] … 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 name of the hero of the poem’ (Peacock Works VIII, p. 100). The sense of ‘an avenging spirit’ also had some currency at the time (OED). In the poem, the ‘Spirit of Solitude’ designates not a supernatural being but rather a morbid state of mind in which sympathetic idealism collapses into solipsism. PBS evoked the mental impulses involved in a letter to T. J. Hogg shortly before he began to compose Alastor: ‘It excites my wonder to consider the perverted energies of the human mind … 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?’ (Letters I, pp. 429–30). MWS’s ‘Note on Alastor’ in 1839 claims that it ‘contains an individual interest only’ (as against the broad political concerns of Queen Mab); and PBS introduced it to the Laureate Robert Southey as his ‘first serious attempt to interest the best feelings of the human heart’ (Letters I, p. 462). In 1839 MWS recalled that in spring 1815 PBS had been diagnosed as suffering from pulmonary consumption and identifies his apprehension of death, the sudden disappearance of his symptoms, and a chastened backward glance at his own early philosophic radicalism as conditions that shaped the major themes of Alastor.
Alastor is PBS’s first sustained examination of what would become a central topic of his work: the scope, responsibility and potential dysfunction of the poetic imagination. These have an obvious autobiographical dimension, but his claim in the Preface that ‘The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men’ has prompted attempts to discover in the Poet-protagonist features belonging to Wordsworth and Coleridge, who also receive particular assessments in the Alastor volume: see ‘To Wordsworth’ and ‘O! there are spirits of the air’. In reading Alastor the different estimates of the Poet’s destiny in the first and second paragraphs of the Preface should be noted; one should also bear in mind the differences between the narrative that is sketched in the Preface and the one that unfolds in the poem, as well as the different roles assigned to the narrator of the poem and its principal character – neither of whom is simply to be identified with PBS himself or any other.
The volume received only a few, largely hostile and uncomprehending, reviews when it appeared, but has since come to be regarded as one of the landmark collections of the second generation of British Romantic poets. The title-poem has attracted important critical commentary; a representative sample would include: G. Kim Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence on Shelley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988); Kenneth Neill Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 219–33; Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 47–53; Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 73–83; Donald Maddox, ‘Shelley’s Alastor and the Legacy of Rousseau’, SiR 9 (1970), pp. 82–98; Paul Mueschke and Earl Griggs, ‘Wordsworth as the Prototype of the Poet in Shelley’s Alastor’, PMLA 49 (1934), pp. 229–45; Joseph Raben, ‘Coleridge as the Prototype of the Poet in Shelley’s Alastor’, RES 17 (1966), pp. 278–92; and Earl Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), pp. 15–46.
Preface Compare this early development with the ‘education peculiarly fitted for a poet’, an idealized account of PBS’s own poetic vocation, in the Preface to Laon and Cythna, written about a year later in autumn 1817.
p. 112 requisitions: Claims.
Blasted: Blighted.
Power: The idea of a ‘Power’ inherent in nature figures in ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, l. 1, and ‘Mont Blanc’, l. 16.
p. 113 doubtful: Apparently combining the obsolete sense ‘to be dreaded’ with the more usual ‘uncertain’.
All else: Completely different.
‘The good … socket’: A slight misquotation of Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814) I.500–502. The lines describe the poor cottager Margaret; although she is kindly, loving and industrious, the harsh material conditions of her existence, the loss of her soldier husband in war and the death of her child have destroyed her will to live.
socket: The hollow part of a candlestick that holds the candle.
Epigraph ‘I was not yet in love, and I was in love with love, I sought what I might love, loving to love.’ The Latin quotation is composed from a longer passage in St Augustine’s Confessions III.i, in which the saint declares that his impulse to love was unconscious longing for God. The sense that PBS attaches to words is set out in the Preface. In Esdaile (SC IV, p. 1005) he applied the quotation to his younger self, and later inscribed it in a notebook in 1814 (Clairmont Journal, p. 61).
2 our great Mother: The forces of nature personified as maternal. See note to ll. 18–19.
3 natural piety: Reverence for nature; echoing Wordsworth’s ‘My heart leaps up’ (1807), ll. 7–9: ‘The Child is Father of the man; / And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety’, lines which were set as an epigraph to ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ in Wordsworth’s Poems (1815).
8 sere: Dried, withered.
14 consciously: Intentionally; PBS became a vegetarian in 1812, defending the ‘vegetable regimen’ himself in his Note [17] to Queen Mab VIII.211–12.
18–19 Mother … song: The appeal to nature for inspiration replaces the similar appeal to the Muse in ancient Greek and Roman poetry.
21 Thy shadow: The operations of nature cannot be perceived directly, but only through its manifestations in the material world. Cp. ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, ll. 1–2.
23–9 I have made … what we are: PBS’s friend Hogg records (Life I, pp. 36–7) PBS’s youthful watching for ghosts, and in a letter to him of January 1811 the nineteen-year-old PBS claims to ‘have been most of the night pacing a church yard’ (Letters I, p. 39). Cp. ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, ll. 49–54, which describe a similar quest for ‘high talk with the departed dead’.
26 obstinate questionings: Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, ll. 142–3: ‘those obstinate questionings / Of sense and outward things’. In Wordsworth’s poem, adults retain vestiges of the lively sense of their own divine origins they experienced in childhood.
29–37 In lone … thy charge: Just such a session is recorded by PBS in MWS Journal (7 October 1814): ‘soon after’ the ‘witching time of night’ he asked ‘whether it is not horrible to feel the silence of night tingling in our ears’. He and Claire Clairmont then ‘continued to sit by the fire at intervals engaging in awful conversation relative to the nature of these mysteries’.
42 lyre: The instrument here functions like the Aeolian harp (from Aeolus or Eolus, the god of the wind), a hollow box stringed across its opening which produced sounds when exposed to wind or breeze, and the subject of Coleridge’s ‘Effusion XXXV’ (1796; later retitled ‘The Eolian Harp’).
44 fane: Temple.
49 deep heart of man: A Wordsworthian phrase; relevant passages would include: ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, ll. 190–206; ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798), ll. 94–112; ‘Michael’ (1800), ll. 29–33.
56 votive cypress wreath: In ancient Rome, boughs of cypress, sacred to Pluto, were carried at funerals as an offering to the gods.
67–8 Wordsworth’s account of the Wanderer’s development in The Excursion I.301–2 – ‘In dreams, in study, and in ardent thought, / Thus was he reared’ – is one among many parallels between his early life and that of the Poet in Alastor.
67 silver: As well as evoking glowing colour, the word suggests the sense ‘gently melodious’.
71 divine philosophy: Recalling Milton, Comus, l. 475: ‘How charming is divine philosophy!’
85 bitumen lakes: i.e. of naturally occurring pitch.
93 Frequent with: ‘Crowded with’ (a Latinism).
94 chrysolite: A green or yellowish-green gemstone.
101 bloodless food: Vegetable fare; see note to l. 14.
104 brake: Thicket.
suspend: i.e. ‘would suspend’.
106–28 The Poet’s journey is both geographical and historical, taking him through the countries of the eastern Mediterranean and up the Nile in search of the origins of European civilization in the great cities of increasingly ancient cultures: Greek (Athens), Phoenician (Tyre, Balbec or Baalbek), Jewish (Jerusalem), Babylonian (Babylon), Egyptian (Memphis, Thebes), finally arriving in Ethiopia, which, according to some writers, was the seat of Paradise. Tyre and Baalbek were in what is now Lebanon; Babylon in Iraq, south of Baghdad.
109–10 the waste … Jerusalem: Jerusalem was sacked by the future Roman emperor Titus Flavius in AD 70.
118 daemons: Spirits that mediate between gods and men.
119–28 The Zodiac’s brazen mystery … birth of time: A celebrated zodiac in the temple of the goddess Hathor at Dendera on the Nile was considered by some contemporary thinkers to be the earliest representation of natural forces as divine, evidence that religion originated in the worship of nature. It is now displayed in the Louvre.
120 mute thoughts … mute walls: Because the temples are now unfrequented and abandoned or, perhaps, as Complete Poetry III suggests, because hieroglyphics had not yet been deciphered.
126–7 till meaning … inspiration: Adapting Wordsworth, ‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud’ (1807), ll. 11–16: ‘I gaz’d – and gaz’d [on a crowd of daffodils] … 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.’
140–45 The Poet … vale of Cashmire: Continuing eastward, the Poet passes through Arabia, Iran (Persia), the Kerman desert (‘the wild Carmanian waste’) in south-eastern Iran, then over the Hindu Kush or Indian Caucasus (source of the Indus and Oxus rivers and setting of Prometheus Unbound I) and on into the valley of Kashmir on the border between modern India and Pakistan. Contemporary speculation located the origin of the human race in Kashmir, in which the scene of Prometheus Unbound II.i is laid.
149–91 PBS describes the impulses that generate the Poet’s vision in the Preface. The psychology developed in his prose essay ‘On Love’ also serves as a commentary on the present passage. The portrait of the ‘veiled maid’ draws upon his reading in contemporary ‘Oriental’ prose fiction and poetry, for which see the notes on Alastor in Poems I and Complete Poetry III. The gap between an idealized and an actual erotic object, a major preoccupation of PBS’s life and poetry, is articulated in, for example, Letters I, pp. 95, 429–30.
163 numbers: Verse; here accompanied by a stringed instrument.
167 symphony: Harmony.
172 intermitted: Interrupted, ceasing at intervals.
189 Involved: Enveloped.
193 blue: Often associated with sickness and death in PBS’s verse, e.g. in ll. 216 and 598 and ‘The Plague’s blue kisses’ (Laon and Cythna, l. 2766).
196–200 Whither have fled … exultation: Echoing Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, ll. 56–7: ‘Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?’
207 He overleaps the bounds: i.e. between the imagined and the real.
211–19 Does … delightful realms: The supposition in ‘Mont Blanc’, ll. 49–52, varies the tenor of the question: ‘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’.
228–32 A similar struggle between a serpent and an eagle has an important symbolic function in Laon and Cythna I.viii–xiv.
229–31 precipitates … her blind flight: Rushes headlong, recklessly.
239–44 The Poet reverses direction, now travelling north and west through modern Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Iran. Commentators have identified Aornos as modern Pir Sarai in Pakistan, Petra as the Rock of Soghdiana in Uzbekistan: each was the site of a victory won by the armies of Alexander the Great. The city of Balk or Balkh is in Afghanistan. The ‘tombs / Of Parthian kings’ in northern Iran were destroyed by the Roman emperor Caracalla in the third century AD.
249 Sered: See l. 8 and note.
272 Chorasmian shore: Probably the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea but possibly the western shore of the Aral Sea. Chorasmia (or Khwarezm) is an area lying between the two along the Oxus (or Amu Darya) river in modern Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
291 wrinkled his quivering lips: PBS substituted the reading ‘convulsed his curling lips’ in a copy of the Alastor volume presented to Leigh Hunt (M. Quinn, KSJ 35 (1986), pp. 17–20).
297 fair fiend: Apparently the ‘veiled maid’ the Poet sees in his dream in ll. 151–91, because the vision of her is both lovely and demonic.
299 shallop: A small boat.
330 genii: Spirits associated with natural phenomena.
352 etherial: Rising high into the air.
353 Caucasus: Mountain range in the Republic of Georgia, to the east of the Caspian Sea, which the Poet has just crossed.
382 knarled: Here and at l. 530 an obsolete (in England) form of ‘gnarled’; perhaps (as Forman 1876–7 suggests) the initial letter k is to be pronounced, as it then was in Scotland.
406 yellow flowers: Narcissi. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses III.344–511, the beautiful youth Narcissus, as punishment for scorning his admirers, is made to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool; dying of grief at not being able to possess the image, he is transformed into a flower.
409 pensive: Frequent in Wordsworth, this is the only occurrence of the word in PBS’s poetry, though ‘pensiveness’ appears in l. 489 in a related context. See note to ll. 126–7.
422 brown: Dark.
424 aëry: High in the air.
425 The caves echo the sound of the wind among the forest trees.
426 implicated: Intertwined.
439–45 The contemporary sense of ‘parasite’ suggested symbiosis rather than exploitation. PBS uses the term in this sense in Queen Mab I.43.
448 lawns: Grassy clearings.
455 PBS varies the image in ‘A Summer-Evening Church-Yard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire’, ll. 5–6: ‘Silence and twilight, unbeloved of men, / Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen’.
465 painted: Brightly and variously coloured.
476 Startled: Started, moved abruptly.
glanced: Sprang aside.
479–88 The Spirit has the appearances of the natural surroundings and communicates with the Poet through its sounds.
490 Two starry eyes: Recalling the ‘beamy bending eyes’ of the veiled maid in l. 179; the crescent-points of the setting moon in l. 654 look back to both images.
507 searchless: Undiscoverable; like the other adjectives in ll. 503–8, this one has a figurative as well as a physical sense.
517–22 The fever-patient, not the Poet, is ‘Forgetful of the grave’.
528 windlestrae: A dry withered stalk of grass.
543–50 Taking ‘it’ as referring to ‘ravine’, the sense of the passage is that while the high rocks darken the depths of the ravine, ‘gulphs and … caves’ which echo the sound of the stream can be discerned higher up.
583 children: i.e. lesser breezes or gusts, the offspring of the ‘autumnal whirlwind’.
588–90 One step … one voice: The ‘step’ is the Poet’s, the ‘voice’ apparently that of the Spirit that in ll. 479–92 beckons him, assuming the sounds of the surrounding natural phenomena.
609–24 The shift of address in this passage is also a shift to a political idiom comparable to that of Queen Mab. The sense is that Death, who rules the world – as witness the pernicious instances in ll. 614–17 – is called by his brother Ruin to feast on a ‘rare and regal prey’, apparently including both royal rulers and the Poet himself, who is at the point of death (cp. ll. 690–95). Thereafter, men will die naturally rather than as victims, no longer crushed by oppression and injustice.
610 sightless: Invisible, possibly also ‘blind’.
651 meteor: The moon; in contemporary usage, ‘meteor’ could signify any luminous atmospheric appearance.
654 two lessening points of light: The moon is setting and only the tips of its crescent remain visible above the horizon. See note to l. 490.
657 stagnate: Stagnant.
660 involved: Enveloped.
672–5 The sorceress Medea restored her husband Jason’s aged father to youth by means of a magic potion which she prepared in a cauldron. Leaves and fruit burst from the withered olive branch with which she stirred the mixture, some drops of which, falling to the ground, caused flowers and grass to spring up – according to the account in Ovid’s Metamorphoses VII.275–81.
675–81 The narrator asks that God, who has inflicted so many ills on humanity, would grant it the gift of immortality. The ‘one living man’ is Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew of legend, the subject of an early poem by PBS and a character in both Queen Mab (note to VII.67) and Hellas (ll. 135–61, 738 ff.). Ahasuerus was condemned to roam the earth eternally as a punishment for having refused help to Christ on the road to Calvary.
681–6 The ‘dark magician’ is an alchemist attempting to concoct the elixir of life, which confers immortality. See ll. 31–2, 672–5 and note.
694 vesper: Evening prayer.
705 senseless: That cannot feel or perceive.
713 The quotation is from the concluding line of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’: ‘To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’
PBS drafted this poem in Switzerland in summer 1816; MWS transcribed a fair copy at Marlow the following year; it was not published until 1925 in the Boston Herald for 21 December: see BSM XI and MYR (Shelley) V. The fair copy, on which the present text is based, is very lightly punctuated; a minimum of additional punctuation has been supplied. The celandine of the title (see notes on ll. 1–3 below) was apparently included in a letter sent from England by Shelley’s friend T. L. Peacock. Years later Claire Clairmont recalled her and MWS’s delight when PBS came from his study and handed them the ‘Verses’ (MYR (Shelley) V.17, 28). Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes (London: Longman, 1807) contains three poems on the lesser celandine, which is identified (vol. I, p. 15) by its familiar name, common pilewort, and whose bright yellow blossoms can be seen in March and April opening to the sun and closing at evening or in cloudy weather. PBS’s ‘Verses’ makes a critical address to Wordsworth with an eye on these poems – taking off from ‘There’s a flower that shall be mine, / ’Tis the little Celandine’ in the first of them, while turning to sarcastic use the role Wordsworth assigns to the flower in the third poem as emblem of the human passage from prodigal youth to helpless age. PBS adapts further details from these and other of Wordsworth’s poems (see M. Quinn, KSJ 36 (1987), pp. 88–109).
In 1813 Wordsworth had accepted a salaried government post as a Distributor of Stamps for his region, in effect a collector of revenue; PBS and Peacock regarded the appointment as a political reward for his increasing conservatism as well as the motive for his support for post-Waterloo conservatism in Britain. See ‘To Wordsworth’ and ‘An Exhortation’. Strategic echoes of Milton and Shakespeare (ll. 30, 62–3) introduce a comparison on the themes of artistic integrity and posthumous fame which is unflattering to Wordsworth – although PBS is careful to acknowledge the power of what he considered to be the older man’s immortal early verse.
1–2 These frankly puzzling lines have occasioned much commentary. The blossom of both the lesser celandine (Ranunculus ficaria) and the greater celandine (Chelidonium majus) is yellow, as PBS well knew. Otherwise the two flowers are botanically distinct, the former a member of the buttercup family, the latter of the poppy family. PBS’s ‘blue’ may allude, for the benefit of the Greek scholar Peacock, to the derivation of ‘celandine’ from the Greek chelidon = ‘swallow’, whose steel-blue upper feathers in flight might suggest the image of ‘a flower aery blue’. Complete Poetry III, citing PBS’s phrase ‘the classic celandine’ (see following note), points out that there is a celandine described as blue in Theocritus’ Idyll XIII.41 and glosses the lines plausibly: ‘When I received a withered specimen of a Celandine, I thought of an ideal Celandine – classically blue and unwithered.’ One might also suggest a tongue-in-cheek reading: ‘I thought that the Celandine, even the smaller variety, was blue’ – which would allude to private coded meanings involving both varieties of celandine, and both colours, which PBS and Peacock entertained, perhaps preferring the ‘classic’ blue greater celandine as a playful jibe against Wordsworth’s association with the smaller flower. See also ll. 65–72 and notes.
3 Yet small: The name Chelidonium was principally applied (as in Pliny, Natural History XXXV.89) to the greater celandine, popularly called ‘swallowwort’ because its blossoms appeared with the arrival of the swallow and disappeared when it departed. It may be the blossom of this plant that PBS was sent (see previous note) and that he writes of to Peacock on 27 July 1816 (Letters I, p. 501), in relation to the Alpine seeds he has purchased to cultivate in England: ‘They are companions which the celandine, the classic celandine, need not despise.’
25–6 A type of … thus familiar: An emblem of that (i.e. the ‘deathless Poet’ of the next line) which now brings us intimately together.
30 Recalling Milton’s reference (Paradise Lost VII.25–6) to the dangers surrounding him immediately after the Restoration because of his support for Parliament during the Civil Wars: ‘though fallen on evil days, / On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues’.
45–8 Alluding to Wordsworth’s celebration of the Allied victory at Waterloo in ‘Ode. The Morning of the Day Appointed for a General Thanksgiving. January 18, 1816’ (1816); liberal opinion was especially outraged by ll. 277–82: ‘We bow our heads before Thee, and we laud / And magnify thy name, Almighty God! / But thy most dreaded instrument, / In working out a pure intent, / Is Man – arrayed for mutual slaughter,— / Yea, Carnage is thy daughter!’
49–56 The stanza is tortuously phrased. The sense appears to be: ‘He scorns hopes that had been his own; the victors he now praises were once his foes. He no longer promotes hope or condemns tyranny. But neither hope nor opposition to tyranny needs his approval. Truth need not lament that he disowned her before his inspiration had waned.’
56 overlive: Outlive.
57–60 The praise of Wordsworth’s early poetry in these lines ironically recalls the compensations he discovers in age for loss of youthful vision (‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807), ll. 182–9): ‘We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind … In years that bring the philosophic mind.’
62–3 Echoing Shakespeare’s claim in Sonnet XVIII.13–14: ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.’
65–72 In fact each stem of the lesser celandine bears only one flower. The greater celandine bears several blossoms on an umbel at the end of its stem.
67 priest of Nature: Apparently Peacock, who sent the celandine and who perhaps had written that he had placed the original stem in his window; PBS humorously refers to him as a priest about the time the poem was written (Letters I, p. 490) – though ll. 67–8 also glance at Wordsworth, who describes the visionary Youth in ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (l. 72) as ‘Nature’s Priest’.
Before leaving Switzerland for England at the end of August 1816, MWS transcribed into a notebook three poems that PBS had written that summer: ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and two otherwise unknown sonnets. PBS himself entered into the same notebook, which remained with Byron in Geneva, a copy of the poem then entitled ‘Scene—Pont Pellisier in the vale of Servox’, later to be retitled ‘Mont Blanc’. The following month the notebook would appear to have been entrusted by Byron to his friend Scrope Davies, who brought it to England but neglected to return it to PBS; when he left England in 1820, Davies deposited a trunk containing the notebook and other papers with his bankers. The trunk was only rediscovered in 1976 in a branch of Barclay’s Bank in London. The texts of ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and of ‘Mont Blanc’ in the Scrope Davies notebook differ significantly from their first appearance in print. On PBS’s return to England, he sent a version of the ‘Hymn’ derived from his first draft for publication to the liberal weekly The Examiner, but the editor, Leigh Hunt, mislaid it. As the fair copy in the Scrope Davies notebook had not been delivered, PBS would seem to have returned to his draft and produced a finished version of the poem for the second time. This was eventually published in The Examiner on Sunday 19 January 1817. Probably ‘Mont Blanc’ was similarly recovered from the draft MS for publication at the end of 1817. Judith Chernaik and Timothy Burnett reconstruct the complex textual history of each poem in RES n.s. 29 (1978), pp. 36–49.
Although not prepared for the press, the texts of PBS’s poems in the Scrope Davies notebook are clean, legible and complete in themselves. They are reproduced here, each headed ‘Version B’, facing the versions published in The Examiner and in 1817, which are headed ‘Version A’ and which are the ones to which the annotations are keyed. The Version B texts are given as they appear in the MSS transcribed by MWS and PBS – with insufficient punctuation, inconsistent capitalization and indentation, unexpanded ampersands and peculiar spellings. As such, they offer not only a rare occasion to compare the published texts of two of PBS’s major poems with an earlier variant derived from the same draft, but also display the features of a stage of composition immediately preceding final submission for print.
In 1839 MWS recalls how PBS’s ‘Hymn’ ‘was conceived during his voyage round the lake [of Geneva] with Lord Byron’. PBS describes this excursion by boat (22–30 June 1816) in Letters I, pp. 480–88, and in 1817, pp. 107–39 (see the extract: p. 595). The Alpine scenes he then observed affected him intensely; he later recalled that the poem had been ‘composed under the influence of feelings which agitated me even to tears’ (Letters I, p. 517). The surviving draft (BSM XI), lacking stanza 4, was probably made during the tour of the lake or shortly afterwards and the poem finished by late August 1816.
The ‘Hymn’ of PBS’s title announces the religious character of a poem which incorporates a number of the traditional elements of prayer: praise offered to a mysterious Power, petition for its aid, confession of childhood errors, and renewal of a vow – in this case following upon a visionary crisis in youth. The poem borrows eclectically from religious and ethical traditions: biblical language is adopted equally with that of secular humanism, while the political implications of ll. 68–70 may have put contemporary readers in mind of the hymns sung during the public ceremonies of the French Revolution to such abstractions as Liberty and Reason. The development of the seven stanzas is underpinned by a discreet structure of argument. Visitations of the Spirit of Beauty, which the poet apprehends through the transient appearances of nature, together with the intense mental and emotive experiences that he recalls in stanzas 5 and 6, support a tentative affirmation: that an immanent force which cannot be known directly, but only through its intermittent interventions in the natural sphere, is the cause of all that the senses, the mind and the affections recognize as beautiful. This power is the Intellectual Beauty that is addressed throughout as if it were a deity, although no such claim is made explicitly. The phrase ‘Intellectual Beauty’ occurs in a number of authors that PBS had read, notably in chapter 3 of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), where it signifies the mental excellence of a woman as opposed to her mere physical attractions; and in chapter 10 of William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), where Mary Wollstonecraft herself is credited with possessing an intuitive perception of that Beauty which is proper to the things of the mind. But it should be stressed that PBS’s poem aims to redefine Intellectual Beauty in his own language and to his own purposes, the text elaborating with notable particularity the special cluster of meanings that he attaches to the idea. Good investigations of the sources and contexts of the term can be found in: N. Brown, KSR 2 (1987), pp. 91–104; Chernaik, pp. 32–40; Complete Poetry III, pp. 476–82; and Poems I, pp. 522–5.
1 awful: Inspiring awe.
6 glance: A sudden movement producing a flash or gleam.
13 doth: ‘Dost’ would be the correct form for an address to the ‘Spirit of BEAUTY’ in the second-person singular, as in ll. 14 and 16; but ‘doth’ is confirmed by both draft and first version.
16 state: Condition, lot.
17 vale of tears: The phrase derives from the Vulgate version of Psalm 84:5–6 (H. W. White and N. Rogers, KSMB 24, pp. 16–18) and traditionally signified the temporary afflictions of this world in contrast to the eternal bliss of heaven.
23 scope: Capacity.
27 name of God and ghosts, and Heaven: the Examiner version reads: ‘names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven’. The reading adopted here was entered by PBS on a clipping of the Examiner text of the poem (MYR (Shelley) V). The draft reads: ‘names of Ghosts & God & Heaven’ (BSM XI); Version B gives: ‘name of God & Ghosts & Heaven’. The removal of ‘God’ from the Examiner text may have been the result of Leigh Hunt’s anxieties; prosecution for blasphemous libel was a real danger in 1817 (see headnote to the extract from the Preface to Laon and Cythna).
34 still instrument: An Aeolian or wind harp, which gives out music as the wind blows upon it. Cp. Alastor, ll. 42–9 and note on l. 42.
36 Echoing John 1:14: ‘And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.’
37 Self-esteem: Here replaces Faith as the third of what were traditionally known as Theological Virtues: Faith, Hope, Charity (Love).
41 firm state: Unshakeable sway.
49–72 Cp. stanzas 3–5 of the Dedication before Laon and Cythna.
49 MWS confirms in a sketch of PBS’s early life that as a boy he sat up at night hoping to see ghosts. See BSM XXII, pp. 270–71, and cp. Alastor, ll. 23–9.
53–4 poisonous names … I was not heard: Both draft and Version B read: ‘false name … He heard me not’. PBS’s original ‘He’ probably intended God (cp. l. 27) and so was altered to avoid offence – as l. 27 seems to have been. But the context admits the possibility that it was the Devil’s aid which was being invoked to raise the spirits of the dead. This would be consistent with the occult experiments of the young PBS as described by his sister (T. J. Hogg in Life I, pp. 22–6). The precise reference of the revision ‘poisonous names’ is still less clear; it may include other demons, magicians, perhaps saints, and even the ‘God’ of l. 27. Cp. Queen Mab IV.112–13: ‘specious names, / Learnt in soft childhood’s unsuspecting hour’.
58 buds: Given as ‘birds’ in The Examiner. PBS corrected what was evidently a misprint on a clipping of the Examiner text (MYR (Shelley) V), so restoring the reading of both draft and first version.
84 fear: Wariness and self-suspicion, combined with the sense ‘revere, show reverence, especially towards God’ – as in ‘The Lord taketh pleasure in them that fear him’ (Psalm 147:11). PBS’s line reformulates as fundamental principles of a secular ethics two biblical injunctions: one frequent in the Old Testament, e.g. ‘Ye shall walk after the Lord your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments’ (Deuteronomy 13:4); the other in the New Testament, e.g. ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’ (Mark 12:31). The worship of Intellectual Beauty as conceived in the poem inspires instead the Shelleyan virtue of self-respect (cp. the ‘Self-esteem’ which stands in place of Faith in l. 37) as well as generalizing the love of one’s neighbour to include all of humanity.
Written between 22 July and 29 August 1816; published late the following year in 1817, which provides our Version A text. The Preface to 1817 introduces the poem as having been ‘composed under the immediate impression 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 also contains a journal-letter recounting the excursion to Mont Blanc from 21 to 27 July during which the poem was conceived and probably drafted at least in part. This letter (see the extract from 1817 (pp. 595–601) and Letters I, pp. 495–502) and the parallel account in MWS Journal I, pp. 112–21, provide a revealing commentary on ‘Mont Blanc’. The Shelleys followed an established itinerary for tourists, and PBS’s poem refashions a language of response to much-described sights which had become current coin.
For the existence of two finished versions of the poem, reproduced here as ‘Version A’ and ‘Version B’, see the headnote to the previous poem, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’. Annotations are to the 1817 text, Version A.
In 1816 the valley of Chamonix presented an even more arresting spectacle than it does today. From the middle of the sixteenth century until 1820, its glaciers grew steadily – thereafter climatic changes slowly decreased their mass – so that the Shelleys saw them both rising higher and descending further towards the neighbouring forests and villages than at present, winding sinuously beneath the high peaks like rivers of ice. In some contemporary descriptions the valley appears as distinctly hostile and menacing, qualities which MWS turned to effect in Frankenstein (1818) by setting the first interview between Victor Frankenstein and the creature to which he has given life on the glacier known as the Mer de Glace.
Mont Blanc and its environs, the most dramatic mountainscape in western Europe, were fast becoming the site par excellence in which orthodox religious convictions could confront that species of the sublime which was held to affirm faith through wonder and awe at the transcendent power of the Deity as revealed in the most majestic of His works. Resisting the expected and conventional response, PBS made a characteristically provocative gesture when he described himself (in Greek) as an atheist (and also as a republican and lover of mankind) in various visitors’ albums in and near Chamonix (G. de Beer, KSMB 9 (1958), pp. 1–15). Climbers had reached the summit of Mont Blanc itself in 1786 and the ascent had been accomplished several times since by naturalist-mountaineers. The perspectives opened up by contemporary geology and the study of comparative religion (see the extract from 1817: p. 595) suggested new lines of enquiry and new modes of imagining the scene, while avoiding any recourse to final causes.
In the poem PBS also evidently intended a specific riposte to the psalmodic enthusiasm of Coleridge’s ‘Hymn before Sun-Rise, in the Vale of Chamouni’ (1802). As against such ecstatic affirmations of immanent divinity as Coleridge’s, Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’ maintains a tone of sceptical uncertainty; its rhetorical modes are interrogation, speculation, hypothesis. The observer-poet’s mixed horror and elation combine with the steady gaze of sceptical rationalism to prompt doubts as to the nature of knowledge itself. The result is a bleak and unsettling lyricism which yet carries a sense of exhilarated wonder.
Revealing commentary is provided in: Chernaik; Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); William Keach, Shelley’s Style (New York and London: Methuen, 1984); Nigel Leask, ‘Mont Blanc’s Mysterious Voice: Shelley and Huttonian Earth Science’, in The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. Elinor Shaffer (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1998); Angela Leighton, Shelley and the Sublime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Michael O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); and Earl Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).
Subtitle Chamouni: Both the draft title (BSM XI) and that of Version B indicate that PBS originally fixed the poem’s viewpoint at a specific location, where ‘he lingered on the Bridge of Arve’ (MWS’s ‘Note on the Poems of 1816’ in 1839), i.e. Pont Pélissier between the village of Servoz and the entrance to the valley of Chamonix proper. See the extract from 1817 (p. 595). As the poem proceeds, it develops its perspective to include sights that he observed both before and after this overwhelming initial impression.
1–11 The natural scene is taken as an emblem of the human mind, which perceives the physical universe as a vast stream of sensations while mingling with them thoughts from its own concealed source.
15 awful: Dreadful; inspiring mingled fear and awe.
16 Power: The might of the rushing torrent suggests the presence of a divinity (OED Power 5.II.7), whose nature is absolute force and strength, enthroned on the summit of Mont Blanc, and which the poet cannot perceive directly. The analogy with the God who speaks from within a cloud on Mount Sinai to Moses (Exodus 24:15–18) is developed with radical revisions throughout the poem.
27–9 When read along with the draft and with the longer version of these lines in Version B, ll. 27–31, the sense appears to be that in the momentary stillness of wind, river and trees a peculiar impression is created of the primeval and permanent nature of the scene.
27 unsculptured image: Shaped by natural forces rather than by a human sculptor. The lines recall the effect of an actual waterfall on the rock below it which PBS observed on the route to Chamonix. See the extract from 1817 (p. 595).
34–40 The dimensions and dramatic perspectives of the place overwhelm the mind, inducing an imaginative vision (‘phantasy’) of itself as the very ravine that it perceives. See the extract from 1817 (p. 595).
41–8 These difficult lines represent the mind’s efforts to make an adequate rational and imaginative grasp of the tremendous spectacle of the ravine, which continues to be addressed directly as ‘thee’ and ‘thou’, as it has been since l. 12. In ll. 45–6, ‘shadows’ and ‘Ghosts’ are in apposition.
44 the witch Poesy: Dragons, demons and witches (like the Witch of the Alps in Byron’s Manfred (1817), II.ii) were among the fabulous beings long imagined as inhabiting these and other remote Alpine regions. A local legend accounted for the current condition of the once verdant valley of Chamonix as the result of a curse by a witch who, disguised as a poor old woman, had been refused bed and board by the inhabitants (F. Bidaut and J. Gendrault, La Mer de Glace et le Montenvers: une légende, une histoire, un site (Servoz: Edimontagne, 1997), pp. 11–12).
49 remoter: Imperceptible by the senses.
53 unfurled: Both the (opposing) senses ‘drawn aside’ and ‘spread out’ are possible.
59 viewless: Invisible.
63–6 Contemporary observers frequently noted that the glaciers of Chamonix resembled bodies of water agitated by the wind whose peaks and waves had suddenly been frozen. See the extract from 1817 (p. 595).
69 tracts: Traces, follows.
72 Earthquake-daemon: PBS imagines the work of gnome-like subterranean beings who cause earthquakes in ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, ll. 58–65.
76–9 This passage has occasioned much commentary, the meaning of l. 79 being particularly contested. PBS’s draft and Version B (l. 89) read: ‘In such a faith with Nature reconciled.’ The alteration to ‘But for such faith’ (the phrase is heavily cancelled in the draft) in the 1817 text appears to carry the sense that the wild spectacle presented by Mont Blanc and its surroundings teaches two possible lessons: (1) doubt, adopted with appropriate dread and awe, regarding the doctrines of a divinely created and providentially directed nature; (2) religious conviction so calm and untroubled that it brings the believer as close as such faith can do to reconciliation with a natural order whose cause is evidently both remote from human concerns and inaccessible to thought – a reconciliation that might be complete were it not for such lingering faith.
81 codes: The word can denote both a system of secular law and a body of religious prescription.
84–95 The passage appears to be inspired by the opening lines of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things; I.1–20), which include the phrase daedala tellus (‘daedal earth’, l. 86) = ‘earth the intricate artificer’, though the sense here has usually been understood passively to mean ‘intricately fashioned earth’.
100 adverting: Observant, attentive.
105 distinct with: Adorned or decorated with.
120 And their place is not known: The exact phrase occurs in Nahum 3:17 apropos of the transience of earthly power, and closely resembles one in Psalm 103:15–16 (which served for morning prayer in the Anglican Psalter) on the brevity of human life.
120–23 Referring to the source of the river Arveiron, which flowed out of a cavern in a glacier – a favourite subject for contemporary prints. See the extract from 1817 (p. 595) for PBS’s visit to it.
123 one majestic River: The Rhône, which flows out of Lake Geneva (into which the Arve flows) to the Mediterranean.
PBS finished composing the twelve cantos of his epic-romance Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century. In the Stanza of Spenser by 23 September 1817 (see headnote to the extract from the Preface to Laon and Cythna). Between then and mid November he added the Preface as well as this lengthy Dedication to Mary (Wollstonecraft Shelley) – the complete name is cancelled in his fair-copy MS – whom he had married on 30 December of the previous year, two weeks after learning of the suicide of his first wife, Harriet. Laon and Cythna was on sale by early December; our text is from 1817 (L&C). In March 1817 the Court of Chancery had denied PBS the custody of his two children by Harriet. By late 1817 PBS and MWS had themselves had three children, of whom two were alive: William, born 24 January 1816, and Clara, born 2 September 1817. The Dedication incorporates two autobiographical strains, intellectual and affective, as well as announcing the formation of a literary alliance between PBS and MWS. In stanza 9 the genesis of Laon and Cythna is attributed to love and domestic fulfilment. Compare ‘To Harriet *****’, PBS’s dedication of Queen Mab to his then wife, Harriet Westbrook (here). Like the twelve cantos of Laon and Cythna, the Dedication is written in the stanza of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–96), which comprise eight lines of ten syllables and a concluding line of twelve syllables, rhyming ababbcbcc.
Epigraph From George Chapman’s play The Conspiracy of Charles Duke of Byron (1608), by way of an extract in Charles Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare (1808). Chapman’s lines evidently epitomized for PBS the ambition and daring necessary to undertake a poem with the high aims of Laon and Cythna, as well as recalling the poet he regarded as best qualified for the task, Byron, in whose company he had spent a good part of the preceding summer.
3 Knight of Faëry: ‘Elfin Knight’ (as Redcrosse Knight is styled in Spenser’s Faerie Queene) was one of Mary’s pet-names for PBS and one he used in 1817 as a nom de plume. ‘Faëry’ is fairyland.
4 dome: A stately home, mansion.
9 beloved name: MWS was the daughter of the liberal authors William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. See note to l. 38 below.
19–45 PBS’s unhappy experiences with both his schoolmasters and fellow schoolboys, especially at Eton (1804–10), contributed to the epiphany and self-dedication to oppose tyranny that are here imagined. Although the precise details cannot be verified, such an experience formed an important element in PBS’s conception of the course of his life. He recounts a comparable episode in ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, stanzas 5 and 6, and attributes to the Maniac in Julian and Maddalo, ll. 380–82, a similar youthful decision to devote himself to ‘justice’ and ‘love’.
38 forbidden mines of lore: The radical and progressive authors who challenged received religious and political ideas and who had formed the outlook of the young PBS – among them the Roman poet Lucretius, the French revolutionary theorist Volney, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. See headnote to Queen Mab.
41 armour for my soul: Adapting the injunction to the Christian in Ephesians 6:11–17 to ‘put on the whole armour of God’, as had Spenser in the ‘Letter of the Authors’ (to Sir Walter Raleigh) explaining the allegory of the Faerie Queene (Longman edition, p. 738).
46–54 Looking back from his union with MWS, which he regards as fulfilling his destiny in love, PBS finds only despair and betrayal in his earlier attachments to women. The lines appear to encode his relations with his cousin Harriet Grove (see ‘How eloquent are eyes!’) and his deceased wife, Harriet Westbrook (see PBS’s dedicatory poem before Queen Mab, ‘To Harriet *****’).
54 clog: A weight that hinders or obstructs.
58–9 mortal chain / Of Custom: The sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin declared her love for PBS, a married man, in June 1814 and, against her father’s wishes, eloped with him the following month – in defiance of conventional social morality.
60–62 The meaning is clarified when ‘breathed’ is understood as ‘breathed forth’. Those slaves imprisoned in their dungeons by Custom exhale dark clouds of disapproval which MWS’s action penetrates like light.
86 Anarch Custom’s reign: The Greek word anarchos signifies ‘without a leader’. The sense here is that Custom is not a true ruler but rather a tyrant whose sway is misrule.
88 Amphion: In Greek mythology, Amphion, son of Zeus and Antiope, was both poet and the father of music, having been given the lyre by Hermes. He helped build Thebes, legend relating that the stones of the wall around the city moved into place by themselves, in response to the sweet melodies he played.
89–90 While composing 1817 (L&C) PBS suffered from ill-health, which made him fear for his life and determined him to ‘leave some record of myself’ in a major poem (Letters I, p. 577).
91–2 PBS is hinting at some future literary fame for MWS, who was responsible for the bulk of 1817 and had written Frankenstein, which would be published early the following year. Both works were issued anonymously.
99 vestal fire: Vesta was the Roman goddess of the hearth in whose temple a perpetual fire, held to guarantee the well-being of the state, was tended by an order of women, the Vestal Virgins, dedicated from youth to the task.
102 One: MWS’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died on 10 September 1797, eleven days after giving birth to her.
108–9 thy Sire … One voice: Referring to MWS’s father, William Godwin, whom PBS identifies in both the draft and fair-copy MSS as the author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), which proposed a theory of rational anarchism based on the principle of human perfectibility.
109–10 Defining Godwin’s ‘voice’ as inspired by the best thinkers and writers of ancient and modern Europe.
115 low-thoughted: Petty, mean-spirited.
118–21 PBS is affirming his intention to speak to the present post-revolutionary period when Truth’s voice has been temporarily silenced.
121–6 The images in these lines are adapted from Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) II.1–5, which praise the retired sage who observes with philosophic calm the vain struggles of the unenlightened as if watching a man weltering on the raging sea (see Queen Mab, editorial note to PBS’s note [6]), and III.1–2 and V.11–12, which liken true wisdom to a light illuminating the darkness of error.
Written between mid 1817 and January 1818 while the Shelley household was living at Marlow; published in the Oxford University and City Herald (OH) on 31 January 1818, which supplies our text, over the signature ‘Pleyel’. The name recalls the novel Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), by the American Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810), in which the character Henry Pleyel is the lover of Clara Wieland. But it may also have been suggested by the composer Ignaz Pleyel (1757–1831), the founder in 1807 of a piano-manufacturing company. It is generally agreed that ‘To Constantia’ was inspired by the singing of MWS’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, an accomplished musician, who at Marlow accompanied herself on the piano that PBS and Leigh Hunt acquired at the end of April 1817. The ‘Constantia’ of the title was PBS’s familiar name for Claire (given name ‘Clara’) as well as alluding to Constantia Dudley, the owner of an exquisite singing voice in another of Brown’s novels, Ormond (1799); Peacock records PBS’s high admiration for her character (Peacock Works VIII, p. 77). Brown’s fiction was a favourite with the Shelleys, and the exchange of playful nicknames was common in their circle at Marlow, as well as later. On 19 January 1818, Claire transcribed a copy of the poem, very likely the one to be sent to OH (Clairmont Journal, p. 79), which she and PBS kept secret from MWS. Judith Chernaik recovered the OH text and printed it in 1969. See MYR (Shelley) V and Chernaik, pp. 52–8, 195–7.
‘To Constantia’ explores the transformative effects on the listener of a woman singing, a theme that PBS also developed in Asia’s lyric in Prometheus Unbound II.v.72–110 and in ‘To Jane’ (‘The keen stars were twinkling’). The highly unusual stanza form of eleven lines of eight, ten or twelve syllables rhyming (ababcdcedee) lends a traditional motif of the personal lyric something of the formal breadth and intricacy of a Pindaric ode (see ‘Ode to Liberty’) as well as its rhythmic variety and verbal music.
Neville Rogers, ‘Music at Marlow’, KSMB 5 (1953), pp. 20–25, gives the history of the piano in question. Jean de Palacio’s ‘Music and Musical Themes in Shelley’s Poetry’, MLR 59 (1964), pp. 345–59, includes a consideration of ‘To Constantia’. Chernaik, pp. 52–8, offers an acute exegesis, while Paul A. Vatalaro, Shelley’s Music: Fantasy, Authority and the Object Voice (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009), examines PBS’s poems on music from a psychoanalytic standpoint.
31–2 If ‘moons’ is understood as satellites of other planets than the earth and ‘sphere’ as ‘domain’, then the sense would be ‘beyond the furthest limit of the universe where heavenly bodies wane’. Cp. 1817 (L&C), ll. 1344–5: ‘Beyond the sun, beyond the stars that wane / On the verge of formless space’.
44 PBS’s draft reads: ‘Alas that the torn heart can bleed but not forget’ (BSM III).
Probably written in late December 1817, perhaps as PBS’s contribution to a friendly sonnet-writing competition with the stockbroker and man of letters Horace Smith, who visited the Shelleys in Marlow on the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh of the month (MWS Journal I, p. 188). Leigh Hunt published PBS’s sonnet in The Examiner for 11 January 1818 over the signature ‘Glirastes’, which has been plausibly interpreted as a compound of the Latin word for ‘dormouse’ and the Greek for ‘lover’; one of PBS’s pet-names for MWS was ‘the dormouse’. Horace Smith’s poem, which appeared in The Examiner for 1 February 1818, reads as follows:
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 fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
‘Ozymandias’ is the Greek name for the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II (reigned 1279–1213 BC). Whether directly or indirectly, both PBS and Smith will have been acquainted with a description of the huge statue of Ozymandias in the temple he erected at Thebes, first given in the Library of History of Diodorus Siculus, a Sicilian-Greek historian of the first century BC. They might also have known that negotiations were in progress to bring to the British Museum the massive bust of Ramses II, part of a larger seated colossus, which had been removed from the temple. The bust, which did not arrive until spring 1818, was put on display in 1820 and is still exhibited in the British Museum. In his long reign Ramses II undertook a grandiose programme of monumental building, of which the temple at Thebes was a spectacular example. It is this vainglorious ostentation as symptom and emblem of monarchical power that provokes the irony of both PBS and Horace Smith.
Widely cited and anthologized, the sonnet is one of the best-known short poems in the English language. The sculpted figure of Ozymandias as PBS imagines it has been regularly invoked in political discourse – appearing, for example, on the front page of The Times (London) on 10 April 2003 beneath a photo of the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad – while the name ‘Ozymandias’ has been appropriated in fantasy and science fiction, graphic novels, the lyrics of popular songs and television series.
Our text is from the Examiner printing, though some punctuation and capitalization have been adopted from PBS’s fair-copy MS (BSM III).
4–8 The displeasure and scorn on the sculpted face have outlived both the discerning sculptor who duplicated (and thereby derided) them, and the Pharaoh’s heart that nourished them.
Composed October 1818, with at least one later addition (see note to ll. 165–6); published in 1819, from which the text is taken, apart from ll. 56–112 – which follow a fragment of MWS’s transcription for the press (now in the Huntington Library: HM331: see MYR (Shelley) III) – and ll. 165–205, which follow a fragment of PBS’s MS now in the Beinecke Library at Yale University (Tinker Collection 1897; see MYR (Shelley) VIII). In early October 1818, PBS was living at I Cappuccini, a villa at Este about twenty miles south-west of Padua which Byron had rented for the summer but had chosen not to occupy – preferring to remain in Venice, some thirty-five miles to the north-east. PBS’s letter to T. L. Peacock of 8 October 1818 (Letters II, pp. 41–4) sketches a visual and moral portrait of Venice as well as describing the view from the villa at Este and the nearby Euganean Hills (pronounced with an accent on the third syllable: Euganèan), a view also described by MWS in her note on Julian and Maddalo in 1839 (OSA, pp. 203–4).
PBS’s ‘Advertisement’ to 1819 (dated 20 December 1818) reveals that the poem
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 anyone 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 [MWS], 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.
PBS’s ‘Lines’ continue a tradition of English verse in which the poet’s wide survey of his natural surroundings from a lofty vantage point prompts reflections on history, politics and poetry itself, as well as recommending the ideal of a tranquil and retired life. Sir John Denham’s ‘Cooper’s Hill’ (1642) and John Dyer’s ‘Grongar Hill’ (1726) are among the better-known examples. This mode PBS combines with that of the extended lyric of personal crisis as practised by both Coleridge and Wordsworth; his title imitates the specificity of Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798’. Byron’s blending of loco-descriptive and confessional poetry in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (especially Canto IV, 1818) is also a major influence. The image in the ‘introductory lines’ (1–65) of human existence as a dark and relentless voyage to death cheered only by the occurrence of fertile islands PBS developed from his own dejection, brought on by personal affliction – in particular the death of the one-year-old Clara Shelley on 24 September and the painful events of his life in the England he had left behind the previous March. These and other sources are identified by Donald H. Reiman in PMLA 77 (1962), pp. 404–13, in Poems II, pp. 428–9, and in Chernaik, pp. 80–81. The passage does not invite precise interpretation as autobiography, however; its symbolic idiom is designed both to conceal specific details and to open up a broader range of meaning.
1–2 In Julian and Maddalo, ll. 77–9, PBS evokes the view from Venice of ‘Those famous Euganean hills, which bear / As seen from Lido through the harbour piles / The likeness of a clump of peaked isles’.
10 Big with: Heavily pregnant with.
13 Riving: Ripping apart.
18 Weltering: Tumbling, as if tossed by waves.
27–8 Poems II compares the series of rhetorical questions in Pope’s ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’ (1717), ll. 55–62. See also note to l. 36 below.
34 wreak: Cause (harm or injury).
36 Senseless: Unable to perceive or feel. Poems II compares Pope, ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’, l. 33: ‘Cold is that breast which warm’d the world before.’
45–65 The passage has been interpreted both as allegorized autobiography and as generalized image of human woe. Chernaik, pp. 80–81, detects a debt to the celebrated choral ode on the calamities of existence in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (ll. 1239–44), in which man is likened to a shore perpetually beaten by winter tempests from the north. See also references at the end of the headnote above.
54 sea-mews: Seagulls.
59 pomp: Ostentatious victory celebration.
71 paean: Song of praise, originally a hymn to Apollo the sun god, patron of medicine and prophecy.
90–91 On 8 October 1818, PBS wrote to Peacock from Este: ‘We see just 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’ (Letters II, p. 43). Lombardy is the region of northern Italy west of the Veneto.
97 Amphitrite: In Greek myth Amphitrite, queen of the sea, was the daughter of Oceanus (her ‘sire’, l. 98) and wife of Poseidon, god of the sea.
111–14 The spectacle of Venice at sunrise suggests a comparison with ancient sacrificial altars from which flames rose as they did at Delphi (and other shrines) where the prophecies of Apollo were delivered.
115–20 Venice, known as ‘Queen of the Adriatic’, will again be overwhelmed by the sea, the original source of her wealth and power.
121–8 Formerly a republic, Venice had been taken by Napoleon in 1797, ceded to Austria in 1798, retaken by France in 1806, and restored to Austria by the Congress of Vienna after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. PBS maintains that when Venice has been reclaimed by the ocean it will be less devastated than it is at present under Austrian tyranny.
123 the slave of slaves: Both Austria and the powers that granted her dominion over Venice are morally enslaved by the exercise of tyranny.
139 starlight: Contemporary form of ‘starlit’.
140 masque of death: A symbolic drama imagined as enacted by the dead, perhaps one resembling a kind of procession in which the participants dressed as resurrected corpses and paraded through the streets as reminders of mortality.
142–9 On 8 October 1818, PBS wrote to Peacock: ‘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’ (Letters II, p. 43).
152 Celtic Anarch: Austrian tyrant. ‘Celtic’ is here used in the Classical sense to indicate a barbarian northern people (see also l. 223); while ‘Anarch’, from the Greek ‘without a leader’, designates an oppressor who lacks any genuine title to rule.
165–6 PBS’s MS of ll. 167–205 (see headnote) instructs the publisher to insert these lines after ‘From thy dust shall nations spring / With more kindly blossoming’. The MS version alters the address as printed in 1819 from second-person plural (referring to the ‘hundred cities’ of l. 154, which are addressed as ‘ye’ in l. 163) to the second-person singular, indicating Venice. The plural ‘your’ seems to make better sense in the context, and in the MS PBS may be quoting from memory or from an earlier version of the poem than the one he sent to be printed. But it is also possible, though he does not say so specifically, that he wished to alter ‘your’ to ‘thy’ and ‘new’ to ‘shall’ – as Donald H. Reiman argues in MYR (Shelley) VIII, p. 188. Norton 2002 cites in support of ‘thy’ and ‘shall’ PBS’s corrections in a privately owned copy of 1819.
174–7 Swan … dreams: Byron, then England’s (Albion’s) best-known poet, who had taken up residence in Venice following his departure from England in the wake of scandals surrounding his personal life.
178–83 Ocean … terror: PBS considered that the apostrophe to Ocean at the close of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV (1818), stanzas 179–84, proved his greatness as a poet despite the desperate pessimism of the rest of the poem (Letters II, pp. 57–8).
184 Alluding to the ‘rich stream’ of poetry flowing eternally from Mount Helicon in ancient Greece in Thomas Gray’s ‘The Progress of Poesy’ (1757), stanza I.i.
194–5 The river Scamander (Karamenderes in modern Turkey) in the Trojan plain is the scene of many battles in Homer’s Iliad.
197 Avon: The river from which the birthplace of Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon, takes its name.
200–203 The Italian Renaissance poet and scholar Francesco Petrarca (1304–74) lived the final years of his life in the town of Arquà in the Euganean Hills and is buried there. For Petrarch as love poet, see A Defence of Poetry.
218–19 The Italian farmer labours for the benefit of the Austrian occupier. See Letters II, p. 43.
228 foizon: (Usually spelled ‘foison’) abundant harvest.
238–48 PBS borrows from both Paradise Lost II.648–870, where Satan and Sin are figured as father and mother; and from Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), ll. 191–4 in the 1805 version, where ‘Death’ and ‘Life-in-Death’ throw dice for the soul of the mariner. Ezzelin is Ezzelino da Romano (1194–1259), a brutal tyrant who ruled Padua and much of its environs, until he was deposed in a bloody revolt. The river Po flows across northern Italy from the Alps and into the Adriatic, near Venice.
256–7 The University of Padua, founded in 1222, is one of the oldest in Europe.
258 meteor: In PBS’s day, the term was applied to a variety of luminous atmospheric phenomena, from will-o’-the-wisps to ‘falling stars’.
269–79 Poems II compares Mary Wollstonecraft’s account of a forest fire near Oslo in her Letters Written … in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), Letter 15: ‘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 crackling amongst the branches.’
271 brakes: Thickets, undergrowth.
289 an air-dissolved star: Whose light is dispersed in the atmosphere like ‘fragrance’ (l. 290).
306 olive-sandalled Apennine: The Apennine Mountains run down the centre of the Italian peninsula with olive groves at their feet.
323 that one star: The planet Venus appearing as evening star (Hesperus).
335–73 PBS imagines a similar island paradise in Epipsychidion, ll. 407–590.
362–9 The meaning of these lines has been much discussed and the punctuation variously altered: see Locock I, p. 592; Poems II, p. 442; Major Works, p. 738. 1819’s punctuation, retained here, requires the verb ‘supplies’ (l. 364) to be understood as repeated before ‘All things’ (l. 368).
PBS drew many of the details for this poem (hereafter JM) from his visit to Byron in Venice on 23–4 August 1818; composition began in September–October and continued the following year. Our text of the poem is taken from the fair copy which PBS sent to Leigh Hunt on 15 August 1819, now in the Pierpont Morgan Library (MS MA 974: see MYR (Shelley) VIII). PBS notes that this ‘was composed at Este last year’ and asks Hunt to have it published anonymously (Letters II, p. 108). But Hunt did not do so and it remained unpublished until 1824, which is the sole authority for the preface and epigraph. MWS dates this text ‘Rome, May 1819’ and says that it had ‘received the author’s ultimate corrections’ (1824, p. vii) but she was uncertain about the composition date, amending it to 1820 in 1839 before deciding on 1818 in 1840.
Using the Socratic device of dialogue, JM reflects on a number of philosophical, political and personal issues through ‘a conversation’ between the two interlocutors named in the title. When PBS sent the poem to Hunt in August 1819, he assured him that ‘two of the characters you will recognise’ (Letters II, p. 108) and most commentators accept that Julian and Maddalo are fictional versions of PBS and Byron; indeed, PBS’s cousin Thomas Medwin records Byron saying of Maddalo that PBS ‘does not make me cut a good figure’ (Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jnr (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 119).
Two issues loomed large in PBS’s relationship with Byron in August 1818. The first, and the main reason for PBS’s visit to Byron in Venice, was the ongoing discussion about the custody of Allegra, Byron’s illegitimate daughter with Claire Clairmont, and (presumably) the original of Maddalo’s ‘child’, introduced in ll. 143–50. Second was PBS’s disappointment with Byron’s much-anticipated Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Canto the Fourth (1818): the poem is pessimistic about the possibilities of human improvement and PBS felt that this would damage support for political reform. In a letter to T. L. Peacock of 17 or 18 December 1818, PBS says of Childe Harold, IV Canto, that 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 & self-willed folly in which he [i.e. Byron] hardens himself. I remonstrated with him in vain on the tone of mind from which such a view of things alone arises’ (Letters II, p. 58). To a certain extent, JM reprises this ‘remonstrance’, with the idealistic Julian attempting to convince the fatalistic Maddalo that human nature and society can be perfected. But the poem narrates – as its subtitle suggests – a conversation rather than an argument won, and PBS is careful to maintain critical distance from both Julian’s and Maddalo’s positions, each exposing the strengths and limitations of the other’s arguments.
Of the Maniac whom Julian and Maddalo visit in the latter part of the poem PBS wrote to Hunt that he is ‘also in some degree a painting from nature, but, with respect to time and place, ideal [i.e. imaginary]’ (Letters II, p. 108). Commentators have variously interpreted the Maniac as a reflection of PBS’s guilt over the collapse of his marriage to Harriet Westbrook, or of Byron’s guilt over the failure of his marriage to Annabella Milbanke and his complex relationship with his half-sister Augusta. Comparisons have also been drawn with the fate of the sixteenth-century Italian poet Torquato Tasso, who was imprisoned and driven insane after attempting to pursue a relationship with Leonora d’Este, the daughter of his patron. Byron had written a ‘Lament of Tasso’ in 1817 and, in a letter of 20 April 1818, PBS told Peacock that he meant to devote ‘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 dramatic & poetical’ (Letters II, p. 8; only one draft, ‘Scene’ and a ‘Song’, survive of this project). JM may be compared with PBS’s other, broadly contemporary engagement with Venice and Byron in ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October, 1818’ (p. 153).
JM is in iambic pentameter couplets, and PBS observed to Hunt that he had employed ‘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’ (Letters II, p. 108). Commentators have noted stylistic similarities with Leigh Hunt’s The Story of Rimini (1816) and John Keats’s Endymion (1818), both of which also employ iambic pentameter couplets as part of an urbane and cultured style.
Influential biographical readings of the poem include William Brewer, The Shelley-Byron Conversation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), pp. 39–56, and Charles E. Robinson, Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 73–106. For critical readings, see: Kelvin Everest, ‘Shelley’s Doubles: An Approach to Julian and Maddalo’, in Kelvin Everest (ed.), Shelley Revalued (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983), pp. 63–88; Nick Johnston, ‘Shelley, Julian and the Narratives of Julian and Maddalo’, KSR 14 (2000), pp. 34–41; Geoffrey Matthews, ‘Julian and Maddalo: The Draft and the Meaning’, Studia Neophilologica 35 (1963), pp. 57–84; and Vincent Newey, ‘The Shelleyan Psycho-Drama: Julian and Maddalo’, in Miriam Allott (ed.), Essays on Shelley (Totawa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1982), pp. 71–104.
Epigraph Excerpted from PBS’s own (partial) translation of Virgil, Eclogues X.29–30, made in June 1818. The words are spoken by Pan in an attempt to correct the excessive grief of Gallus, Virgil’s friend and patron, at the loss of his would-be lover, Lycoris.
Preface Count Maddalo: The two seventeenth-century Italian biographies of Torquato Tasso (1544–95) which PBS read in spring 1818 in preparation for his drama on the life of the poet identify a Count Maddalo Fucci as responsible for betraying the secret of Tasso’s love for Leonora d’Este, and a ‘Count Maddalo’ features in PBS’s draft scene for the play (see Poems II, pp. 365–7).
p. 163 capable, if he would direct: In 1816, PBS had written to Byron to urge him to make his work ‘a fountain from which the thoughts of other men shall draw strength and beauty’ (Letters I, p. 507).
his degraded country: The reference is both to Italy, ‘degraded’ by Austrian occupation (see note to ll. 121–8 of ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills’), and, implicitly, to contemporary England.
But it is … human life: Cp. PBS’s description of Byron in his letter to Peacock of 17 or 18 December 1818, as ‘heartily & deeply discontented with himself, & contemplating in the distorted mirror of his own thoughts, the nature & the destiny of man, what can he behold but objects of contempt & despair?’ (Letters II, p. 58).
concentred: Self-focused.
1–3 I rode … Venice: Cp. PBS’s letter to MWS of 23 August 1818 in which he describes the day’s events: ‘[Byron] took me in his gondola … 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’ (Letters II, p. 36).
2–3 the bank of land …Venice: The Lido di Venezia, which shields Venice from the Adriatic Sea.
36–9 Our talk … extinguish: Our conversation became more serious, as conversation often does when we try and fail to dismiss sobering thoughts with witty, self-ironic chatter.
40 so poets tell: As Milton did in Paradise Lost II.555–61; the phrase introduces ll. 41–5 here.
46 descanted: Discussed at length.
51 struck … blind: Cp. PBS’s account of Coleridge in ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, ll. 202–8, and Byron’s ‘Lament of Tasso’ (1817), ll.1–2.
67 hoar: Grey or white with age; here implying snow-capped.
74 rent: Torn gap.
77–9 PBS develops the island-mountain simile in more detail in his ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October, 1818’ (p. 153).
88 that funereal bark: Cp. PBS’s description of gondolas in his letter to Peacock of 8 October 1818: ‘the gondolas themselves are things of a most romantic & picturesque appearance; I can only compare them to moths of which a coffin might have been the chrysalis. They are hung with black, & painted black, & carpeted with grey’ (Letters II, p. 42).
111 vespers: Evening prayers.
115–18 You were ever … Providence: Maddalo’s quip might recall an incident in July 1816, when PBS and Byron ran into difficulties during a sailing trip on Lake Geneva and their boat appeared near sinking. PBS could not swim; Byron was an excellent swimmer (see Letters I, p. 483). The phrase ‘A wolf for the meek lambs’ alludes to John 10:11–12, in which Christ contrasts the good shepherd who gives his life for his sheep and the hireling who abandons them to the wolf.
143–55 Biographical readings usually associate Maddalo’s child with Allegra, Byron’s illegitimate daughter with Claire Clairmont. Claire had sent the fifteen-month-old Allegra to Byron in Venice in April 1818, believing that he could better provide for her. Hence PBS had not seen Allegra for four months when he arrived in Venice in August 1818. PBS describes Allegra’s ‘deep blue eyes’, her ‘seriousness’ and ‘vivacity’ in a letter of 15 August 1821 (Letters II, p. 334).
144 toy: Plaything, companion in play.
162 old saws: Proverbial sayings.
163 never own: Never acknowledge.
164 teachless: Incapable of being taught; here meaning ‘free’.
170–76 it is our will … desire: Cp. ‘Ode to Liberty’, ll. 241–5: ‘He who taught man to vanquish whatsoever / Can be between the cradle and the grave / Crowned him the King of Life. O vain endeavour! / If on his own high will a willing slave, / He has enthroned the oppression and the oppressor’; and MWS’s ‘Note on Prometheus Unbound’: ‘Shelley believed that mankind had only to will that there should be no evil, and there would be none’ (1839 II, p. 133).
175–6 and … desire: Cp. Macbeth I.vii.39–41: ‘Art thou afeared / To be the same in thine own act and valour / As thou art in desire?’
188–9 PBS refers to the pre-Christian thought of Classical Greece and Rome.
190–91 And those … religion: Those whose religion leads them to sympathy with others, or those for whom such sympathy has the force of religion.
204 “soul of goodness”: Cp. Shakespeare, Henry V IV.i.3–4: ‘There is some soul of goodness in things evil / Would men observingly distil it out.’
218 This line is not in 1824.
238 peculiar: Specific, particular.
244 humourist: Two senses are possible: someone subject to the humours (i.e. of unstable feelings), or someone with a sense of humour.
252–8 Poems II compares a similar act of kindness by Glenarvon, Caroline Lamb’s portrait of Byron in her eponymous novel of 1816.
301 jade: A worn-out horse.
302–3 PBS describes convicts chained in St Peter’s Square in a letter of 6 April 1819 to Peacock from Rome (Letters II, p. 93).
320 What … torture us: Cp. Prometheus Unbound II.iv.100–101, in which Asia asks Demogorgon ‘who rains down / Evil, the immedicable plague’.
354–7 Nora Crook and Derek Guiton, in Shelley’s Venomed Melody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 137, suggest that PBS ‘refers here to the homeopathic principle [which seeks the cure for an illness or injury in its cause], but warns against a single-minded application of it’.
380–82 as when … nature: PBS recalls such a youthful crisis in ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, ll. 49–62, and in the Dedication before Laon and Cythna, ll. 19–36.
383 pent: Imprisoned.
384–5 In PBS’s draft of these lines, the Maniac refers to a ‘Laura’ at this point, Petrarch (buried in the nearby Euganean Hills) and his unrequited love for Laura of Avignon. Poems II observes that John Black’s Life of Tasso, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1810), II, p. 242, records that the imprisoned and ailing poet confused ‘illusions’ of the mind with ‘external impressions’ and frequently conversed with an imagined ‘familiar spirit’.
416–19 As the slow … immortality: Cp. Prometheus Unbound I.13–14: ‘And moments aye divided by keen pangs / Till they seemed years’.
433 cearedst: 1824 reads ‘seard’st’. OED cites ‘cear’ as an obsolete form of ‘sear’ = ‘to dry or burn’. Poems II, p. 686, emends to ‘ceredst’, suggesting that PBS’s spelling is an alternative for both ‘seared’ (burned, dried) and ‘sered’ (embalmed). Cp. l. 614 and note.
438 imprecate for, on me: Wish upon me as a curse.
450 Echoing Ecclesiastes 4:1: ‘So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun.’
504 words like embers, every spark: Cp. ‘Ode to the West Wind’, ll. 66–7, and The Triumph of Life, ll. 206–7, 386–8.
536 nice: Refined.
541–2 That is, language that would have been called poetry if it had been metrical. In his letter to Hunt of 15 August 1819, PBS says of the ‘style of language’ used in JM that ‘passion exceeding a certain limit touches the boundaries of that which is ideal [i.e. imaginary]. Strong passion expresses itself in metaphor borrowed from objects alike remote or near, and casts over all the shadow of its own greatness’ (Letters II, p. 108).
561 make me know myself: Echoing the famous advice, ‘Know Thyself’, of the oracle at Delphi. Cp. Adonais, ll. 415–16: ‘come forth / Fond wretch! and know thyself and him aright’; and The Triumph of Life, ll. 211–12: ‘their lore / Taught them not this—to know themselves’.
586–7 Byron studied the Armenian language at a monastery in Venice.
588 His dog was dead: Byron kept a sequence of Newfoundland dogs as favoured pets, and elegized the first – Boatswain – in a poem of November 1808.
588–9 His child … woman: Byron and Claire’s daughter Allegra was to die, from malaria or pneumonia, on 20 April 1822, aged five.
595 lorn: Forlorn, i.e. ‘miserable’ or ‘abandoned’.
597 The fair copy that PBS sent to Hunt begins direct speech at this point, but this seems incompatible with the reference to ‘my departure’ in l. 598. Editors have differed as to where direct speech should begin.
608–15 Child … lie: The distribution of the dialogue in these lines is uncertain. In PBS’s fair copy the lines are compressed into the edge of the page, leaving it impossible to discern any intended punctuation. Editors tend to assign the question in l. 608 to Julian and ll. 609–15 to Maddalo’s daughter. However, the division between the speakers given here is also possible: that Julian asks an extended question in ll. 608–10, to which Maddalo’s daughter replies in ll. 611–15. In PBS’s fair copy, ‘Yet’ in l. 611 replaces a cancelled ‘But’, which, as Poems II observes, ‘might enforce a pause and help suggest a change of speaker’.
614 ceared: See note to l. 433 above.
Composed, as the title indicates, in December 1818, and first published in 1824. PBS’s draft is in the Bodleian Library (BSM XV), and there are two autograph fair copies, one in the Pierpont Morgan Library (MYR (Shelley) V) and the other in the Bodleian (MS Shelley e. 5: see BSM XXI). Our text follows the Bodleian fair copy, evidently the later of the two. The poem was one of a number which PBS gathered together in November 1820 as his ‘saddest verses’ and planned to publish with Julian and Maddalo (Letters II, p. 246). The ‘dejection’ of the title resulted from several converging causes: PBS’s poor health, a malicious reference to his personal life (though not by name) in the Quarterly Review for May 1818, the death of his daughter Clara that September and the depression of spirits it occasioned in MWS, and the complications surrounding Elena Adelaide, PBS’s ‘Neapolitan charge’ (Letters II, p. 211): a child registered as his and MWS’s in February 1819 and as having been born the previous December, but whose relationship to them remains unclear (MWS Journal I, pp. 249–50; Bieri II, pp. 103 ff.). The ‘Stanzas’ take the form of modified Spenserian stanzas, and commentators have noted the influence of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807) and Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (1802). Chernaik, pp. 74–80, offers a close and informative reading.
1–4 In a letter of 23–4 January 1819, PBS wrote to T. L. Peacock of the view from Pompeii, just south of Naples, which he and MWS had visited on 22 December: ‘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’ (Letters II, p. 73).
10–11 In a letter of 17 or 18 December 1818, PBS described for Peacock an excursion by boat from Naples: ‘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’ (Letters II, p. 61).
10 untrampled: Never having been trod upon, and so intact, undamaged.
21–3 Various candidates for this ‘sage’ have been proposed, including Socrates and Marcus Aurelius, but PBS may not have had a specific individual in mind.
23 inward glory crowned: The phrase recalls the characterization of regenerated man in Prometheus Unbound III.iv.196–7, who is ‘King / Over himself’, and ‘Sonnet: Political Greatness’, ll. 10–13: ‘Man, who man would be, / Must rule the empire of himself; in it / Must be supreme, establishing his throne / On vanquished will’.
First published in 1824. Our copy-text is PBS’s draft in the Bodleian Library (MS Shelley adds. e. 12: see BSM XVIII), the only authoritative source. It appears to date from late 1818, although in 1839 MWS grouped the poem with those written in 1820. The draft, which never reached finished form, is rough and not always resolved, so that more editorial intervention than usual has been necessary, including conjectural readings in some lines. At the head of the draft PBS has written ‘The good die first’, the first words of a reflection from Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814), I.500–502, which he had quoted in the Preface to Alastor (here). Beneath it are the cancelled lines ‘Two genii [i.e. spirits] stood before me in a dream / Seest thou not the shades of even’. The poem’s title invites interpretation – without pre-empting it – of the spirits’ dialogue on freedom and constraint, boldness and caution, and the transforming power of love.
15 meteors: The term could signify any luminous atmospheric body or appearance.
37 leagued: BSM XVIII reads PBS’s difficult draft as ‘languid’, as do 1824, Chernaik and most modern editors. The sense of ‘leagued’ would be, as Poems II suggests, that the ‘storm’ is composed of various destructive powers conjoined, as in ll. 17–24.
42 death dews: Noxious vapour (miasma) rising from swampy ground (‘the morass’) was regarded as carrying disease.
In 1839 MWS dated this sonnet 1818, but later editors have proposed a date of composition between the middle of that year and spring 1820. There is a draft in PBS’s hand in the Bodleian Library (BSM XVIII) and an autograph fair copy in the Pierpont Morgan Library (MS MA 406: see MYR (Shelley) V). We follow Poems II in taking as copy-text the printing in 1839, as this seems likely to embody PBS’s latest revisions. Substantive verbal differences between 1839 and PBS’s fair copy and 1824 (where the poem was first published) are recorded in the notes below. Prometheus Unbound III.iv.190–92 employs the imagery and language of lines 1–4 of this poem for a contrary purpose, to imagine the mind’s liberation from deceptive illusion. The traditional order of the Petrarchan or Italian sonnet into octave followed by sestet is here reversed, and an unorthodox rhyme scheme adopted.
6 1824 reads: ‘The shadows, which the world calls substance, there.’
sightless: ‘Impenetrable by vision’ (OED).
7–14 Cp. the fate of the ‘one frail Form’ in Adonais, ll. 271–306.
13 PBS’s fair copy reads: ‘Cast on this gloomy world—a thing which strove’.
14 the Preacher: The preacher of Ecclesiastes, who declares that ‘all is vanity’ but who ‘sought to find out acceptable words: and that which was written was upright, even words of truth’ (12:8–10).
PBS would have been familiar from his school days with Aeschylus’ drama Prometheus Bound and the outline of its lost sequel, the seminal retelling of the myth of the Titan Prometheus whom Zeus (PBS uses the Roman name, Jupiter) punished for bringing to earth fire stolen from heaven (out of pity for the lot of humanity) by chaining him to a rock in the Caucasus where each day an eagle devoured his liver which was continually renewed. On his release, Prometheus revealed to Jupiter that an oracle had foretold that, were he to marry the nymph Thetis, a son born of their union would be greater than his father and dethrone him. See also note to first stage direction and PBS’s Note [17] to Queen Mab VIII.211–12 In a letter of 1823, MWS suggested that PBS had ‘the idea’ of writing his own version of the myth after passing through Les Échelles, in the French Alps, on their journey to Italy in March 1818 (MWS Letters II, p. 357); for an account by PBS of these mountains, see his entry in MWS’s journal for 26 March 1818 (MWS Journal I, p. 200).
PBS probably began Prometheus Unbound (PU) in late summer or early autumn 1818 and composition continued, with varying intensity, until December 1819. PU was published in 1820, in August of that year. After PBS received a copy, he wrote to Charles Ollier on 10 November that it was ‘certainly most beautifully printed’ but also ‘regretted that the errors of the press are so numerous’ (Letters II, p. 246). Our text is based on 1839, which MWS edited using ‘a list of errata prepared by Shelley himself’ (II). We have taken some readings and presentational features from 1820 and from PBS’s fair copy in the Bodleian Library (see BSM XI) when these seemed preferable. For a detailed account of the compositional and textual history of PU, see Poems II, pp. 456–65, and the commentary in BSM XI, pp. lxii–lxxv.
PU is a work of extraordinary scope and ambition which embodies many of the fundamental concerns of PBS’s thought (for assessments of its complexity by PBS himself and by MWS, see Letters II, p. 246, and 1839 II, p. 135). It is at once a narrative of political change, of geophysical transformation, and of the liberation of the human mind from various forms of intellectual and ideological enslavement, which PBS identifies as both cause and consequence of any successful reformation of the structures of power. Two characters whom PBS introduces to the story of Prometheus are central to these transitions. The first is Asia, Prometheus’ beloved, one of the Oceanides, daughters of the Titan Oceanus/Ocean (the presiding divinity of the ocean and rivers) and his sister Tethys; her role in PU suggests that love is the central principle of the moral world and the only true agent of lasting personal and political reform. The second is Demogorgon, a shadowy figure whom MWS in her note on PU in 1839 describes as ‘the Primal Power of the world’ (II, p. 134). Often understood by commentators as a personification of the natural laws governing the universe, Demogorgon’s presence in PU suggests that it is only through recognizing and abiding by those laws that humanity can find genuine and lasting freedom. As Poems II, p. 468, observes, Demogorgon is also ‘the one figure in whom most levels of [PU] coincide’: in the terms of the Classical myth, he represents the mysterious child destined to overthrow Jupiter; but he also stands for the physical energies of the earth, and the irresistible historical impetus towards political liberty. For further commentary, see note to II.iv.1–7.
PU also represents an impressive and innovative advance in PBS’s poetic technique. Subtitled ‘A Lyrical Drama’ and described by PBS as having ‘characters & mechanism of a kind yet unattempted’ (Letters II, p. 94), PU blends blank-verse narrative with lyric and choral elements into a hybrid form which draws upon Classical Greek drama, established English and European genres, and other more contemporary, experimental forms, such as Byron’s ‘dramatic poem’ Manfred (1817). For considerations of the ways in which PBS’s stylistic innovations in PU relate to its thematic concerns, see, for example: Susan Hawk Brisman, ‘“Unsaying His High Language”: The Problem of Voice in Prometheus Unbound’, SiR 16 (1977), pp. 51–86; Kelvin Everest, ‘“Mechanism of a Kind Yet Unattempted”: The Dramatic Action of Prometheus Unbound’, in P. J. Kitson (ed.), Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley (London: Palgrave, 1996), pp. 186–201; Jennifer Wallace, Shelley and Greece (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 147–8; and Timothy Webb, ‘The Unascended Heaven: Shelley’s Use of Negatives in Prometheus Unbound’, in Kelvin Everest (ed.), Shelley Revalued (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983), pp. 37–62.
Critical discussion of PU has been extensive, and most monographs on PBS offer an extended analysis. Dedicated studies of note include: Stuart Curran, ‘The Political Prometheus’, SiR 25/3 (1986), pp. 429–55; Carl Grabo, A Newton Among Poets: Shelley’s Use of Science in Prometheus Unbound (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Richard Isomaki, ‘Love as Cause in Prometheus Unbound’, Studies in English Literature 29/4 (1989), pp. 655–73; Geoffrey Matthews, ‘A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley’, ELH 24/3 (1957), pp. 191–228; Tilottama Rajan, ‘Deconstruction or Reconstruction: Reading Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound’, SiR 23/3 (1984), pp. 317–38; Stuart Sperry, ‘Necessity and the Role of the Hero in Prometheus Unbound’, PMLA 96/2 (1981), pp. 242–54; and Earl Wasserman, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966).
Epigraph ‘Do you hear this, Amphiaraus, in your home beneath the earth?’ Amphiaraus became an oracular god after Zeus saved his life by having the earth swallow him and hide him from his enemies. The quotation is from Epigoni, a lost play by Aeschylus, quoted in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, where it is used to challenge the Stoic doctrine that suffering is of no consequence. In a notebook PBS addresses it to Aeschylus’ ghost (BSM XV).
p. 184 Agamemnonian story: The subject of Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy, which was produced in 458 BC and which dramatizes the myth in which King Agamemnon, his wife Clytemnestra and their son Orestes are trapped in a cycle of murder and vengeance until the intervention of Athena, who settles the matter by submitting it to the decision of public justice.
catastrophe: Denouement, resolution of the plot.
p. 185 casuistry: ‘The part of Ethics which resolves cases of conscience … in which there appears to be a conflict of duties’ (OED).
Baths of Caracalla: The extensive ruins of public baths, which were opened in AD 217 in the reign of the emperor Caracalla (Marcus Aurelius Antoninus), located south-east of the ancient centre of Rome.
pp. 185–7 One word … unknown: PBS added the last five paragraphs to the Preface after he read the Quarterly Review for April 1819 which attacked his character and poetry in a review of Laon and Cythna/The Revolt of Islam (1817–18); among its many criticisms, the periodical questioned the originality of PBS’s work, claiming it was a debased imitation of Wordsworth.
p. 187 Fletcher: Shakespeare’s younger contemporary John Fletcher (1579–1625) is best known for his dramatic collaborations with Sir Francis Beaumont (1584–1616) but wrote plays with several other authors as well as on his own account.
‘a passion for reforming the world’: In chapter 2 of T. L. Peacock’s satire Nightmare Abbey (1818), Scythrop Glowry, a character based on PBS, suffers from ‘the passion for reforming the world’ (Peacock Works, p. 22). The ‘Scotch philosopher’ is Robert Forsyth, to whose Principles of Moral Science (1805) Peacock attributes the phrase.
For my part … Malthus: For Lord Bacon, see note 11 to the extract from the Preface to Laon and Cythna. William Paley (1743–1805) was a conservative theologian and author of Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) and Natural Theology (1802), whose ideas PBS considers and rejects in his A Refutation of Deism (1814). Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) was the author of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798); see note 30 to ‘From A Philosophical View of Reform’.
seeds … life: Alluding to the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13:3–9.
Stage direction Indian Caucasus: The Hindu Kush, a mountain range in central Asia (largely in modern Pakistan and Afghanistan) considered by some in PBS’s day to be the birthplace of humanity and of civilization. PBS sets the action of the drama there rather than its traditional location in the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia.
1 Daemons: Plato’s Symposium, which PBS translated, describes daemons as beings intermediate between gods and mortals.
2 But One: Prometheus, or perhaps Demogorgon.
7 hecatombs: Sacrifices of numerous victims; in ancient Greece, the sacrifice of a hundred oxen.
9–11 The phrase ‘eyeless in hate’ may refer either to ‘me’ or ‘thou’ – appropriately, as Prometheus and Jupiter have become reflections one of the other.
42 genii: Beings representing aspects and activities of the natural world.
53–9 Prometheus’ mental shift from hatred to pity is the moral condition of the subsequent dramatic action.
59 recall: Here meaning both ‘remember’ and ‘revoke’.
61 spell: Here and elsewhere in PU (e.g. IV.555) meaning ‘words with transformative and/or binding effect’.
64–5 Thou serenest … without beams: In the note to Queen Mab I.242–3, PBS explains that beyond the earth’s atmosphere sunlight has no rays.
82–3 Colour is produced by the interaction of sunlight with the earth’s atmosphere (air); it is not a property of things in themselves.
95–8 Cp. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), ll. 554–63 (1805 version).
99–102 Echoing biblical accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus, e.g. Luke 23:44–6.
121 frore: Frozen.
135 inorganic: Inanimate; the Spirit of the Earth has no body. Cp. OED 2, citing this line: ‘Not furnished with or acting by bodily or material organs’.
137 And love: And that you love (me).
141–2 some wheel … roll: In Greek myth, Zeus tortures Ixion, one of the Titans, by binding him to a burning and ever-spinning wheel. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading, pp. 262 ff., suggests that PBS is alluding here to the ecliptic (the apparent annual path of the sun around the earth), which determines the seasons.
150–51 this tongue … die: See ll. 243–5.
153 stony veins: Cp. PBS’s 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’ (Letters I, p. 500).
170 Blue thistles: PBS and his contemporaries often associate the colour blue with disease and illness.
178 contagion: Here indicating transmission of disease, but cp. II.iii.10.
192 Zoroaster: Also known as Zarathustra. A Persian sage (Magus) and mystic known to PBS and his contemporaries as the author of a system of belief which viewed existence as a perpetual struggle between the opposed principles of good (Ormuzd) and evil (Ahriman). No source for Zoroaster’s encounter with his double has been identified but the Zoroastrian belief in fravashis, or guardian spirits, is relevant. See Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1975), pp. 68–74.
195–209 The notion of two parallel worlds, material and immaterial, is found in various ancient traditions, Platonic, Neoplatonic and others.
212 Hades or Typhon: In Classical myth, Hades was the lord of the underworld; Typhon, a dragon-like monster and one of Prometheus’ fellow Titans, was imprisoned by Zeus beneath Mount Etna.
229 our sweet sister: Asia: the third Oceanid and Prometheus’ beloved.
236 To stay steps: To steady [its] steps.
278 imprecate: To invoke, or call down upon.
289 In Classical myth, both Hercules and Creusa, the daughter of Creon, were killed by poisoned robes.
292–3 Echoing Milton, Paradise Lost I.215–18.
296 awful: Inspiring terror and awe.
324–5 serpent-cinctured wand … Mercury: The messenger of the gods in Classical myth, Mercury is often depicted carrying a caduceus, a short staff with two serpents wrapped around it.
326 hydra tresses: The Hydra was a monstrous many-headed serpent.
331 Jove’s tempest-walking hounds: The Furies (Erinyes): female spirits whom the Greek gods send to punish those guilty of serious crimes. PBS’s Furies threaten Prometheus with physical pain (ll. 475–91) and, when this fails, move on to mental torments, showing Prometheus visions of the perversion of the philanthropic teachings of Jesus by institutional Christianity (ll. 546–60), of the failure of the French Revolution (ll. 564–77), and of the corruption and injustice of the world (ll. 618–31).
342 Son of Maia: Maia was one of the Pleiades and mother of Hermes/Mercury by Zeus.
345 the streams of fire and wail: In Greek myth, Phlegethon (river of fire) and Cocytus (river of lamentation) were two of the traditional five rivers of the underworld. See Paradise Lost II.575–86.
346–9 Geryon … hate: Monsters from Classical myth. Geryon was a three-headed giant slain by Hercules; Medusa was a Gorgon slain by Perseus; the Chimaera, a mythical beast composed of goat, lion and snake, was slain by Bellerophon. Sophocles’ Theban plays tell how Oedipus solves the riddle of the monstrous Sphinx before proceeding, unwittingly, to murder his father and marry his mother; his sons subsequently murder each other. So his story exemplifies both ‘Unnatural love’ and ‘unnatural hate’.
387 thought-executing ministers: The phrase has been understood as meaning ‘those who carry out Jove’s thought’ and/or ‘those who destroy thought’.
398–9 the Sicilian’s … o’er his crown: Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse, compelled the courtier Damocles to dine under a sword suspended by a single horse-hair so that he might appreciate the insecurity of rule.
409 lowers: i.e. ‘lours’, ‘threatens’, presumably by darkening.
450 Notopoulos, p. 227, suggests that this idea, which features in various forms in PBS’s writings, derives from Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791): ‘It is the faculty of the human mind to become what it contemplates, and to act in unison with its object’ (ed. Eric Foner and Henry Collins (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 109). See III.iii.49–53 and A Defence of Poetry.
479 lidless: Always open; unsleeping.
492–4 Cp. ‘Sonnet: Political Greatness’, ll. 10–14.
506–9 Cp. ‘Ode to the West Wind’, ll. 63–70.
530 Kingly conclaves: No doubt to be understood as referring in particular to the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), which was convened to decide the partition and governance of post-Napoleonic Europe, and which PBS and many of his contemporaries regarded as having legitimized reactionary royal authority.
546 One came forth: i.e. Jesus Christ.
563 pillow of thorns: Recalling the crown of thorns placed on Christ’s head in e.g. Matthew 27:29.
567 a disenchanted nation: Coleridge, ‘France: An Ode’ (1798), l. 28, describes France, in the early phase of the Revolution, as a ‘disenchanted nation’, i.e. freed from the spell of tyranny.
573–7 The lines suggest parallels with recent historical events, such as the Reign of Terror (1793–4), the wars of revolutionary and imperial France (1792–1815), and the restoration of the European monarchies post-Waterloo (1815).
609 ounces: Leopards.
619 ravin: Prey.
622 fanes: Temples.
625–8 Cp. The Triumph of Life, ll. 228–31.
631 they know not what they do: Echoing the words of Jesus on the cross (e.g. Luke 23:34).
651 ‘Truth, liberty, and love!’: Cp. the French revolutionary slogan: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; see also John 8:32: ‘And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’
658 subtle and fair spirits: The first four of these immaterial (‘subtle’) beings represent qualities inherent in general and individual human thought which offer hope for the future of humanity as an antidote to the Furies’ counsels of despair. The fifth and sixth spirits exemplify the intimate relation of hope and despair in even the enlightened mind.
765 That planet-crested Shape: Love, associated with the planet Venus.
769 unupbraiding: Without rebuking or criticizing; one of a number of unusual negative constructions in PU; see Webb, ‘The Unascended Heaven’, in Everest (ed.), Shelley Revalued, pp. 37–62.
772–9 PBS is adapting the imagery of Plato, Symposium 195.
782 Cp. Revelation 6:8: ‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death.’
825 the Eastern star: The planet Venus, as the morning star.
830–31 And haunted … waters: Adapting Shakespeare, The Tempest III.ii.138–40: ‘The isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give Delight and hurt not.’
1–9 Poems II cites this passage, as well as ll. 27, 35–8, 92 and 107–8 of this scene, as evidence that the action of the poem is to be considered sequential rather than simultaneous.
3 horny: An unusual usage: ‘semi-opaque like horn’ (OED); hence (perhaps) ‘dull’, ‘cloudy’.
26–7 The beating of Panthea’s wings through the morning air makes music: see ll. 50–52. Aeolus was the mythical keeper of the winds.
43 erewhile: i.e. ‘Before the sacred Titan’s fall’ (l. 40).
44 glaucous: ‘Of dull or pale green colour passing into greyish blue’ (OED).
62–7 Recalling the Gospel episode, e.g. Matthew 17:1–6, in which Christ is transfigured.
133–41 This complex sequence involves several elements: the almond-tree, which flowers early, heralds the spring. Its blossoms are killed by an icy wind from the north (for the ancient Greeks, Scythia indicated lands to the north of the Black Sea; this is the region in which the action of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound is set). Each fallen almond leaf bears the message ‘O, follow, follow!’, just as the hyacinth’s petals were imagined as bearing the sorrowful cry ‘ai’ in memory of Apollo’s love for Hyacinth, who had been transformed into the flower after his early death. Apollo was the Greek god of the sun, and patron of poetry, prophecy and medicine. The priestesses of some ancient oracles traditionally wrote their prophecies on leaves.
Stage direction As Geoffrey Matthews notes, in ‘A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley’, the scenery of PU II.ii, through which Asia and Panthea journey on their way to the cave of Demogorgon, is based upon the lush volcanic landscapes of Lake Agnano and the Astroni crater near Naples, which PBS visited in the spring of 1819 (see Letters II, p. 77). The scene (like much of PU II) is also indebted to both ancient and contemporary speculation about volcanic activity, e.g. the account of ‘the breathing earth’ (ll. 50–56), which combines early nineteenth-century natural philosophy with Classical notions of the inspirational or intoxicating properties of volcanic gases. See also II.iii.1–10.
Fauns: A faun was a rural semi-divinity, half man and half goat.
10 Cp. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream II.i.14–15: ‘I must go seek some dewdrops here, / And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.’
70–82 These lines derive from the debate among some contemporary natural philosophers on the question whether flammable hydrogen gas, released from water plants by the sunlight, might be the cause of various luminous atmospheric phenomena (‘meteors’).
90 Silenus is a satyr (part man, part goat), repository of ancient myth and wisdom and tutor to Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy. Here he would be ‘thwart’ (cross, testy) to find his herd of goats ‘undrawn’ (unmilked).
Stage direction Asia and Panthea have reached the summit of a volcano, from which gas is being expelled (ll. 3–4); the cave of Demogorgon is located in the depths of the crater beneath them. Many of the details recall PBS’s account of his ascent of Vesuvius on 16 December 1818 (Letters II, p. 62–3).
4 the oracular vapour: The priestess who delivered the responses of the Oracle at Delphi was reputed to draw her inspiration from vapours rising from a chasm.
9–10 In Greek myth, Maenads were the frenzied female followers of Dionysus; their ritual cry was ‘Evoe!’. Equivocal figures, they express both transformative energies and the dangers of intoxication, hence the ambivalence of ‘The voice’ in l. 10, where ‘contagion’ can be construed in either a positive or a negative sense. Cp. I.178.
28–42 PBS’s draft of these lines indicates that he intended them as a response to an attack, in the Quarterly Review for May 1818, on his atheism and on the absence of pious awe before mountain landscapes in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817) and ‘Mont Blanc’. See Timothy Webb, ‘“The Avalanche of Ages”: Shelley’s Defence of Atheism and Prometheus Unbound’, KSMB 35 (1984), pp. 1–39.
70 stone: Lodestone; magnetic iron oxide.
79 one: Demogorgon is intended, here and in l. 95 (‘the Eternal, the Immortal’).
97 snake-like Doom: Fate, or destiny; ‘snake-like’ suggests an association with eternity (sometimes represented as a serpent devouring its own tail).
Stage direction Asia and Panthea have reached the cave of Demogorgon, at the bottom of the volcanic crater. As Geoffrey Matthews observes, in ‘A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley’, one current theory held that volcanic eruptions were triggered by the interaction of sea water and molten magma in subterranean caverns. Hence, the entry of the Oceanides to Demogorgon’s cave appropriately precipitates a symbolic eruption, and the various accounts of Jupiter’s fall in ll. 129, 150 ff. and III.i–ii draw upon that scientific dimension.
1–7 Commentators have found sources for PBS’s conception of Demogorgon in T. L. Peacock’s Rhododaphne (1818), where Demogorgon is named as the supreme earthly power; in Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium (1472), which was Peacock’s source; and in a range of Classical texts, including Lucan’s Pharsalia. PBS’s description of Demogorgon in these lines recalls Milton’s portrait of Death in Paradise Lost II.666–70. Carl Grabo suggests that the ‘rays of gloom’ (l. 3) emitted by Demogorgon might allude to infra-red radiation, which the astronomer William Herschel had discovered in 1800; see also IV.225–30 (A Newton Among Poets, p. 47). Paul Foot finds in the name ‘Demogorgon’ the etymological sense ‘people-monster’, thereby suggesting that the character is linked in PBS’s mind with the (revolutionary) political energies of the crowd (Red Shelley (London: Bookmarks, 1984), pp. 193–201 (p. 194)).
32–4 There was … shadow: Uranus (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth) were the parents of the Titans, including Saturn (Greek ‘Kronos’, associated with Chronos (Time)).
52 unseasonable seasons: Both Classical and Christian traditions regarded the seasons as the consequence of a fall from an original Golden or Edenic age of perpetual spring.
61 In Classical mythology, nepenthe was a drug which caused forgetfulness of sorrow. According to Homer, Odyssey X.302–6, moly was the flower which Hermes gave to Odysseus to protect him from the enchanted potion of Circe. Amaranth here is a mythical, unfading flower growing only in Paradise.
77–9 Recalling Christ’s walking on the water, e.g. Matthew 14:25–6.
80–84 A difficult passage, of uncertain meaning. The general sense appears to be: ‘Sculptors first copied the human body and then created idealized versions of it, inspiring love in the mothers who beheld such idealized forms and hoped that their own children would share such perfection.’ Some commentators find a reference to the idea that a child in the womb is influenced by an intense impression on its mother during pregnancy. As Poems II, p. 562, observes, ‘the subject of behold, and perish is presumably the men of line 83, but the grammar is dislocated and the sense unclear’.
91 interlunar: The period between the old and the new moon. Cp. ‘With a Guitar. To Jane’, l. 24.
94 Celt: Used loosely to indicate a northern European.
101 immedicable: Not capable of being healed.
102–3 Man … glorious: The prerogative of divinity, as in Genesis 1:31, ‘And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good’, and Satan’s address to the Sun in 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.’
107 adamantine: Unbreakable.
156–9 See … tracery: The chariot that attends Asia recalls Aphrodite, the goddess of love, one of whose emblems is the seashell. Cp. II.v.20–25, where Asia’s emergence from the ocean on a seashell recalls the myth of the birth of Aphrodite.
171 Atlas: Traditionally the highest point on earth, Mount Atlas was thought in ancient times to stand in the far west of the known world; it was associated with the Titan Atlas, brother to Prometheus, who was condemned by Zeus to support the heavens on his shoulders for having joined the war against the Olympian gods.
2 respire: Catch their breath.
7 it could not: The cosmic cataclysm that has begun must take its course, keeping even the sun from rising until noon (l. 10).
20 Nereids: Sea deities, daughters of Nereus, the sea god.
21 the clear hyaline: The glassy sea, as in l. 24.
98–110 Asia’s lyric traces, according to a broadly Platonic scheme, a journey from age back to birth and through that portal to the eternal realm peopled by spirits – from which the soul enters the world. Commentators have suggested that PBS may be reversing the account of the soul’s progress from eternity to manhood in Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807), ll. 58–84. See III. iii.113–14 and note.