11 the pendulous air: Cp. Shakespeare, King Lear III.iv.64–5: ‘Now, all the plagues that in the pendulous air / Hang fated o’er men’s faults light on thy daughters!’
18–19 Even now … fatal child: Jupiter’s child by Thetis who, he assumes, will secure his reign, but whom Prometheus knows will be his undoing. See also note to ll. 33–9 below. Jupiter’s words echo Paradise Lost V.603–4: ‘This day I have begot whom I declare / My only Son.’
25 Idaean Ganymede: Ganymede was a young Trojan prince who was abducted by Jupiter from Mount Ida (in what is now north-west Turkey) and became the cup-bearer of the gods.
26 daedal: Intricately crafted; from Daedalus, the Greek master craftsman and father of Icarus. Cp. ‘Mont Blanc’, l. 86.
33–9 And thou … presence: In Classical myth, Zeus/Jupiter ensures that Thetis, a sea goddess, is married to a mortal after Prometheus reveals that her son will become greater than his father; Thetis marries Peleus, and gives birth to Achilles. Thetis’ account of her rape draws on the story of Semele – a mortal woman raped by Jupiter and destroyed by the intensity of his presence. See Ovid, Metamorphoses III.259 ff., XI.229–65.
40–41 Like him … poison: Lucan, Pharsalia IX.762–88, recounts how Sabellus was ‘dissolved’ after being bitten by a seps (a highly poisonous, mythical snake) in the Numidian desert.
48 Griding: Cutting or scraping with a grating sound.
51 Stage direction The Car of the HOUR: The chariot driven by the ‘spirit with a dreadful countenance’ from II.iv.142–4.
62 Titanian: The Titans were imprisoned underground in Tartarus, below Hades, after their defeat by Zeus and his divine allies.
72–3 a vulture and a snake … fight: PBS introduces similar images of archetypal combat in Laon and Cythna (1817), I.vi–xiv, and Alastor, ll. 227–32.
Stage direction Atlantis: A legendary island in the Atlantic west of Gibraltar in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias; sometimes associated in PBS’s work with America.
19 unstained with blood: Because naval warfare, piracy and the slave trade will all have ceased to be.
24 Blue Proteus: A shape-shifting god of the sea. Cp. III.iii.65.
26–8 P. H. Butter(ed.), Shelley: Alastor and Other Poems, Prometheus Unbound with Other Poems, Adonais (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1970), suggests that the complex image likens the moon with a star at its tip to a boat (‘bark’) guided by an invisible (‘sightless’) pilot with a star as his crest.
49 unpastured: Unfed (with the ‘calm’ it hungers for).
10 a Cave: It is not clear whether this cave is the same as the ‘Cavern’ which Earth describes and allots to Prometheus in ll. 124–47, although here Prometheus does not mention any adjacent ‘temple’ (l. 127). Both locations revise Plato’s image of the cave as a theatre of deceptive illusion in Republic 514–19: instead these caves are privileged places from which Prometheus and Asia will observe the operations of a regenerated, post-revolutionary consciousness.
15 the mountain’s frozen tears: Stalactites.
22–9 The passage borrows from King Lear V.iii.8–19.
42–3 Proserpina/Persephone was snatched away by Pluto/Hades as she gathered flowers in a mountain meadow near Enna in central Sicily (see Ovid, Metamorphoses V.385–96). Himera was a Greek town on the north coast of Sicily.
49–56 Adapting the Platonic notion that the intimate experience of beauty transforms the mind, finally rendering it capable of immortal creations. See note to I.450.
64–8 The association of Asia with a curved shell given by Proteus (see note to III.ii.24) links her with the mythical Aphrodite, born on a seashell.
96–9 to me … brimming stream: Echoing the Song of Solomon 4:5: ‘Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.’
113–14 Death … lifted: Cp. III.iv.190–92, ‘Sonnet’ (‘Lift not the painted veil’) and ‘Mont Blanc’, ll. 53–4.
124 Cavern: See note to II.iii.4 and to the stage direction for II.iv.
136 ivy: Sacred to Dionysus.
154–5 Bacchic Nysa … Indus: Dionysus/Bacchus was born in the semi-legendary mountains of Nysa, which some Classical authors locate in India; hence ‘beyond’ Indus, a river which flows through Tibet, India and Pakistan.
165 Praxiteles (fourth century BC) was one of the foremost sculptors of ancient Athens.
168–70 there the … emblem: At the Athenian festival of Lampadephoria, young men competed in races while carrying torches in honour of Prometheus’ gift of fire to humanity.
168 emulous: Both ‘competing’ and ‘desiring to imitate’.
Stage direction In this scene, PBS associates the Spirit of the Earth with electricity and electrical phenomena: many contemporary scientists believed that electricity was the fundamental force animating the physical universe. The Spirit has also been likened to the god Eros, Aphrodite’s son.
2–4 on its … hair: Carl Grabo relates this image to the Leyden jar, an early form of electrical battery, which emits a green light when charged (A Newton Among Poets, p. 126).
8 populous: ‘Numerous’, or perhaps ‘full of life’, i.e. ‘populated’.
19 dipsas: A mythical snake, whose bite was supposed to induce severe thirst.
54 a sound: No doubt a blast from the ‘curved shell’ given by Prometheus to the Spirit of the Hour in III.iii.64–8.
65–7 Those ugly human shapes … the air: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) IV.30–37, describes the simulacra or filmy images which leave the surface of all material objects and float in the air.
74 efts: Small lizards.
79–82 nightshade … long beaks: Kingfishers (‘halcyons’), vegetarians since the fall of Jupiter, eat nightshade, formerly poisonous, which is now innocuous.
111–24 PBS borrowed details for these lines from a sculpture, in the Vatican Museum, of the Chariot of the Moon whose horses are linked by a two-headed (‘amphisbaenic’) snake. Phidias was the pre-eminent sculptor of Athens in the fifth century BC. See Donald H. Reiman, Romantic Texts and Contexts (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1987), pp. 278–83.
120 will mock: Will imitate, though in the stillness of marble, the motion of the steeds they represent.
136 ‘All hope … here’: The inscription over the gate of Hell in Dante’s Inferno III.9.
140 abject: Here, a noun: ‘outcast’.
167 glozed on: Given a specious and deceptive commentary.
187 unreclaiming: Unprotesting.
204 inane: Empty space.
11 the Father: Jupiter; he is called ‘the King of Hours’ (l. 20) by the ‘dead Hours’ (l. 13) which he has ruled; hence ‘Time’ has not ended (l. 14), only that period of time dominated by Jupiter.
34 One: Prometheus.
58 the figured curtain: Cp. III.iii.113–14 and note.
109–10 The consciousness of time may be slowed down by love (‘siren wiles’) and the experience of wisdom.
140 clips: Circumscribes, encloses.
169 gathering sphere: Perhaps alluding to the speculation of some contemporary scientists that new planets were formed from the particles and gases in nebulae.
184 unpavilioned: Uncovered, open.
207 Mother of the Months: A conventional poeticism for the moon.
209 interlunar: Between the disappearance of the old and the reappearance of the new moon.
213 Regard like: Resemble, look like; OED (v. 10) cites this instance as a rare and obsolete sense.
219 The ‘winged infant’ that directs the moon-chariot has details in common with the visionary figures in Daniel 7:9 and Revelation 1:14.
230 fire that is not brightness: Perhaps referring to infra-red radiation, a phenomenon investigated by the astronomer William Herschel (1738–1822) and the chemist Humphry Davy (1778–1829). For Herschel, see also note to II.iv.1–7.
236–68 Panthea’s vision recalls that of ‘the likeness of the glory of the Lord’ in Ezekiel 1:28 which influenced Milton’s image of the chariot of divine power in Paradise Lost VI.749–852. It also draws upon contemporary scientific speculation on the atomic composition of matter. See Thomas Reisner, ‘Some Scientific Models for Shelley’s “Multitudinous Orb”’, KSJ 23 (1974), pp. 52–9.
246 inter-transpicuous: ‘Visible between or through each other’ (OED, citing this instance).
261 drowns the sense: Is sublime; i.e. overwhelms the senses.
269 mocking: Imitating.
272 tyrant-quelling myrtle: ‘Tyrant-quelling’ is borrowed from Coleridge, ‘France: An Ode’, l. 37. In ancient Greece, myrtle was sacred to Aphrodite, goddess of love, and associated with the struggle for liberty, recollecting Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who slew the tyrant Hipparchus of Athens in 514 BC, having concealed their daggers in ceremonial myrtle branches.
275–318 In these lines, PBS condenses information from contemporary scientific thinking on a range of topics, including geology (ll. 280–83), the water cycle (ll. 284–7), archaeological studies on the evolution and destruction of civilizations and species, including proto-hominids (ll. 287–316), either gradually or by a catastrophe such as a flood (ll. 314–16). Lines 316–18 dramatize the suggestion, by Pierre-Simon Laplace, Exposition du système du monde (1796), that these extinctions might have been precipitated by the impact or near miss of a comet displacing the oceans.
281 Valueless: Punning on the two meanings of ‘priceless’ and ‘worthless’.
283 vegetable silver: Of a substance combining mineral and vegetable; cp. ‘vegetable fire’ (III.iv.110).
291 gorgon-headed targes: Light shields decorated with the head of a monster (gorgon) which had snakes in place of hair. See headnote to ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, In the Florentine Gallery’.
303 anatomies: Skeletons.
319–502 PBS’s playful equation of gravitational with erotic attraction in this dialogue reaffirms love as the governing principle of the universe.
388–93 King Bladud, the legendary founder of the city of Bath, having been exiled as a child because of his leprosy, became a swineherd. Noticing that those of his pigs that bathed in the warm mud of a marsh did not suffer from skin disease, he followed their example and was cured and returned to his father’s court.
415 Orphic: In Greek myth, Orpheus was the first poet. His verse and music were credited with magical powers.
444 my pyramid of night: The conical shadow which the earth casts away from the sun into space.
455 Covered: The word has a sexual connotation.
473–5 In Euripides, The Bacchae 1051 ff., Agave, the daughter of Cadmus, unwittingly kills her son Pentheus while in the frenzy of a Dionysian ritual.
526 birth: Species, or race.
529–30 Cp. the orders of angels enumerated in Paradise Lost V.600–601: ‘Hear, all ye Angels, Progeny of Light, / Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers.’
539 elemental Genii: Spirits representing natural phenomena.
555 Earth-born: Prometheus, who, as a Titan, descended from Uranus (the Heavens) and Gaia (the Earth).
562–9 The stanza echoes and revises the defeat and imprisonment of the Devil in Revelation 20:1–3.
575 Cp. Satan’s defiant words in Paradise Lost I.94–6: ‘Yet not for those, / Nor what the potent victor in his rage / Can else inflict, do I repent or change.’
According to MWS, PBS had the idea for The Cenci after seeing in the Palazzo Colonna at Rome on 22 April 1819 a portrait then believed to be of Beatrice Cenci, by Guido Reni (1839 II, p. 274; the identity of both sitter and artist is now doubted). On 11 May, PBS, MWS and Claire Clairmont visited the Palazzo Cenci in Rome and three days later MWS records that PBS ‘writes his tragedy’ (MWS Journal I, p. 263). As he makes clear in his Preface, PBS drew on a historical account in Italian of the Cenci family. MWS had copied this in May 1818 from an MS in the possession of the Shelleys’ friend John Gisborne, and began to translate it, perhaps with some help from PBS, in May 1819 (see Poems II, pp. 865–75); the translation was published in 1840 and is reproduced in BSM X. Notes on the Cenci family in PBS’s hand also survive, in the Huntington Library (see MYR (Shelley) IV). Composition was interrupted by the death of William Shelley on 7 June and not resumed until PBS, MWS and Claire had moved to the Villa Valsovano, near Livorno, on 17 June, where Mary says ‘the principal part’ was written (1839 II, p. 276). PBS and MWS made the press copy in August and an edition of 250 copies had been printed by Glauco Masi at Livorno by 21 September (Letters II, p. 119).
PBS hoped that The Cenci could be performed in London and, conscious of his scandalous reputation in England, sent a copy, no doubt with the title-page, Dedication and Preface removed, to T. L. Peacock on 10 September, asking him to ‘procure for me its presentation at Covent Garden’ (Letters II, p. 102). PBS had in mind two of the leading actors of the day, Edmund Kean and Eliza O’Neill, for the parts of Count Cenci and Beatrice. However, Thomas Harris, the manager of Covent Garden, found PBS’s depiction of the subject of Cenci’s rape of his daughter ‘so objectionable, that he could not even submit the part to Miss O’Neil [sic] for perusal’ (1839 II, p. 279) and rejected the play outright for performance. The Cenci was first performed privately in 1886 and in public in 1922, each time in London.
Apart from a few brief fragments, the only recorded surviving manuscripts of The Cenci are those of the Dedication and the Preface (MYR (Shelley) IV). In autumn 1819, PBS had the 250 copies of the play that were printed in Italy sent to Charles Ollier in London, where The Cenci was published early the following year, dated 1819. In April 1820, PBS sent a list of errata in the 1819 text to Ollier, who published a second edition (the only one of PBS’s works to reach an authorized second edition in his lifetime) in spring 1821. Our text is based on the 1819 Italian printing, though we have incorporated readings from the 1821 edition, from the list of errata, and from the alterations in PBS’s and MWS’s hand in a copy of the 1819 text that PBS inscribed to his friend John Taafe, which are given in Poems II.
The Cenci owes much to the English tragedies of the Renaissance period, especially Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth, although commentators have also discerned the influence of a range of other dramatic forms, including Classical Greek tragedy. At the heart of the play is Beatrice’s murderous response to the abuse which she and her family suffer at the hands of her father and the ‘restless and anatomizing casuistry’, as PBS puts it in his Preface, which this response prompts in the audience as they ‘seek the justification of Beatrice, yet feel that she has done what needs justification’ (here). Comparable enquiry into the ethics of force and retribution is present in Prometheus Unbound and Hellas, examples of PBS’s sustained interrogation of the role of violence in the political process: can violence ever be a legitimate or even a necessary response to oppression, or is it only ever an instrument for breeding further violence? MWS records that PBS was ‘writing the Cenci, when the news of the Manchester Massacre reached us’ (1839 II, p. 205) – which prompted The Mask of Anarchy, an important poetic engagement with the issue of retribution for authorized carnage.
The Cenci is the third work in verse by PBS to treat explicitly the topic of incest, which he, in a letter of 16 November 1819, describes as a ‘very poetical circumstance’ which can consist in either ‘the excess of love or of hate’ (Letters II, p. 154). Laon and Cythna (1817) and ‘Rosalind and Helen’ (1818) offer a view of incest more in keeping with what PBS, in his letter, calls ‘that defiance of every thing for the sake of another which clothes itself in the glory of the highest heroism’ (Letters II, p. 154). Cenci’s abuse of his daughter, conversely, typifies ‘that cynical rage which confounding the good & bad in existing opinions breaks through them for the purpose of rioting in selfishness & antipathy’ (Letters II, p. 154). Aware of the obstacle that the theme of incest posed to representation on the contemporary stage, PBS took pains to treat the subject with ‘peculiar delicacy’, as he wrote to Peacock (Letters II, p. 102). Apart from the ‘Song’ which closes Act V, Scene iii, The Cenci is in blank verse dialogue throughout, with little of what PBS, in his Preface, describes as ‘mere poetry’ (here), i.e. imagery beyond what is strictly required for the development of dramatic plot and character. PBS goes on to state the principles on which he based his choice of language in the paragraph beginning ‘In a dramatic composition’ (here).
Critical commentaries include: Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 202–21; Paul A. Cantor, ‘“A Distorting Mirror”: Shelley’s The Cenci and Shakespearean Tragedy’, in G. B. Evans (ed.), Shakespeare: Aspects of Influence, Harvard English Studies 7 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 91–108; Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); D. Harrington-Lueker, ‘Imagination versus Introspection: The Cenci and Macbeth’, KSJ 32 (1983), pp. 172–89; Jacqueline Mulhallen, The Theatre of Shelley (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2010), pp. 85–113; and Earl Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), pp. 84–128.
Dedication Leigh Hunt (1784–1859); poet, essayist and editor of the liberal weekly The Examiner, Hunt had been a close friend and supporter of PBS since 1817. He had been imprisoned from 1813 to 1815 for criticizing in print the Prince Regent in an instance of the ‘political tyranny’ to which PBS alludes in the final paragraph (here).
p. 273 a sad reality: On 15 December 1819, PBS wrote to Charles Ollier of his plans to write poems ‘the subjects of which will all be drawn from dreadful or beautiful realities’ (Letters II, p. 164).
p. 274 Clement VIII (1536–1605): Pope from 30 January 1592.
p. 275 Guido’s picture: See headnote.
p. 276 Revenge … mistakes: Cp. Hellas, ll. 729–30: ‘Revenge and wrong bring forth their kind, / The foul cubs like their parents are’.
anatomizing casuistry: Close moral analysis of a difficult case. In his Preface to Prometheus Unbound, PBS attributes to Milton’s characterization of Satan in Paradise Lost a comparable ‘pernicious casuistry’ (here).
p. 277 those modern critics … to belong: The use of familiar language as proper to poetry had been variously argued by Wordsworth in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), Coleridge in Biographia Literaria (1817) and Leigh Hunt in the Preface to The Story of Rimini (1816).
[Shelley’s note]: See note to III.i.243–65 for the ‘speech’ to which PBS refers in his footnote. Earlier in 1819, PBS was introduced by Maria Gisborne to the work of the Spanish Golden Age dramatist and poet Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681).
p. 278 Mount Palatine: The Palatine Hill in central Rome, traditional site of the first settlement of the city.
Castle of Petrella: See note to II.i.168.
1 the murder: Referred to by Cenci in ll. 21–3.
3 fief: Land.
Pincian gate: Part of the fortifications of ancient Rome; now at the northern end of the Via Vittorio Veneto.
4 conclave: Gathering of cardinals and the Pope; the Papal Court.
7 compounded: Settled by (punitive) payment.
16 nephew: Perhaps a euphemism for ‘illegitimate son’; Cenci’s reply implies nepotism and corruption in the papacy.
51 meteors: Any atmospheric phenomenon could be so denominated.
57 Aldobrandino: The nephew of the Pope. The family name of the historical Clement VIII was Aldobrandini.
69 list: Wish.
87 captious: Both ‘entrapping’ and ‘capacious’.
94 Hardened: Obdurately closed to divine influence.
113 the bloody sweat of Christ: Cp. Luke 22:44 on Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, on the eve of the crucifixion: ‘his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.’
114–15 The image of the body as a prison for the soul is Platonic, e.g. Phaedo 82d–e.
121 Salamanca: A city in north-western Spain.
127 Close husbandry: Care in expenditure.
141–4 Cp. Macbeth II.i.56–8: ‘Thou sure and firm-set earth, / Hear not my steps which way they walk, for fear / Thy very stones prate of my whereabout.’
23 loose: Loosen, untie.
75 vassal: Changed on PBS’s list of errata from ‘slave’ in the first edition.
85 anatomize: Literally, ‘dissect’; figuratively, ‘analyse in great detail’.
4 Anchorite: Hermit.
60 a mummy: ‘A pulpy substance or mass’, specifically of ‘dead flesh’ (see OED n. 1, b–c).
68 the twenty-seventh of December: Comparing Cenci with the biblical King Herod, who is said to have ordered the slaughter of all male children under two years of age (Matthew 2:16–18), a massacre remembered in the Christian calendar on 28 December, the Feast of the Holy Innocents. Cp. II.i.133–6.
73 the Infanta: The title of the daughter of the King of Spain (in l. 39, the news of the death of Cenci’s sons is communicated in letters from Salamanca).
74 El Dorado: In Spanish, ‘the golden one’, a legendary city of fabulous wealth believed to be located in the Spanish Americas.
77–90 Cenci, raising the cup of wine, parodies the Christian rite (‘sacrament’, l. 82) of the Eucharist.
108–10 The sense of these difficult lines seems to be: ‘Imagine the wrongs which must have been done not only to cause the devotion and respect for my father to be erased, but also to embolden me to speak out in public against him like this.’
109 prone: Impressionable.
126 Prince Colonna: Head of one of the oldest aristocratic households in Rome.
127 chamberlain: Responsible for managing the Pope’s household.
151 ill must come of ill: A succinct statement of the ethical principle embodied in The Cenci. Cp. Macbeth V.i.68–9, ‘Unnatural deeds / Do breed unnatural troubles’, and Hellas, ll. 729–30. Cp. also IV.iv.139.
151–3 Frown … seat: Recalling the appearance of Banquo’s ghost to Macbeth in Macbeth III.iv.
26 secure: Presumably combining the two senses: sure of finding her and sure of finding her alone.
27 At the Ave Mary: At the hour of the Angelus, the Catholic devotion performed morning, noon and evening, in which the Hail Mary (Ave Maria) features prominently. Since Act II, Scene i, evidently takes place the morning after the banquet in Act I, Scene iii (see II.i.106), Lucretia probably means either noon or 6 p.m.
71 gangrened: Made rotten.
86 coil: Turbulent existence; drawing on Hamlet III.i.68–70: ‘For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil / Must give us pause.’
111 Commentators have identified a number of precedents for Beatrice’s wish to be swallowed up in the earth, including: Aeschylus, Persae 915–17; Virgil, Aeneid X.675–6; and Marlowe, Doctor Faustus V.ii.88.
142 sudden: Fast-acting.
168 Castle of Petrella: Rocca Cenci, in the village of Petrella Salto, north-east of Rome. See note to III.i.240. For detailed discussion of the ambiguities in PBS’s account of the castle and its location, see Poems II, pp. 737n and 767n.
174 The all-beholding sun: Cp. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet I.ii.94: ‘the all-seeing sun’.
177 Cp. Romeo and Juliet III.ii.25, ‘the garish sun’, and Milton, Il Penseroso, l. 141, ‘day’s garish eye’.
181–3 Cp. Macbeth I.v.49–53: ‘Come, thick night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, / That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, / Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark / To cry “Hold, hold!”’
190 the earth’s shade: The shadow cast by the earth into space in the direction opposite the sun.
interlunar: The period of darkness between the old and the new moon. Cp. ‘With a Guitar. To Jane’, l. 24.
14 thrice-driven beds of down: Cp. Shakespeare, Othello I.iii.230: ‘My thrice-driven bed of down’; ‘thrice-driven’ indicates beds made up of only the smallest, softest feathers separated from the larger, coarser ones.
49 Gian Galeazzo Visconti (1351–1402) became ruler of Milan after seizing control from his uncle; a patron of the arts, he also conducted a lengthy and bloody struggle to unite and rule northern Italy. Cesare Borgia (?1475/6–1507), statesman, soldier and one-time cardinal, was ruler of a territory in northern Italy which he sought to extend by treachery and open conflict. The illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI, his power depended upon the continued support of the papacy. Ezzelino III da Romano (1194–1259) was leader of the Ghibellines in Lombardy and the Veneto; ruler of Verona, Vicenza and Padua, he was notorious for his cruelty. PBS also refers to ‘Ezzelin’ in ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October, 1818’, l. 239, and would have read about all three ‘memorable torturers’ (l. 48) in J.-C.-L. Simonde de Sismondi, Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge (2nd edn, 1818).
70–71 scorpions … death: Cp. similar imagery in Byron, The Giaour (1813), ll. 422–38. Cp. also PBS’s A Declaration of Rights (1812) (Prose Works I, p. 57); Queen Mab VI.36–8 (p. 58); and Laon and Cyntha XI.viii.
89 the inmost cave of our own mind: The image (Platonic in origin) is not uncommon in PBS’s work, e.g. ‘Mont Blanc’, ll. 34–48, and Julian and Maddalo, l. 573; cp. also the prose fragment in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. c. 4 ff. 184r–184v: ‘thought can with difficulty visit the intricate & winding chambers which it inhabits … The caverns of the mind are obscure & shadowy, or pervaded with a lustre, beautifully bright indeed, but shining not beyond their portals’ (see BSM XXI, pp. 192–5).
110 Cp. PBS’s letter to MWS of 10 August 1821: ‘What is passing in the heart of another rarely escapes the observation of one who is a strict anatomist of his own’ (Letters II, p. 324).
120 fee: Buy off, bribe.
130–31 and all … its effect: Poems II compares this with Macbeth I.v.44–6: ‘That no compunctious visitings of nature / Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between / The’effect and it.’
147 Cp. Shakespeare, Richard III II.iv.52–3: ‘Welcome destruction, blood, and massacre! / I see, as in a map, the end of all.’
13 Cp. Marlowe, Doctor Faustus V.ii.78: ‘See where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!’
16–17 There creeps … mist: Cp. Paradise Lost IX.180, describing Satan ‘Like a black mist low creeping’.
26–8 Cp. Shakespeare, Richard II I.iii.187–9: ‘By this time, had the King permitted us, / One of our souls had wandered in the air, / Banished this frail sepulchre of our flesh.’
34–7 An instance of what in post-Freudian terminology would be called post-traumatic repression: Beatrice’s suffering effaces her memory of its cause, or ‘father’ (in a double sense).
44 hales: Hauls, drags.
48 strange flesh: Cp. Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra I.iv.67: ‘It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh’. In Jude 7 the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are reproached with eating ‘strange flesh’.
52 Prodigious: Combining the senses of ‘extraordinary’ and ‘monstrous’.
86–7 something … know not: Echoing the words of the old king in Shakespeare, King Lear II.ii.454–5: ‘I will do such things – / What they are, yet I know not.’ Poems II compares this with Leigh Hunt on the political situation in England in The Examiner for 3 January 1819, p. 1: ‘all classes feel that something, as the phrase is, must be done.’ PBS quotes Beatrice’s speech in his letter to Charles Ollier of 6 September 1819, in which he deplores the Peterloo Massacre (see The Mask of Anarchy and headnote, and Letters II, p. 117; see also Letters II, p. 120).
101 and so die: And die in that doubt.
129 the unworthy … spirit: An echo of 1 Corinthians 6:19: ‘know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost.’
132–4 Self-murder … it: Cp. Hamlet I.ii.129–32: ‘O that this too too solid flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, / Or that the Everlasting had not fixed / His canon ’gainst self-slaughter!’
157–60 aye … astonishment: Cp. Deuteronomy 28:37: ‘And thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword, among all nations’.
178 double-visaged: Two-faced; recalling representations of the Roman god Janus.
208–9 Echoing Satan in Paradise Lost IV.108–9: ‘So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, / Farewell remorse.’
240 Apulian Apennines: PBS seems mistaken in his geography: the Appenine Mountains run the length of the Italian peninsula, but Apulia is the extreme south-eastern region of Italy whereas Petrella is located north-east of Rome.
243–65 This is the speech which PBS, in his Preface, identifies as the sole instance in The Cenci of ‘mere poetry’, although the images suggest both the dark intentions of the principal characters and their precarious moral state. The ‘sublime passage’ of El Purgatorio de San Patricio on which he says it is based has been identified as II.2019–26. See Curran, Shelley’s Cenci, pp. 120–21. Beatrice’s description also recalls Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’ (1816), ll. 16–25.
293 fair: Pure, untainted.
319 specious: Deceptively plausible. Cp. IV.i.115.
324 ardent: Passionate, fervent; in contrast to his wife’s ‘look averse and cold’ and to Cenci’s ‘specious tale’ in l. 319.
8–18 The imagery and sentiment are drawn from Othello V.ii.7–15.
51–2 And yet … life: Echoing Othello, contemplating the murder of Desdemona: ‘I know not where is that Promethean heat / That can thy light relume’ (V.ii.12–13).
54 recall: Restore.
62 castellan: ‘The governor of a castle’ (OED).
66 a reward of blood: Presumably, payment for a murder.
5 the eyes and ears of Rome: Cenci wonders whether he need be apprehensive of his deeds becoming known in Rome, even though, as Poems II points out, Petrella stood outside Roman jurisdiction.
8–12 Cenci wants Beatrice to ‘consent’ rather than be forced to accept his abuse, so that he may destroy her body and soul. See IV.i.44–5, 93–5.
55 the wide Campagna: Sparsely populated countryside around Rome.
83 blazoned: Proclaimed.
114–67 ‘As to Cenci’s curse—’, PBS wrote to his cousin, Thomas Medwin, on 20 July 1820: ‘I know not whether I can defend it or no. I wish I may be able, since, as it often happens respecting the worst part of an author’s work, it is a particular favourite with me’ (Letters II, p. 219). The curse has a notable precedent in King Lear’s cursing of his daughters (e.g. I.iv.254–69, II.ii.335–41).
115 specious: Deceptively fair and attractive.
131 Maremma: A large area of wetland along the coast of Tuscany; associated, like the Campagna Romana, with disease and banditry.
140 That if she have a child: MWS comments in her ‘Note’ on The Cenci: ‘In speaking of his mode of treating this main incident, Shelley said that it might be remarked that, in the course of the play, he had never mentioned expressly Cenci’s worst crime. Every one knew what it must be, but it was never imaged in words—the nearest allusion to it being that portion of Cenci’s curse, beginning, “That if she have a child”, &c.’ (1840, p. 159).
144 Cp. Genesis 1:22: ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.’
145 imprecation: Curse.
162 some unremembered world: Recalling the Platonic idea of the pre-existence of the soul which the soul forgets at birth.
172 spurn: Kick.
173–4 It were … prey: Cp. King Lear I.i.122: ‘Come not between the dragon and his wrath.’
187–9 All good … quickened: Cp. Macbeth III.ii.53–4: ‘Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, / Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.’
11 recking: Considering, caring for.
12 to die without confession: The fate of old Hamlet, murdered by his brother Claudius, as well as that which Prince Hamlet contemplates for Claudius. See Hamlet II.v.76–9, III.iii.74–95.
33 the Hell within him: Cp. Paradise Lost IV.18–21: ‘Horror and doubt distract / His troubled thoughts, and from the bottom stir / The hell within him, for within him hell / He brings, and round about him.’
1–35 These lines draw on the conversation between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth following the murder of Duncan in Macbeth II.ii.1–18. Poems II observes that PBS also ‘follows closely the language’ of MWS’s translation of the MS account of the Cenci family.
25 palterers: Prevaricators, tricksters.
28 equivocation: A falsehood expressed in a form of words that is true in itself. Beatrice accuses Marzio and Olimpio of showing mercy in a case justly demanding an unflinching conscience when they have been habitually indifferent in dishonourable matters. Cp. Macbeth II.iii.7–11: ‘Faith, here’s an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven.’
42 light of life: Recalling Christ’s words in John 8:12: ‘I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.’ Cp. also Prometheus Unbound III.iii.6.
43 jellied: Congealed, coagulated.
57–8 Hark … trump: Cp. Macbeth II.iii.80–82: ‘What’s the business, / That such a hideous trumpet calls to parley / The sleepers of the house?’
58 tedious: Perhaps combining the senses of ‘irritating’ and ‘late-arriving’.
Stage direction Legate: ‘An ecclesiastic deputed to represent the Pope and armed with his authority’ (OED).
13 suddenly: Immediately.
28 PBS seems to have introduced this ironic twist to the story, although such devices are familiar practice in Classical and Renaissance tragedy.
44 cheap: Easily feigned.
49 Free … air: Cp. Macbeth III.iv.22: ‘As broad and general as the casing air’.
76 effortless: ‘Lifeless; with no sign of struggle’ (Major Works).
79 Poems II observes that the historical Marzio was apprehended some four months after Cenci’s murder. Olimpio was killed almost nine months after (cp. IV.iv.86–7).
127–9 Unless … avenge: Unless God will avenge crimes that people are unwilling to address. Cp. IV.iv.151.
151 rejected: Unacknowledged.
12 Cp. Romeo and Juliet III.iv.1: ‘Things have fall’n out, sir, so unluckily.’
85 vile: Mean, wretched.
87 misdeeming: ‘Misjudging, wrongly supposing’ (OED).
50–55 MWS says that PBS recalls in these lines the grief that ‘haunted’ him after the death of their son William on 7 June (1839 II, p. 275n).
59–61 What shall … fountain: Poems II compares this with Webster, The Duchess of Malfi IV.ii.364–6: ‘where were / These penitent fountains while she was living? / O, they were frozen up!’
164 pain: Rendered ‘pang’ in the second edition, though the change is not on PBS’s list of errata.
169 strain: Playing on the two senses of ‘filter’ (‘sifted’, l. 170) and ‘place under stress’.
172–3 Entrap … accuser: Cp. Webster, The White Devil III.ii.225–6: ‘If you be my accuser / Pray cease to be my judge.’
182 deep: Cunning, artful.
189 pleasure: i.e. ‘will’, but with a pun on ‘enjoyment’.
191 engines: Instruments of torture.
89 Cp. Iago being led to torture in Othello V.ii.310: ‘From this time forth I never will speak word.’
125 monotony: i.e. ‘monotone’, sound without variation.
13 looking deprecation: His look expressing disapproval.
18–20 According to MWS’s translation of the Italian account of the Cenci family (see headnote), the news that one Paolo Santa Croce had recently murdered his mother influenced the Pope to deny a pardon to Lucretia, Giacomo and Beatrice. See BSM X, pp. 214–17.
47–55 The lines draw on Claudio’s speech in Shakespeare, Measure for Measure III.i.118–32.
56 Let me not go mad: Cp. King Lear I.v.45: ‘O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!’
76–7 Echoing the words of Jesus on the cross to the ‘good thief’ in Luke 23:43: ‘Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise.’
80–81 Cp. Hamlet I.ii.133–4: ‘How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world!’
100 narrow: Brief.
101–7 Plead … man: Poems II compares this with Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice IV.i.70–79.
106 wind-walking Pestilence: According to the miasmatic theory of disease, infectious vapours rising from rotting vegetable matter were carried on the wind.
136 This line lacks a tenth syllable. Some editors emend to ‘was as a bond’.
The Mask of Anarchy (MA) is PBS’s primary imaginative response to one of the defining events of English national life in the early nineteenth century. On 16 August 1819, tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered on St Peter’s Field near the centre of Manchester for a mass protest against the hardship of the labouring poor and in support of electoral reform. They were to be addressed by well-known speakers from the reform movement. When constables, struggling to make their way through the dense crowd, were unable to carry out the orders of the magistrates to arrest the leaders of the meeting, the local mounted yeomanry was called to their aid. These inexperienced volunteers, acting both brutally and ineffectively, soon required the reinforcement of regular cavalry and infantry who were instructed to disperse the crowd. In the melee some dozen or more of the demonstrators were killed and hundreds wounded. There were women and children among the injured. That unarmed English civilians, legally and peacefully assembled, should be assaulted by mounted troops aroused widespread shock and consternation and inspired the ironic title of ‘Peterloo’ which was soon applied to the day’s events as a sarcastic allusion to the military victory at Waterloo four years previously. Shortly after 16 August, the home secretary, Lord Sidmouth, wrote to the civil authorities in Manchester to convey the Prince Regent’s congratulations to them and to the yeomanry for their decisive intervention to preserve the peace.
The news from Manchester reached PBS in Livorno on 5 September. The following day he wrote to his publisher, Charles Ollier, that ‘the torrent of my indignation has not yet done boiling in my veins’, and to T. L. Peacock three days later that in the bloody confrontation of 16 August he could hear ‘the distant thunders of the terrible storm which is approaching’ (Letters II, pp. 117, 119). In this mood of outrage and foreboding, he set to work on MA, completed it rapidly and posted it to Leigh Hunt on 23 September for immediate publication in The Examiner newspaper (MWS Journal I, p. 298, Letters II, p. 152). But Hunt dared not risk legal sanctions by publishing so inflammatory a poem at a time of increased government vigilance of the press. MA was not to appear until 1832, after the passage of the First Reform Bill, in a separate volume with a preface by Hunt, but omitting the subtitle, which was not printed until Forman 1876–7.
For information about Peterloo PBS relied on newspapers sent to him by Peacock, especially The Examiner for 22 and 29 August, which gave ample accounts of the events of the day and the opposing reactions they provoked. His sense of the matter, expressed in a letter to The Examiner of 3 November, which again Hunt did not publish, was fiercely indignant: ‘We hear that a troop of the enraged master manufacturers are let loose with sharpened swords upon a multitude of their starving dependents & in spite of the remonstrances of the regular troops that they ride over them & massacre without distinction of sex or age, & cut off women’s breasts and dash the heads of infants against the stones’ (Letters II, p. 136). But in MA he chose not to incorporate any actual details of the skirmish or any direct reference to the local actors or to dramatize conflicting political opinions. Instead he opted for a formal hybrid: a dream vision (ll. 1–4) that draws largely on the New Testament (especially Revelation), delivered as a symbolic narrative in a popular ballad stanza, and which borrows its title and fictional development from the mask (or masque), a dramatic pageant with courtly origins featuring allegorical personages and a plot that typically affirms the legitimacy of royal and aristocratic power. Leigh Hunt had given an example of the mask as vehicle for a progressive political viewpoint in his The Descent of Liberty (1815), which celebrates not the return of the conservative old order but the hopes of liberal opinion for increased freedom and solidarity in Europe after the first defeat of Napoleon in 1814. The ‘Mask’ of PBS’s title also signifies the disguises that arbitrary authority and its supporters assume, whether trappings of office or religious devotion or tendentious language, to conceal the self-interest that lies behind what Leigh Hunt calls in his leading article in The Examiner for 22 August 1819 ‘the Brazen Masks of power’. Looking beneath these disguises, MA reveals that it is the established political order and not the movement for reform which is the source of anarchy in its usual sense of ‘social confusion and disorder’, while bringing to the fore another sense of the word, ‘misrule’, as underlying cause.
Our text is taken from MWS’s fair copy with corrections by PBS which was sent to Leigh Hunt on 23 September 1819 and which is now in the Library of Congress (MMC 1399): there is a facsimile in MYR (Shelley) II.
The extensive commentary on MA includes: Stephen C. Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 196–204; Richard Cronin, Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 39–55, and The Politics of Romantic Poetry (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 173–80; Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1975), pp. 185–93; Steven E. Jones, Shelley’s Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994), pp. 94–123; Michael Henry Scrivener, Radical Shelley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 199–210; and Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 195–204.
6 Castlereagh: See headnote to ‘To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]’.
8 Seven bloodhounds: Various references have been detected in the phrase: to the recurring number seven in Revelation, e.g. the beast with seven heads in 17:3; to the seven other European nations that joined Great Britain to postpone indefinitely the abolition of the slave trade in 1815; and to the pro-war party in Pitt’s administration (1783–1801), who were known as ‘bloodhounds’.
15 Eldon: The Lord Chancellor, John Scott, 1st Earl of Eldon (1751–1838), an uncompromising defender of the established order in Church and State, had in the Court of Chancery in March 1817 delivered the verdict that deprived PBS of the custody of his children by his first wife, Harriet.
ermined gown: The mark of a peer of the realm and a judge.
16 tears: Eldon was known for weeping in court.
17 mill-stones: Cp. Matthew 18:6: ‘But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.’ See also Richard of Gloucester addressing the murderers he has commissioned in Richard III I.iii.351: ‘Your eyes drop millstones when fools’ eyes fall tears.’
24 Sidmouth: See headnote to ‘To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]’. The pious Sidmouth supported the building of new churches to serve the growing population of industrial towns.
25 crocodile: In popular lore, the crocodile shed tears while devouring its victim. See ‘To —– [the Lord Chancellor]’, ll. 47–8.
26 Destructions: Destroyers.
30–33 Anarchy is modelled upon the apparition in Revelation 6:8: ‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death.’ See the Dedication before Laon and Cythna, l. 86, and The Triumph of Life, ll. 285–6.
34–7 The lines borrow details from Revelation 19:11–16.
48–9 Alluding to the drunken ‘Mother of Harlots’ in Revelation 17:1–6 and to reports that the yeomanry who attacked the crowd at Manchester had been drinking or were drunk.
57 triumph: See note to ‘To —–’ (‘Corpses are cold in the tomb’), l. 19.
59 blood and flame: Recalling the red coats of the British army.
77 ten millions: The large allowances from the public purse granted to the seven sons of George III caused widespread offence. See ‘England in 1819’, ll. 2–3.
80 globe: ‘A golden orb, emblem of sovereignty’ (OED).
83 Bank and Tower: The Bank of England and the Tower of London, the latter both a fortress and an arsenal.
85 pensioned: In receipt of a stipend from government and so biased to support its policies and prerogatives.
115 A planet, like the Morning’s: Venus as the morning star, emblem of love, one of the principal symbols in PBS’s verse.
145 accent: Utterance.
151 The line adopts a traditional simile, as in Numbers 23:24: ‘Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion.’
169 pine and peak: Waste away.
176–83 The radical reformer William Cobbett (1763–1835), whom PBS cautiously admired, was persuaded that the necessity of paying the interest on the large national debt had led to two measures which weighed disproportionately on the poor: the issue of paper currency unbacked by gold, which depreciated in value; and the introduction of regressive commodity taxes. Together, these deprived of their just reward those whose labour was the ultimate source of wealth. See ‘From A Philosophical View of Reform’ and Peter Bell the Third, ll. 152–6.
205–8 Recalling Matthew 8:20: ‘And Jesus saith unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.’
220 Fame: Rumour, gossip. In Ovid, Metamorphoses XII.39 ff., Rumour (Latin fama) lives in a house of echoing brass.
233 The flag of the American Minutemen militia in the Revolutionary War pictured a coiled rattlesnake and the words ‘Don’t tread on me’. See K. N. Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Havard University Press, 1974), p. 623.
238–41 PBS deplored the threat of eternal punishment by institutional religion as a means of enforcing political submission. In his letter protesting against the conviction of the bookseller Richard Carlile for ‘blasphemous libel’ for publishing Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason (1793, 1796), PBS defended freedom of opinion on religious matters and castigated its misuse for political advantage: ‘the prosecutors care little for religion, or care for it only as it is the mask & the garment by which they are invested with the symbols of worldly power’ (Letters II, p. 143).
245 In 1793 Britain joined other European powers in a coalition against revolutionary France (Gaul).
250–53 The stanza draws upon Luke’s Gospel, on which PBS made notes in late 1819: the episode of the woman who washed and kissed Jesus’s feet and is forgiven her sins in 7:36–50; of Christ’s advice to the rich man in 18:18–22; and of the charity of Zacchaeus the Publican in 19:1–10.
286 tares: Noxious weeds, alluding to the parable in Matthew 13:24–40.
305 targes: Light shields.
319 scimitars: Short curved swords used especially in the Near East and associated with proverbial Oriental brutality and despotism.
320 sphereless stars: Stars that have left their proper sphere in the heavens (as understood in older astronomy) and appear as meteors.
330 phalanx: Compact battle array; more generally, a body of people drawn closely together for a common purpose.
331–4 Cp. PBS’s A Declaration of Rights (1812): ‘No man has a right to disturb the public peace, by personally resisting the execution of a law however bad. He ought to acquiesce, using at the same time the utmost powers of his reason, to promote its repeal’ (Prose Works I, p. 57).
335 old laws of England: Reformers appealed to such legal milestones as Magna Carta (1215) and the Bill of Rights (1689) as well as to the rule of law generally, as forming a native English tradition.
341 sacred heralds in their state: In the exercise of their duties as representatives of the sovereign, the safety of heralds was to be scrupulously respected.
344–67 PBS argued for passive resistance in A Philosophical View of Reform: ‘not because active resistance is not justifiable when all other means shall have failed, but because in this instance temperance and courage would produce greater advantages than the most decisive victory’ (Prose, p. 257).
360 bold, true warriors: Reports in The Examiner for 22 and 29 August contrasted the restrained conduct of the regular troops at Peterloo with the undisciplined force used by the yeomanry cavalry.
364–7 Volcanic vapours were thought to inspire those who delivered the prophecies of the ancient oracles. Volcanoes regularly figure in PBS’s poetry as emblems of revolutionary change. See Prometheus Unbound II.iii.1–10 and Hellas, ll.587–90.
In summer 1819 at Livorno, PBS read in The Examiner for 2 May Leigh Hunt’s review of Wordsworth’s Peter Bell: A Tale in Verse, which had been published towards the end of April. He would also have read in the previous week’s Examiner Keats’s anonymous review of J. H. Reynolds’s parody Peter Bell: A Lyrical Ballad, which had appeared a week before Wordsworth’s Peter Bell. (The publication of Wordsworth’s poem, finished in 1798, was expected.) It is not certain whether PBS read either Wordsworth’s Peter Bell or Reynolds’s parody; his acquaintance with each may have been confined to Hunt’s and Keats’s reviews and the extracts from the poems that they included. However that may be, between the summer and autumn (by which time the Shelleys were living in Florence) PBS composed Peter Bell the Third (PB III), quite possibly in about a fortnight in October, and on 2 November sent it to Leigh Hunt in London with instructions for immediate anonymous publication by Charles Ollier (Letters II, pp. 134–5). Ollier chose not to publish it, however; it remained unpublished until MWS included it in 1840.
Wordsworth’s Peter Bell recounts, in a ballad-like stanza, a number of incidents in the life of the character of the title, an itinerant seller of earthenware pots. The last of these, his overhearing of a Methodist preacher urging repentance, has the effect of completing his conversion from a cruel, selfish and brutal life to be ‘a good and honest man’ (l. 1135). Peter Bell the Third (in the Prologue, Reynolds’s is the first Peter, Wordsworth’s only the second) counters this fable of conversion with another, in which his Peter mimics the display of orthodox religious convictions in Wordsworth’s recent verse as well as his change from a reforming to a conservative political outlook. PBS learned in a letter of July 1818 that in the parliamentary elections for Westmorland Wordsworth had supported the successful candidates, the two sons of his patron the Earl of Lowther, against the liberal Whig Henry Brougham, prompting a disgusted reply: ‘What a beastly and pitiful wretch that Wordsworth! That such a man should be such a poet!’ (Letters II, p. 26). The barter of political integrity for personal advantage is in PB III the cardinal sin for a poet, and Peter reaps its inevitable reward of dullness.
This narrative provides PBS with a satirical perspective on what he regarded as deadening features of contemporary literary culture: a narrow religious outlook, sexual prudery, political patronage and partisan reviewing. From all of these he felt he had himself suffered, no more so than in the review of his Laon and Cythna/The Revolt of Islam (1817–18) in the Quarterly Review for April 1819 (it reached him in mid October), which combined a vituperative personal attack with the charge that he had imitated, and perverted, Wordsworth. The central figure of the metropolitan literary scene in which Peter is corrupted is his patron the Devil, who is no goat-like demon but ‘what we are’ (l. 81) – of this world and able to embody himself in any convenient human form. In PB III, PBS imagines this Devil for a rational age (see the extract from ‘On the Devil, and Devils’) as a member of the ‘new aristocracy’ that he recognizes in the essay A Philosophical View of Reform (p. 644), one of the nouveaux riches whose wealth allows them to patronize learning and taste without title to either.
PB III’s ballad-like stanza of five lines of three or four stresses rhyming abaab is a variant of both Wordsworth’s and Reynolds’s, which rhyme abccb. Two satirical influences are of particular note. With Pope’s Dunciad (1743) PB III shares the conviction that bad writing and debased civilization go hand in hand. The apocalyptic triumph of dullness bringing the return of ancient chaos and darkness at the end of The Dunciad provides the model for the conclusion to PBS’s poem. T. L. Peacock’s burlesque Sir Proteus: A Satirical Ballad (1814) combines the mock-heroic narrative of a comic character based on the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, with an attack on the political apostasy of the Lake Poets.
Critical comment includes: Poems III, pp. 70–81; Carlo M. Bajetta, Peter Bell: The 1819 Texts, rev. edn (Milan: Mursia, 2005); James Chandler, England in 1819 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 484–90, 515–24; Richard Cronin, ‘Peter Bell, Peterloo, and the Politics of Cockney Poetry’, Essays and Studies (1992), pp. 63–87, and The Politics of Romantic Poetry (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 147–55; Steven E. Jones, Shelley’s Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994), pp. 38–69; and Michael Henry Scrivener, Radical Shelley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 218–24.
Our text is taken from MWS’s press copy of the poem with additions and corrections by PBS, now in the Bodleian Library (MS Shelley adds. c. 5, ff. 50–99: see BSM I).
Title Miching Mallecho: Sneaking mischief. See second epigraph.
First epigraph The scene is a nocturnal fantasy of the terrified Peter Bell in Wordsworth’s poem. The stanza was omitted in editions after 1819 to avoid offending ‘the pious’ (Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years 1821–1853, ed. E. de Selincourt, rev. Alan G. Hill, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978–88), I, p. 312).
Second epigraph From Shakespeare, Hamlet III.ii.130–31. Hamlet explains to Ophelia the meaning of the dumb show he has arranged to uncover the hidden guilt of Claudius the king.
p. 369 To Thomas Brown Esqr., the younger, H. F. &c. &c.: A comic parody of Wordsworth’s dedication of his Peter Bell to ‘Robert Southey, Esq. P. L.’ (i.e. Poet Laureate). ‘Thomas Brown, the Younger’ was the name adopted by the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852) for two popular verse satires, The Twopenny Post-Bag (1813) and The Fudge Family in Paris (1818). ‘H. F.’ has been decoded as ‘Historian of Fudges’ or as Hiberniae Filius (Latin for ‘Son of Ireland’) or as Hiberniae Fidicen (‘Harpist of Ireland’).
Fudges: A fictional Irish family who go on a fashionable tour to Paris after the restoration of the Bourbons in Thomas Moore’s verse satire (see previous note), which mocks their opinions and behaviour. The father of the family, Phil Fudge, a radical in the 1790s, now serves the foreign secretary, Castlereagh (for whom see headnote to ‘To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]’), as spy and informer.
the Rat and the Apostate: The targets intended are not entirely evident. In the early nineteenth century, a ‘rat’ was political slang for a turncoat; an ‘apostate’ is one who abandons his religion or principles or allegiances. Reynolds’s and Wordsworth’s ‘Peter Bells’ might qualify, the first as appearing in the disguise of another, the second as having undergone a conversion (the potter Peter Bell) and changed political loyalty for personal advantage (Wordsworth himself).
p. 370 Mr. Examiner Hunt: Leigh Hunt edited the liberal weekly The Examiner from 1808 to 1821.
the Quarterly: The Quarterly Review was edited by William Gifford (1756–1826) from an upper room at the establishment of its publisher, John Murray. The conservative Gifford and the liberal Leigh Hunt were bitter critical and political opponents.
eleutherophobia: A coinage from the Greek, ‘fear of freedom’.
borrow colours: Find pretexts.
venerable canon … grandmother: The Book of Common Prayer included as the first entry in its table of the degrees of kinship and affinity within which marriage was forbidden: ‘A man may not marry his grandmother.’
Proteus: A sea god who could change shape at will.
ultra-legitimate dullness: The phrase conjoins Wordsworth’s shift to conservative opinions and the – in PBS’s view – degeneration of his verse. ‘Legitimacy’, or the incontestable right of hereditary monarchy, was imposed by the victorious powers as the basis of the post-revolutionary settlement in Europe.
White Obi: Obi was a system of magic and sorcery of West African origin current among the transported slaves of the British West Indies. ‘White Obi’ evidently means Obi as practised by whites, i.e. Christianity. See l. 552.
p. 371 the world … or not at all: A slight misquotation of the final three lines of Wordsworth’s poem ‘French Revolution, As It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement’ (1809), republished in Poems (1815).
six or seven days … literature of my country: Mocking Wordsworth’s statement in the Preface to Peter Bell that he had been revising the poem since 1798 with a view ‘to fit it for filling permanently a station, however humble, in the Literature of my Country’.
cyclic poems: Heroic narrative poems based on a cycle of legends or myths.
bitterns: Large marshland birds.
Waterloo bridge: Originally, Strand Bridge, renamed and reopened on 18 June 1817, the anniversary of the victory at Waterloo.
3 antenatal: Reynolds’s Peter Bell, which appeared before Wordsworth’s poem.
4 weeds: Clothes.
7–12 The passage combines logical and theological language to construct a mock argument on the relations that bind the three Peter Bells to each other. Wordsworth’s poem is likened to the ‘mean’ or middle term of a syllogism: that is, an argument in three propositions, of which the first and last are the ‘extremes’. To be valid these two must be properly linked by the mean. This prevents a ‘schism’, or break in the argument, because it is correctly ordered (‘orthodoxal’), and also a doctrinal split because the mysterious threefold nature of Peter Bell is affirmed on an analogy with the orthodox Christian belief in the Holy Trinity – for which see the third paragraph of the Dedication.
10 Aldric’s: The reference is to Henry Aldrich (1647–1710), whose Artis Compendium Logicae (1691) was used as a textbook for teaching logic at Oxford.
13–26 The ‘first Peter’ is Reynolds’s poem, the second Wordsworth’s, the third PBS’s. An ‘antitype’ fulfils the prophecy implicit in the original type.
32 Predevote: Predestined.
35 Cotter: One who occupies a farm cottage in return for work on the farm.
36 polygamic Potter … [Shelley’s note]: In the second edition of Peter Bell, Wordsworth explained that in northern dialect a ‘potter’ was ‘a hawker of earthenware’. A ‘scholiast’ is an early commentator on a Classical text; ‘dodecagamic’ means ‘having married twelve times’ (as had Wordsworth’s Peter Bell); ‘megalophonous’ is ‘high-sounding’.
8 oiled his hair … [Shelley’s note]: Both whale oil and Russia oil (extracted from birch bark) were used to dress hair.
15 the gravel: Stones in the urinary tract; painful urination generally.
22 brimstone hue: Sulphureous yellow; as in The Witch of Atlas, l. 43.
25 The other: i.e. ‘brimstone hue’ (l. 22).
27 water gruel: A thin porridge of meal and water.
32 lake of Windermere: Located to the south-east of ‘Grasmere vale’ (l. 60), where Wordsworth lived in the early nineteenth century and from which the Langdale Pikes, or Peaks, can be seen (l. 56).
40 To curse one or the other of one’s parents is forbidden under pain of death in Leviticus 20:9.
56–60 See note to l. 32.
76 The Devil: PBS’s essay ‘On the Devil, and Devils’ (p. 630) makes an illuminating commentary on the character introduced here.
82 Cp. Shakespeare, King Lear III.iv.134: ‘The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman.’
83–4 The Poet Laureate traditionally received a butt of ‘sack’ (white wine from Spain or the Canaries) as part of his stipend. The Laureate at that time, Robert Southey (1774–1843), PBS regarded as having abandoned the progressive politics of his youth for a reactionary conservatism, like his fellow ‘Lake Poet’ Wordsworth.
86 Cp. 1 Thessalonians 5:2: ‘the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night.’
87 That is, with high boots and fashionable close-fitting trousers.
92 slop-merchant from Wapping: A seller of cheap clothing in this poor district of east London populated by sailors and others engaged in shipping.
94 perk: To act in a lively, jaunty manner; also assertively, impudently or with conceit.
96 upper Benjamin: A short coat suitable for wear when driving a carriage.
101 corse: Corpse.
116 phiz: Face, from ‘phiznomy’ (physiognomy).
120 Wordsworth attributes pride and joy to children in the ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807), l. 101, and in The White Doe of Rylstone (1815), l. 1810.
128 Grosvenor square: Completed in 1737, this square was a fashionable address and the location of many grand residences.
146 bowled … chaise: Driven in the Devil’s carriage.
152–6 John Castles was a hired government informer and agent provocateur, a discredited witness for the prosecution in the trial (9–17 June 1817) of the leaders of the Spa Fields riots of 2 December 1816. George Canning (1770–1827), Tory politician and member of cabinet in the Earl of Liverpool’s administration, spirited contributor to the weekly Anti-Jacobin (1797–8), foreign secretary (1807–9), succeeded Castlereagh in that office (1822) and became prime minister briefly in 1827. William Cobbett (1763–1835), reformist editor of the weekly Political Register (1802–35); fearing prosecution, he fled to America in 1817, returning in October 1819. PBS admired the vigour and clarity of Cobbett’s writing, though regarded some of it as inflammatory and deplored Cobbett’s appeal to the people to exact retribution for the wrongs they had suffered. See l. 239. For Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, see headnote to ‘To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]’.
154 caitiff: Base, wicked.
155 cozening: Cheating, trickery.
trepanning: Swindling.
157 The three asterisks were substituted in the press-copy MS for ‘S—th—y’. The Laureate Southey (see note to ll. 83–4 above) had suffered a serious mental decline by the time the poem was published in 1840, so ll. 157–8 would have been considered unacceptably offensive had his name been retained.
162 Chancery Court: The court that could be petitioned in cases of equity, presided over by the Lord Chancellor. See note to The Mask of Anarchy, l. 15.
163 manufacturing: Made up of industrial workers.
163–5 set / Of thieves … Similar thieves: The unreformed Parliament, elected by a small minority to represent its interests.
166 An Army: PBS and other liberals opposed the maintenance of a standing army in peacetime as a threat to freedom. See note to l. 173.
public debt: See note to The Mask of Anarchy, ll. 176–83.
173 Despotism: In four leading articles in The Examiner in April and May 1816, Leigh Hunt had warned of the dangers to civil authority of the increased presence of soldiers in London.
174 German soldiers: Large numbers of German troops served abroad in the British army in the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), but their presence on British soil was regarded by many with apprehension. King George III (reigned 1760–1820) was also Elector of Hanover.
175 lotteries: From 1694 to 1826, lotteries were sponsored by the state as a means of raising revenue, but by the early nineteenth century were criticized as inefficient and subject to various sorts of fraud.
176 suicide and Methodism: In An Attempt to Show the Folly and Danger of Methodism (1809), Leigh Hunt claimed that the extreme emotions encouraged by Methodism had resulted in a growth in the number of suicides.
177 Taxes: Increases in commodity taxes (which fell most heavily on the poor), on items such as tea, coffee and tobacco, were voted by Parliament in June 1819.
183 amant miserè … [Shelley’s note]: The Swedish naturalist Carl Linné (1707–78) had thus described the screeching and howling (amant miserè = ‘they love dolefully’) of the cat in the act of mating.
186 Without which … [Shelley’s note]: The self-appointed Society for the Suppression of Vice, formed in 1802, campaigned against (among other things) prostitution, gambling and public drunkenness. ‘Women of the Town’ are prostitutes.
187 hobnobbers: Drinking companions, familiar friends.
190 stock jobbers: Members of the Stock Exchange who deal in stocks on their own account (OED); speculators.
197 moiling: Drudging at menial or dirty tasks.
202 levees: Receptions held by persons of eminence for men only.
207 aldermanic: Dinners given by aldermen, municipal officials, were traditionally sumptuous.
209 Cretan-tongued: St Paul (Titus 1:12) reports that ‘Cretians [sic] are always liars’.
210 Alemannic: German.
212 conversazioni: Small assemblies for cultivated discussion of the arts and sciences.
213 Conventicles: Originally a meeting or place of meeting for illegal religious worship; more generally, a clandestine gathering.
222–3 ‘God damns!’ … [Shelley’s note]: One of the central themes of the poem, that it is not God who damns men but men who damn themselves, is illustrated in the stanzas that follow. ‘Heaven’s Attorney General’ is the Devil: see the extract from ‘On the Devil, and Devils’ (p. 630).
224 flams: Falsehoods.
239 Cobbett’s snuff, revenge: See note to ll. 152–6 above.
242 some few: PBS himself and other reform-minded individuals, such as Leigh Hunt, who strive for justice.
273–332 The strengths and limitations attributed to Peter in this passage are those that PBS, together with Leigh Hunt and the liberal critic, journalist and essayist William Hazlitt (1778–1830), considered characteristic of Wordsworth: great poetic power; an egotism, or intense sense of self, that coloured all he wrote, and a restricted capacity for dealing with physical pleasure and erotic experience.
285 trim: Type.
287 play: Gambling.
320 Diogenes: Diogenes of Sinope (c.400–325 BC), Greek Cynic philosopher, taught that a radically simple life with the minimum of attachments was the condition of happiness.
328–9 ‘A kissed mouth loses nothing but renews itself like the moon.’ PBS writes in a letter of 27 September 1819 that this maxim from Boccaccio’s Decameron (end of the seventh tale of the second day) might stand against ‘the common narrow-minded conception of love’ (Letters II, p. 122).
341 toadlike: Alluding to Milton, Paradise Lost IV.799–809, in which Satan, ‘Squat like a toad’, tempts Eve.
346 limes his lazy wing: Becomes ensnared by the sticky substance birdlime.
348 wight: Individual.
349 fixed aera: Appointed time.
350 turtle: Turtle soup.
352 East Indian Madeira: Madeira wine that had improved in cask on the voyage to and from India.
373–97 PBS credits the guest who fascinates Peter with the exceptional mental and imaginative powers that he admired in S. T. Coleridge’s poetry and criticism, but also with the tendency to obscurity in Coleridge’s writings on philosophy and religion, which T. L. Peacock had burlesqued in the character of Moley Mystic in chapter 31 of the novel Melincourt (1817).
374 petit soupers: Late-evening private suppers for invited guests.
390–91 Alluding to John 3:8: ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.’
407 heart of man: A Wordsworthian phrase, e.g. in the poem ‘Michael’ (1800), l. 33.
425 quickset fence: A hedge, e.g. of hawthorn.
428–32 The Wanderer, a leading character in Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814), had previously been a pedlar. Books V–VIII of the poem are set in a churchyard where the character of the Pastor is one of the principal speakers. Most of Wordsworth’s ‘The Brothers’ (1800) is narrated by the local priest in a churchyard.
447 pipkins: Small earthenware pots or pans.
448–9 Wordsworth and Coleridge were paid 30 guineas for Lyrical Ballads (1798) by the Bristol bookseller Joseph Cottle.
452 warning: Notice that he was leaving his position.
458–9 ‘O, that … book’: Cp. Job 31:35: ‘Oh … that the Almighty would answer me, and that mine adversary had written a book’ – the words of Job wishing his suffering to be accounted for.
463 next new book: Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), The Excursion and The White Doe of Rylstone had all attracted adverse criticism.
468 seriatim: One after another.
470–72 Betty Foy is the mother of the title-character, Johnny, in ‘The Idiot Boy’ in Lyrical Ballads (1798). She has no daughter. PBS himself had been censured for abandoning his first wife, Harriet, who drowned herself in London in 1816. Ullswater is a large lake in the north-eastern part of the Lake District. In the copy of the poem sent to London for publication in November 1819, a stanza is cancelled at this point:
Another—‘Impious Libertine!
That commits i——t with his sister
In ruined Abbies—mighty fine
To write odes on it!’—I opine
Peter had never even kissed her.
473–4 Shaving the head was jokingly said to relieve manic excitement and was a preliminary to blistering the scalp as a treatment for mental disorder. Dr Francis Willis (1718–1807) and his sons, John (1751–1835) and Robert Darling Willis (1760–1821), treated George III’s mental illness.
478–9 Accusations of adultery and incest had been made against both PBS and Leigh Hunt in reviews of their poetry. See note to ll. 470–72.
483 WE: Reviews in contemporary periodicals were written anonymously.
500 Betty: PBS’s draft and fair-copy MS and 1840 all read ‘Emma’. PBS asked Charles Ollier to alter the name to ‘Betty’, if he published the poem, in order to avoid offence, as he apparently thought that Wordsworth had a sister Emma (Letters II, p. 196).
514 sad stuff in prose: Wordsworth defended his verse from critical disapproval in the Preface and ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ of Poems (1815).
518–19 The Devil sends to the annual book fair at Leipzig for the four volumes of F. G. Born’s translation into Latin (1796–8) of the works of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).
524 psychologics: Science of the mind, psychology.
525 furor verborum: Rage for words.
532 Sir William Drummond (?1770–1828): The author of Academical Questions (1805), which is severely critical of Kant’s philosophy.
534 ‘P. Verbovale Esquire’ … [Shelley’s note]: Verbovale, as the mock-learned Latin of PBS’s note indicates, approximates an early pen name adopted by Wordsworth, ‘Axiologus’ – a compound from the Greek, signifying ‘Worthword’ or ‘Wordworth’. The phrase ‘a pure anticipated cognition’ was used by Sir William Drummond (see previous note) to criticize the Kantian notion of a kind of knowledge arrived at by pure reason, as opposed to knowledge deriving from sense experience. The phrase became a joke in the Shelley circle: see, for example, Letters II, p. 438.
536 Carlisle mail: The coach carrying mail from London to Carlisle and the surrounding region.
538 ex luce praebens fumum: ‘From light producing smoke’, reversing the terms of Horace’s praise of Homer’s practice in Ars Poetica 143–4.
541 subter humum: ‘Under ground’.
549 hobby: Both a smallish horse or pony and an obsession.
552 White Obi: See notes to the Dedication above.
555 Flibbertigibbet: The ‘foul fiend’ of King Lear III.iv.104.
566 Deist: A subscriber to ‘natural’ religion who accepts on rational grounds the existence of a supreme being, creator of the universe, but rejects such supernatural elements as miracles, revelation and the divinity of Christ.
574 Calvin and Dominic: Jean Calvin (1509–64), French theologian and religious reformer, and Dominic de Guzmán (c.1170–1221), founder of the Dominican Order, both notorious for zealous severity in suppressing heresy. See ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, ll. 25–6.
583 Otter … [Shelley’s note]: Coleridge lived as a child in Devonshire near the river which he celebrates in the sonnet ‘To the River Otter’ (1796). The pompous phrase ‘Dynastophilic Pantisocratists’ mocks the support for hereditary European monarchies of Coleridge and Southey, who in their youth planned to establish in Pennsylvania a democratic agricultural community holding land in common ownership, a scheme known as Pantisocracy. The ‘new Atlantis’ refers to a utopian fiction by Francis Bacon published posthumously in 1627.
584–8 In the death hues … [Shelley’s note]: PBS recalls ll. 556–71 of Wordsworth’s The Excursion on the beauty of some trout that have been caught and are lying dead. He opposes to it ll. 568–71 of Wordsworth’s ‘Hart-leap Well’ (1800).
602 Sherry: The familiar name of the dramatist and Whig MP Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816), who had been a friend and adviser to the Prince of Wales. When the latter became Prince Regent, he disappointed the expectations of Sheridan (and of liberals generally) and was accused of deserting his friend in his final years when ill and impoverished.
603 The line is the reply of Peter’s soul.
615 The line alludes chiefly to The Excursion V–VIII.
616 George Colman the Younger (1762–1836) was a comic dramatist and wit noted for his affable disposition.
617 male Molly: The word ‘Molly’ ranged in meaning from a lower-class girl or woman to a prostitute; a ‘male Molly’ would appear to mean an effeminate or homosexual man.
618 staves: Stanzas.
636–52 The ‘ode’ parodies the address to ‘Almighty God’ in Wordsworth’s ‘Ode. The Morning of the Day Appointed for a General Thanksgiving. January 18, 1816’ (1816), a hymn of gratitude for the victory at Waterloo. Lines 279–82 provoked widespread consternation: ‘But thy most dreaded instrument, / In working out a pure intent, / Is Man – arrayed for mutual slaughter,— / Yea, Carnage is thy daughter!’ Wordsworth altered the final couplet in subsequent editions of his poetry.
644–5 Alluding to the Peterloo Massacre of 16 August 1819, for which see the headnote to The Mask of Anarchy, as well as to recent demonstrations for reform in other manufacturing towns.
650 Moloch: A deity of the Ammonites to whom children were sacrificed. See 2 Kings 23:10 and Leviticus 18:21.
652 It was thou … [Shelley’s note]: See note to ll. 152–6 above.
655 Lord McMurderchouse: ‘Chouse’ can mean both cheat (as here) and dupe.
656 interest in both houses: Influence in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
658 cure or sinecure: In 1813 Wordsworth had accepted the salaried post of Distributor of Stamps (in effect a collector of revenue) for Westmorland and part of Cumberland through the patronage of William Lowther, 2nd Earl of Lonsdale, whose political interests he served following the appointment.
664 boroughs: Lord McMurderchouse controls several of these districts and so the member or members of Parliament that represent them.
665 front: Forehead.
671 Oliver: William Oliver was the pseudonym of a notorious government spy and agent provocateur. See An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte.
679 pelf: Money and property.
687 An additional stanza occurs at this point in PBS’s draft:
So in the luxury & the pride
Which Tyrants wring from the oppressed;
Peter’s thought even now espied—
A thought of pleasure & of pride
Wherewith to ‘feather his own nest’.
688 a house: Soon after his appointment as Distributor of Stamps (see note to l. 658 above), Wordsworth moved his family to a larger and more comfortable house, Rydal Mount, where he remained until his death in 1850.
705 rehearsed: Recited aloud.
711–12 In Gulliver’s Travels (Part III, chapter 10) the Struldbruggs, a race of beings that never die, increase in infirmities and follies as they age, becoming intolerable to others.
721–2 Various accounts of the torture of the Aztec emperor Guatimozin by the Spanish under Hernán Cortés have been recorded, including that he was made to lie on a hot gridiron to force him to reveal the whereabouts of hidden treasure.
725 famed seven: The Seven Sleepers, Christian youths of Ephesus who under the persecution of the Roman emperor Decius in the third century were sealed up in a cavern where, according to legend, they slept for nearly two centuries only to awake without having aged. See Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), chapter 33.
734 pest: Plague.
763 bailiff: The landowner’s agent who collected rent.
PBS began and probably completed a draft of this, one of his best-known poems, in Florence in late October 1819. It was published in 1820, from which we take our text. Punctuation and capitalization have been modified after consulting PBS’s MSS (see BSM V and XVIII) and 1839.
The ‘Ode’ addresses the West Wind as both the natural energy that drives the abrupt passage of autumn to winter in the Mediterranean region and as prophetic symbol in relation to what PBS perceived as converging public and personal crises in October 1819. In the political sphere he feared that social injustices in England would precipitate a ‘bloody struggle’ (Letters II, p. 149), in contrast to the non-violent revolutions he had imagined in Laon and Cythna (1817) and The Mask of Anarchy, written the previous month. In mid October Laon and Cythna, which he had hoped would promote ‘a happier condition of moral and political society’ (Poems II, p. 32), was comprehensively denigrated and himself branded as cowardly and vicious in the Quarterly Review dated April 1819. His family life was also deeply troubled. All three children born to him and MWS in the past five years had died, the loss four months earlier of their three-year-old son, William, leaving them particularly disconsolate. That MWS was pregnant with their fourth child (who would be born on 12 November) is likely to have influenced l. 64 (see also note).
These circumstances inform the ‘Ode’, which, like ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, shares many features with prayer. The West Wind is invoked as a powerful deity and petitioned to aid the poet in a radical transformation that will confer on him the power of prophecy as well as a form of posthumous existence. Prosodically intricate and demanding, the poem’s five divisions each consist of four groups of lines in terza rima (rare in English poetry of the period) – the Italian verse form of three-line stanzas rhyming aba bcb cdc, and so on – and a concluding couplet, which together compose a sonnet. Both Dante’s Divina Commedia and Petrarch’s Trionfi employ terza rima; the latter supplies the model for The Triumph of Life.
Critical commentary includes: Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 158–78; James Chandler, England in 1819 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 525–54; Chernaik, pp. 90–97; Richard Cronin, Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 23–42; Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1975), pp. 156–72; Edward Duffy, ‘Where Shelley Wrote and What He Wrote For’, SiR 23 (1984), pp. 351–77 (360–71); and Paul H. Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 203–17.
Footnote temperature: Attributes in combination.
Cisalpine: South of the Alps.
1 Wind: The wind is associated with creation and inspiration in Genesis 1:2 and Acts 2:2.
2 leaves dead: The comparison of the human dead to dead leaves is traditional in epic poetry: e.g. Homer, Iliad VI.146–9; Virgil, Aeneid VI.309–10; Dante, Inferno III.112–17; cp. also Milton, Paradise Lost III.300–303 and The Triumph of Life, ll. 49–51 and 528–9.
4 hectic: Flushed, as if with a wasting fever.
9 azure sister: The gentle west wind of spring, called Zephyrus or Favonius in Classical literature, was traditionally represented as a young man rather than a woman.
14 Destroyer and Preserver: Attributes, respectively, of the Hindu deities Shiva and Vishnu.
hear, O hear: Cp. Psalm 61:1: ‘Hear my cry, O God; attend unto my prayer.’
17 tangled boughs: The ocean provides moisture for the formation of clouds, which returns to the sea as rain.
18 Angels: Harbingers, forerunners: from the Greek aggelos = ‘messenger’.
21 Maenad: A female follower of Dionysus, Greek god of wine and ecstasy, typically represented as dancing ecstatically. PBS saw a relief sculpture of Maenads at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence on 11 October 1819; in ‘Notes on Sculptures’ he describes their ‘hair loose and floating [which] seems caught in the tempest of their own tumultuous motion’ (Ingpen and Peck VI, p. 323). See also note to Prometheus Unbound II.iii.9–10.
32–6 pumice isle … picturing them: Pumice is porous rock formed from cooling lava. In December 1818, PBS made an excursion that included Baiae on the Bay of Naples (described in Letters II, p. 61), where from a boat he was able to see the sunken ruins of its ancient buildings.
54 Recalling Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV (1818), ll. 88–9: ‘The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree / I planted, – they have torn me, – and I bleed.’
57 lyre: See A Defence of Poetry: ‘Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre’ (here). (See also Alastor, ll. 41–9 and note to l. 42.)
63 dead thoughts: PBS’s poems and prose writings, which had failed to find the readers he wished to influence.
64 new birth: PBS expanded on the idea in A Philosophical View of Reform, begun in late 1819, in a passage that he later adapted in A Defence of Poetry: ‘The literature of England, an energetic development of which has ever followed or preceded a great and free developement of the national will, has arisen, as it were, from a new birth’ (here).
Composed in autumn 1819, published under the title ‘Similes’ by Thomas Medwin in The Athenaeum for 25 August 1832 and by MWS in 1839. In 1840 the title was expanded to ‘Similes, For Two Political Characters of 1819’. Our text is from PBS’s fair copy in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 12, pp. 60–61 (see BSM XVIII).
The poem is addressed to two government ministers, Henry Addington, Viscount Sidmouth (1757–1844), and Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh (1769–1822), pillars of the Tory administration of Lord Liverpool from 1812 to 1822. Steadfastly hostile to electoral reform, Sidmouth and Castlereagh were regarded as reactionary and repressive by liberal opinion. As home secretary, Sidmouth often dealt harshly with popular discontent following the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), overseeing a network of government spies and informers. See headnote to The Mask of Anarchy. Castlereagh, foreign secretary and Leader of the House of Commons, was accused of excessive severity in suppressing – in 1798 when chief secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland – a rising of United Irishmen, and was unresponsive to popular demands for relief and reform following the Napoleonic Wars.
2 empty: Hungry.
wind: Blow.
4 smoke: Vapour from rotting corpses.
9 in a fit: Hidden for a time.
11–13 shark and dogfish … Negro ship: The predators wait for a vessel transporting African slaves to the West Indies, anticipating that those among them who are dead or sick will be thrown overboard.
18 bloodless: Heartless, unfeeling.
19 murrained: Diseased.
On 16 November 1819, PBS sent a copy of this playfully erotic lyric, probably just composed, from Florence to London, where Leigh Hunt published it in his literary weekly The Indicator on 22 December under the present title, which may be either his or PBS’s. At the end of December, PBS presented a copy of the poem to Sophia Stacey, inscribed in The Literary Pocket-Book for 1819, also edited by Leigh Hunt – a combined calendar, memorandum book, compendium of miscellaneous information and anthology of contemporary writing – on her departure from Florence, where she had been lodging in the same house as the Shelleys. Miss Stacey, a year older than PBS and distantly related to him through a family marriage, was travelling in Italy with an older female companion. She and PBS spent much time together during her stay in Florence from 9 November to 29 December. The version of the poem presented to her, now in the library of Eton College, supplies our text. It is untitled and shows minor variations from the Indicator version. Another transcription, in a notebook (now Harvard MS Eng. 258.2: see MYR (Shelley) V), is entitled ‘An Anacreontic’ after the Greek poet (Anacreon) of the sixth century BC whose lyrics typically celebrate the pleasures of the senses.
7 The line is more explicitly erotic in both the Harvard and Indicator versions: ‘In one another’s being mingle.’
Probably composed in autumn 1819, ‘Goodnight’ was presented to Sophia Stacey in late December on her departure from Florence, inscribed in a copy of the The Literary Pocket-Book for 1819 (see previous headnote), which is now in the library of Eton College and which supplies our text. Another transcription of the poem, in a notebook (now Harvard MS Eng. 258.2: see MYR (Shelley) V), is entitled ‘Song’. ‘Goodnight’ was first published in late 1821 in The Literary Pocket-Book for 1822. PBS made a free imitation of the poem in Italian in 1821, ‘Buona Notte’, for which see Poems IV, pp. 93–6.
PBS inscribed this poem, together with ‘Love’s Philosophy’ and ‘Goodnight’, into a copy of The Literary Pocket-Book for 1819, which he gave to Sophia Stacey on her departure from Florence for Rome at the end of December 1819. It is now in the library of Eton College and supplies our text. (For Sophia Stacey and The Literary Pocket-Book, see headnote to ‘Love’s Philosophy’.) The poem could have been written towards the end of the period from early November to late December 1819, when Sophia was in Florence. If written earlier, it might have been inspired by the strained relations between PBS and MWS following the death in Rome in June 1819 of the Shelleys’ three-year-old son, William, which is alluded to in ll. 15–18. It was first published in Rossetti 1870.
15 corse: Corpse.
In March 1820, PBS appended this lament for faded love to a letter sent from Pisa by MWS to Sophia Stacey (for whom see headnote to ‘Love’s Philosophy’) in Rome, enjoining her to keep its origin secret. In his accompanying note he refers to the poem as ‘old stanzas’, and they appear to have been drafted some months earlier, perhaps addressed to MWS. His relations with her had been severely strained since the death in Rome in June 1819 of their three-year-old son, William. PBS later sent a copy of the poem to Leigh Hunt in London, who published it in The Literary Pocket-Book (see headnote to ‘Love’s Philosophy’) for 1821 under the title ‘Song. On a faded Violet’. Our text is from PBS’s holograph on MWS’s letter to Sophia Stacey of 7 March 1820, now in the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, Cologny-Genève, Switzerland (see MYR (Shelley) VIII).
PBS probably composed this poem on a painting in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence in November–December 1819. No holograph MS is known to exist. It was published by MWS in 1824 (from which our text is taken) in its present form, with ll. 18 and 37 incomplete. The painting, in oil on a wooden panel measuring 74 × 49cm, is now considered the work of an unidentified Flemish artist of the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, though when PBS was in Florence it was attributed to Leonardo. The picture draws on two mythical traditions concerning the Medusa. According to one, she was a monster (a Gorgon – see l. 26) so hideous that to gaze on her (or to be gazed upon by her) was to be turned to stone. In his struggle with the Medusa, the hero Perseus avoided looking directly on her face, instead viewing her reflection in a polished shield, and was thus able to cut off her head. The other tradition represents the Medusa as a remarkable beauty whom Minerva punished by changing her hair into a knot of serpents. This combination of beauty and horror in art fascinated PBS, who wrote (disapprovingly) of Michelangelo in a letter of early 1819: ‘What is terror without a contrast with & a connection with loveliness?’ (Letters II, p. 80).
Mario Praz takes the poem as typical of a characteristically Romantic idea of beauty in the first chapter of The Romantic Agony, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). See also: Jerome McGann, ‘The Beauty of the Medusa: A Study in Romantic Literary Iconology’, SiR 11 (1972), pp. 3–25; and W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1994), pp. 171–6.
3 tremblingly: As if blurred, perhaps by mist.
9–13 It is rather the grace than the terror of the Medusa’s countenance that turns the spirit of ‘the gazer’ to stone on which her features are engraved and so assimilated.
16 strain: i.e. of music.
18 watery: Damp, moist; or perhaps located in water, such as a stream.
22 mailed: Covered with scales.
mock: Defy or mimic.
25 eft: A small lizard.
35 inextricable error: Convoluted winding that cannot be disentangled.
36 thrilling: Quivering.
PBS probably composed this lyric on a traditional theme (cp. ‘Epithalamium’ and Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet III.ii.1–31) in late 1819. MWS published it in 1824. In Greek myth, both Night (Nyx) and Day (Hemera) were goddesses. PBS alternates the gender of Day and Night in stanzas 2–4. Kurt Schlueter traces the poem’s debt to the Classical hymn to a deity as well as to other Classical models in SiR 36/2 (1997), pp. 239–60; Chernaik, pp. 144–6, examines its character as a lyric of desire. The urgency of the address to Night is embodied in an intricate stanza of seven lines of eight, seven, four or three syllables rhyming ababccb.
Our text is from PBS’s holograph fair copy in Harvard MS Eng. 258.2 (see MYR (Shelley) V). Some punctuation has been modified.
Not published until 1839, though written in late 1819 and sent on 23 December in a letter to Leigh Hunt that includes PBS’s lament ‘What a state England is in!’ and his instruction ‘I do not expect you to publish it, but you may show it to whom you please’ (Letters II, pp. 166–7). Webb 1995 compares the liberal reformer Sir Francis Burdett’s election address of 6 October 1812, published in The Examiner for 11 October 1812, pp. 654–6, on the condition of the nation: ‘an army of spies and informers … a phantom for a King; a degraded Aristocracy; an oppressed People … irresponsible ministers; a corrupt and intimidated Press; pensioned Justices; packed Juries; vague and sanguinary Laws’ (here). The eighty-one-year-old King George III, who had reigned since 1760, had been diagnosed as incurably insane in 1810 and by late 1819 was blind, deaf and senile; he would die on 29 January 1820. His son, the unpopular Prince of Wales and future George IV, had exercised the office of regent from early 1811. The six other sons of George III, royal dukes supported from the public purse, were resented for their profligacy and extravagance. The first line invites comparison with Shakespeare, King Lear III.ii.20, in which the old former ruler of a kingdom in turmoil describes himself as ‘A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man’. The play was not allowed to be performed during the Regency (Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 204–5).
Our text is from PBS’s fair copy in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 12 (see BSM XVIII), which is untitled. MWS supplied the present title in 1839.
7 An allusion to the killing and wounding of demonstrators for reform, many of them agricultural and industrial labourers who had suffered great hardship, by armed militia on 16 August 1819 at St Peter’s Field, Manchester; see headnote to The Mask of Anarchy.
8–9 An army maintained to oppress the people and extinguish liberty (the sense of ‘liberticide’) can turn against those who employ it.
10 Gold and blood (here ‘sanguine’ = ‘sanguinary’, ‘bloody’) are in PBS’s poetry regularly presented as the foundations and instruments of tyranny. They ‘tempt and slay’ by bribery and corruption, and judicial murder.
11 a book sealed: Cp. Isaiah 29:11 – ‘And the vision of all is become unto you as the words of a book that is sealed’ – directed at those who refuse God’s warnings.
12 senate … unrepealed: Parliament, for too long unrepresentative and in need of reform.
13–14 The lines borrow a symbolic figure from the conclusion to PBS’s An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte, written two years earlier: ‘Let us follow the corpse of British Liberty slowly and reverentially to its tomb: and if some glorious Phantom should appear, and make its throne of broken swords and sceptres and royal crowns trampled in the dust, let us say that the Spirit of Liberty has arisen from its grave and left all that was gross and mortal there, and kneel down and worship it as our Queen’ (here). Cp. the similar apparition in The Mask of Anarchy, ll. 102–25.
The text given here is from PBS’s fair copy in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. c. 4, ff. 75v–76r (see MYR (Shelley) V). The ‘Song’ was probably written some time in early 1820; MWS published it in 1839. On 1 May 1820, PBS wrote to Leigh Hunt: ‘I wish to ask you if you know of any bookseller who would like to publish a little volume of popular songs wholly political, & destined to awaken & direct the imagination of the reformers. I see you smile but answer my question’ (Letters II, p. 191). PBS never carried out his plan for such a collection; had he done so, this poem as well as a number of others that he wrote in late 1819 and early 1820 are likely to have figured in it, among those in the present selection: The Mask of Anarchy, ‘To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]’, ‘To —–’ (‘Corpses are cold in the tomb’) and ‘God save the Queen!’. MWS noted in 1839 (III, p. 307) that the reason none of them could appear in print until years later was that ‘in those days of prosecution for libel’ no bookseller would dare publish them. All of these poems emerge from the mixed outrage and apprehension that PBS felt following ‘Peterloo’, the killing of civilians by mounted militia at Manchester on 16 August 1819. See headnote to The Mask of Anarchy.
10 scourge: Whip.
27–8 The sense of the couplet is: ‘You yourselves have manufactured the chains and the steel that are now used against you.’ The verb ‘glance’ can mean both ‘flash’ and ‘strike a blow obliquely’.
Text from Harvard MS Eng. 822 (see MYR (Shelley) V). This bitterly defiant lament for the state of England was probably written in the early months of 1820 and may have been intended for a collection of political songs that PBS planned but never completed. See previous headnote. It was not published until 1832, in The Athenaeum, under the title ‘Lines Written during the Castlereagh Administration’. The conspicuous absence of a name in the title suggests that some individual too dangerous to specify is being addressed as the ‘Oppressor’ of l. 11, perhaps Castlereagh himself or the home secretary, Sidmouth. See headnote to ‘To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]’.
3 Abortions: Lifeless foetuses.
5 Albion: England.
9 travaileth: Labours in childbirth; see note to l. 3.
12 redressor: One who puts right a wrong.
18 crying ‘havoc’: To ‘cry havoc’ was to license a victorious army to plunder a defeated enemy.
19 Bacchanal triumph: In ancient Rome, the Bacchanalia was an orgiastic ritual, often disorderly, in honour of Bacchus (the god of wine and ecstasy); a ‘triumph’ was a public procession celebrating victory over a foreign foe.
20 Epithalamium: A wedding song; see ‘Epithalamium’.
24 Hell: PBS originally wrote ‘God’ before altering the word to the present reading.
PBS composed ‘The Sensitive-Plant’ in Pisa in spring 1820, probably in March. It was published as one of the ‘Miscellaneous Poems’ in 1820, which supplies our text, though we have adopted some features of MWS’s fair copy in Harvard MS Eng. 258.2 (see MYR (Shelley) V). The plant of the title is the Mimosa pudica, popularly known as the ‘humble plant’ or ‘shame plant’, which shrinks from contact and closes its leaves at night. Its sensitivity to changes in light and temperature, as well as to touch – and hence the resemblance of its movements to animal reactions – had made its place in nature, on the border between animal and vegetable, the object of scientific interest. Mimosa pudica is an annual, a characteristic of importance for its representation in the poem. PBS’s intriguing ‘Conclusion’ speculates on the existence of a transcendent dimension in which the features of the exquisite garden and its lovely custodian continue to exist in permanent perfection despite the seasonal alterations they have undergone. In creating the garden in which the plant grows, and the lady who tends it, PBS drew upon (and revised) a long tradition of fictional gardens presided over by a female attendant, including those in: Genesis 1–3; Dante, Purgatorio XXVIII; Spenser, The Faerie Queene III.vi.30–50; Milton, Paradise Lost IV and IX; and the botanical verses of Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791). William Cowper’s brief moral fable in verse, ‘The Poet, the Oyster, and the Sensitive Plant’ (1782), makes a revealing contrast with PBS’s poem.
The sparse commentary on ‘The Sensitive-Plant’ includes: Desmond King-Hele’s chapter on Shelley in Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986); R. M. Maniquis, ‘The Puzzling Mimosa: Sensitivity and Plant Symbols in Romanticism’, SiR 8 (1969), pp. 129–55; and Michael O’Neill, ‘The Sensitive-Plant: Evaluation and the Self-Conscious Poem’, in his Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
3–4 The mimosa ‘Shuts her sweet eye-lids to approaching night; / And hails with freshen’d charms the rising light’ in Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden II.i.307–8.
17 wind-flowers: Anemones.
18–20 Alluding to the myth of Narcissus who, having scorned the love of the nymph Echo, pined away to death for love of his own reflection in a pool and was changed into a flower (Ovid, Metamorphoses III.344–511).
21 Naiad-like: In Greek mythology, Naiads were water nymphs.
24 pavilions: Coverings, canopies.
25 hyacinth: In Classical myth, Apollo loved the youth Hyacinth; when he died, the god caused a flower to spring from his blood.
27–8 The first of many examples of synaesthesia, representing one sense-impression in terms of another – a principal stylistic figure in the poem.
34 Maenad: See note to ‘Ode to the West Wind’, l. 21.
37 jessamine: Jasmine.
42 prankt: Ornamented, decorated.
54 asphodels: A plant of the lily family imagined by Homer as growing in the Elysian Fields (Odyssey XI.539) and by Milton in Paradise (Paradise Lost IX.1040).
63 mine-lamps: In 1815 Humphry Davy invented a miner’s lamp which could be used safely underground.
76–7 Recalling Plato’s Symposium, which PBS translated in July 1818: ‘Love wants and does not possess beauty’ (Ingpen and Peck VII, p. 195).
88 spirits: Angelic beings who guided the concentric spheres that made up the heavens, in older astronomy.
108 Elysian: Exquisitely delightful, as in Elysium, the abode of the blessed after death in Classical mythology.
2 grace: In Classical myth, the Graces were three sisters, goddesses of beauty, ministers of joy and affection and sources of artistic inspiration.
10 meteors: Any luminous atmospheric phenomenon.
sublunar: Under the moon’s influence, earthly, and so subject to change.
38 ozier: Willow.
43 woof: Woven material.
49 ephemeris: An insect (usually ‘ephemerid’) whose brief winged adult life may fill no more than a day.
53 antenatal tomb: The pupal case from which the adult butterfly emerges.
3–4 Mount Vesuvius is visible from Baiae on the Bay of Naples, which PBS visited in December 1818 (MWS Journal I, p. 242).
34–41 The lines rework ‘Ode to the West Wind’, ll. 2–8.
48 parasite bowers: Bowers formed by climbing plants, not necessarily those that feed off a host.
54 darnels: Weeds, harmful grasses generally.
55 Dock is a weed with deep roots and broad leaves; henbane and hemlock are both poisonous and foul-smelling.
56 shank: The stem or footstalk.
62 agarics: A variety of fungi with gills on the underside, including edible mushrooms.
66–9 The fungi that emerge from the ground in the previous stanza are compared as they decay to the rotting corpse of an executed criminal exposed on a gibbet.
70 Spawn: The fibre-like filaments of a mushroom or other fungus.
72 flags: This perhaps designates a species of iris, though in older usage it could also signify a reed or rush.
78 unctuous meteors: Unctuous = ‘inflammable’ (cp. OED unctuous 3); for meteors, see note to II.10 above. The will-o’-the-wisp or marsh fire – glowing gases resulting from decaying vegetation – is here imagined as flitting from plant to plant spreading infection.
82 forbid: Accursed.
91 choppy: Chapped, cracked; cp. Shakespeare, Macbeth I.iii.42–3 describing the weird sisters: ‘By each at once her choppy finger laying / Upon her skinny lips’.
113 griff: Claw.
116 mandrakes: Plants common in the Mediterranean area, having white flowers tinged with purple and traditionally thought to possess magical properties. Their large roots were supposed to resemble the human form and to shriek when plucked.
117 charnels: Places of burial, tombs.
9–12 Relevant antecedents for the life-dream comparison would be Shakespeare, The Tempest IV.i.156–7, ‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on’, and Calderón’s play La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream).
15 own: Acknowledge.
16 mockery: Illusion; PBS formulates this intuition more firmly in ‘On Life’: ‘Whatever may be his [man’s] true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with change and extinction’ (here).
21 PBS’s first version was ‘For love & thought there is not death’ (Huntington Library HM 2176 f. 33r reverso: see MYR (Shelley) VI).
22–4 their might … obscure: The sense is that our limited organs of perception are inadequate to discern the permanent transcendent radiance of ‘love, and beauty, and delight’ (l. 21).
23 Exceeds our organs: PBS first wrote ‘Outlives our feelings/visions’ (see MYR (Shelley) VI).
Composed between late 1819 and spring 1820, published in 1820, which provides our copy-text; punctuation has been somewhat modified, taking into account the fair copy in Harvard MS Eng. 258.2 (see MYR (Shelley) V). PBS’s remark in a letter of May 1820 to John and Maria Gisborne in London probably refers to the present poem: ‘I send a little thing about Poets; which is itself a kind of an excuse for Wordsworth … You may shew it [Leigh] Hunt if you like’ (Letters II, p. 195). This lyric handles lightly and deftly the theme of the poet’s relation to ‘wealth or power’ (l. 19) which PBS had treated more seriously – with Wordsworth as case in point – in ‘To Wordsworth’ and Peter Bell the Third. The chameleon’s capacity to change colour in response to its environment made it an emblem of inconstancy, while its ability to exist for long periods without food gave rise to the belief that it fed on air.
7 light: Both the senses ‘agile’ and ‘fickle’ appear to be intended.
10–18 Just as an undersea cave would provide no light to bring about a change in the chameleon’s colour, so the world cannot offer poets the love and fame they need. No wonder, then, that poets behave with inconstancy in their search for both.
PBS composed these lines and their companion piece, ‘Song of Pan’, in April–May 1820 for a scene in Midas, a mythological drama that MWS adapted from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Our texts are based on PBS’s drafts in the Bodleian Library (MS Shelley adds e. 6: see BSM V) rather than the fair copies by MWS (BSM X), which differ from the drafts at a number of points. In MWS’s play, as in her source (Metamorphoses XI.146–93), Midas attends a singing contest between Apollo and Pan which is judged by Tmolus, the local deity of the mountain of the same name. In Ovid, Pan sings first and is declared the victor by Midas; when Apollo’s song is judged superior by Tmolus, Midas objects, provoking Apollo to punish him by causing ass’s ears to grow on his head. MWS departs from Ovid by having Apollo sing first. In Greek myth and religion, Apollo was a god of music, poetry, healing, archery and prophecy (ll. 13–14, 33–4), and, as god of light (l. 35), was associated with the sun. Earl Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), pp. 46–56, makes an illuminating comparison of the two songs.
Title Neither of PBS’s drafts is titled. In 1824 MWS supplied the titles ‘Hymn of Apollo’ and ‘Hymn of Pan’.
22 cinctured: Encircled, girded.
27 even: Evening.
31–2 Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading, p. 48, notices in these lines a reworking of the Sun’s declaration in Metamorphoses IV.226–8: ‘Lo, I am he who measure out the year, who behold all things, by whom the earth beholds all things – the world’s eye.’
For composition and context, see previous headnote. The god Pan was a rural deity, particularly of shepherds and flocks, who was reputed to haunt mountains and caves. His cult originated in Arcadia. Rough and shaggy in appearance, he was represented as half man and half goat and personified erotic energy, figuring in several myths of sexual pursuit. Because the Greek word pan means ‘all’, he was sometimes regarded as a universal deity.
Title See note to previous poem.
3 river-girt: Surrounded by rivers.
9 cicadae: Cicadas were traditionally imagined as blithe and carefree. See also note to The Witch of Atlas, l. 108.
11 even old Tmolus: The local deity presiding over the contest between Apollo and Pan (see previous headnote); ‘even’ – because Tmolus preferred Apollo’s song.
13–15 The river Pineios (Peneus) flows through the valley of Tempe in north-eastern Thessaly, in Greece, and is overshadowed by the mountains of Pelion, Ossa and Olympus.
15 [ ? ]: PBS first wrote then cancelled ‘Ossa’s’, substituting an illegible word above the line. Editors have read this as ‘Pelion’ or ‘Olympus’. See previous note.
18–19 sileni … nymphs: Minor demi-gods in Greek and Roman myth, often associated with particular localities or aspects of nature such as trees or streams.
26 daedal: Intricately formed; from Daedalus, the skilled inventor and father of Icarus. See ‘Mont Blanc’, l. 86, and ‘Ode to Liberty’, l. 18.
27 the giant wars: Pan sings of the archaic Greek myth of the battles for dominion over the world waged by the Olympian gods against the Giants, the offspring of Gaia (the Earth). The Olympians defeated the Giants with the aid of the mortal hero Heracles.
30–31 The nymph Syrinx, pursued by Pan, was transformed into a reed to escape him. Intrigued by the sound of the wind in the reeds, Pan joined several of different lengths together to make the musical pipes called syrinx traditionally associated with him. The Mainalo (Maenalus) Mountains are in northern Arcadia, a region sacred to Pan.
34 both ye: Apollo and Tmolus.
Composed in spring 1820, published in 1820, which furnishes our copy-text. Partial drafts of a few lines and an autograph fair copy of ll. 35–84 have survived (see BSM V) and have been consulted. The punctuation of 1820 has been somewhat modified.
The two major literary precedents for PBS’s poem are Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds, in which the chorus of female clouds points out the benefits they bring to the world by providing both rain and shade, and Leigh Hunt’s poem ‘The Nymphs’ (published in Foliage, 1818), which gives voice to a group of ‘Nepheliads’, each of them a nymph-like spirit that guides a cloud as it travels through the heavens. PBS praised ‘The Nymphs’ as ‘delightful’ and ‘truly poetical, in the intense and emphatic sense of the word’ (Letters II, pp. 2–3). The poem also exhibits an understanding of the atmospheric cycle of evaporation–condensation–precipitation by which the earth is supplied with rain and which contemporary science had elucidated. Luke Howard’s On the Modifications of Clouds (1803), for example, had established that the identifiable types of clouds were not fixed but that their existence involved constant transformation one into another. See Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), and Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 219–27.
9 flail: A staff to which a freely swinging club is attached, used for threshing grain; also a weapon consisting of a handle to which a spiked ball is fastened by a chain.
17–30 The passage is influenced by the view of some contemporary scientists – no longer accepted by meteorologists – that the interaction of electrical charges in the atmosphere and in bodies of water on earth furnishes the energy for the production of clouds and rain. Adam Walker, who lectured at both Syon House Academy and Eton during PBS’s time at each, held that ‘water rises through the air, flying on the wings of electricity’ (A System of Familiar Philosophy (London: 1799), p. 358). Equally important in these lines, however, is the analogy between cloud formation and erotic attraction.
23 genii: Spirits that preside in particular places.
31 sanguine: Blood-red.
33 rack: A mass of high clouds driven by the wind.
44 Echoing the apostrophe to the Holy Spirit in Milton, Paradise Lost I.20–21: ‘[thou] with mighty wings outspread / Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast abyss.’
45–58 The stanza imagines the moon’s footsteps as making gaps in the cloud through which the stars appear to ‘whirl and flee’ as it is driven along by the wind; thus exposed, the moon and stars are reflected in the waters below.
59–60 zone … girdle: The halos of illuminated cloud round the sun and moon.
67–9 In ancient Rome, a triumphal arch was a monument commemorating a victory over a foreign foe. PBS had seen several examples in Rome. The victorious commander was typically represented in a chariot (‘chair’) and the foreign captives in chains. Cp. The Triumph of Life, l. 252, in which defeated prisoners are ‘chained to the triumphal chair’. The ‘Powers of the Air’ are atmospheric forces considered as celestial divinities. Cp. Hellas, l. 230.
71 sphere-fire: The sun.
75 pores: The moisture that forms the cloud has been drawn through the minute interstices between the particles that form the matter of sea and land.
78 pavilion: A large tent.
79 convex: ‘The earth’s atmosphere bends a ray of sunlight into a curve … convex to an observer in a cloud looking down’ (King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work, p. 225).
81 cenotaph: A funerary monument for one whose body rests elsewhere. Here it is the ‘blue Dome of Air’ (l. 80) which the winds and sunbeams have built for the cloud and which it destroys in ll. 83–4.
In 1840 MWS published without title six stanzas of this parody of the British national anthem, which PBS had drafted and left in a notebook, now Bodleian Shelley MS adds. e. 6 (see BSM V) and from which our text has been edited. Additional punctuation has been provided. The draft, which is rough and unfinished, appears to date from April–May 1820. The present title was supplied in Rossetti 1870. ‘A New National Anthem’ was the title given by Edward Dowden in his edition of the poem (1891) and has been followed by several twentieth-century editions. It is likely that the ‘anthem’ was intended for a collection of songs on political themes that PBS planned but never completed: see headnote to ‘Song: To the Men of England’.
Dating from the late seventeenth century, ‘God Save the King’ acquired something like its modern form in response to the Jacobite rising of 1745. Through the eighteenth century new stanzas were added in reference to royal events, and parodies of varying political colours were written, some sharply satirical. PBS’s version avoids specific satire in favour of a generalized hymn of praise to Liberty expressed in a religious idiom adopted from biblical tradition.
3 murdered Queen: PBS introduces the figure of Liberty as murdered queen in An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte. See also ‘England in 1819’.
36 The line alludes to the conferring of prophetic power in Isaiah 6:6–7: ‘Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand … And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.’
40 The missing word, cancelled in the MS, is difficult to read: ‘triumphal’ and ‘trumpet’s’ have been suggested.
PBS drafted this translation from the Purgatorio, the second canticle of Dante’s Divina Commedia, in late spring or summer 1820 in a notebook which is now Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 6 (see BSM V). Lines 1–9 and 22–51 were first published in Thomas Medwin, The Angler in Wales (London: Richard Bentley, 1834), the complete text in Relics of Shelley, ed. Richard Garnett (London: Edward Moxon, 1862). PBS’s draft is incomplete and not always perfectly legible, so that the text offered below is necessarily conjectural in places. Some additional punctuation has been supplied.
Dante imagines Purgatory as a steep mountain which sinners must ascend in the afterlife in order gradually to purge their sins; the present passage is set in the earthly paradise at its summit. The woman that the pilgrim Dante encounters will later be named ‘Matilda’; she, together with Beatrice, becomes his guide in the final six cantos of the Purgatorio. By mid 1820, PBS had come to hold Dante in the highest regard. The previous summer he had written that ‘Matilda Gathering Flowers’ was a representative specimen of ‘all the exquisite tenderness & sensibility & ideal beauty, in which Dante excelled all poets except Shakespeare’ (Letters II, p. 112). He felt both that no ‘adequate translation’ of the Divina Commedia existed (Medwin 1913, p. 244) and that Dante was ‘the most untranslatable of all poets’ (Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. E. J. Lovell, Jnr (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 160). In A Defence of Poetry, PBS defines the pivotal position he assigned to Dante in the development of European literature; while in The Triumph of Life he creates a Dantean visionary poem in the terza rima of the Divina Commedia – three-line stanzas rhyming aba bcb cdc, and so on – notoriously difficult to manage in English, which offers fewer possibilities for rhyme than Italian.
2 woof: The greenery of the wood is, as it were, woven closely together like fabric.
12 That sacred hill: The mountain of Purgatory.
15 blithe quest: Cheerful singing; ‘quest’ is a term for the baying of hounds in a hunt.
18 roundelay: A brief song with a ‘burthen’ (refrain).
20 Chiassi: Modern Classe on the Adriatic coast south of Ravenna.
21 Aeolus was the ancient god of the winds who released or restrained them. Sirocco is a hot wind from the south-east.
34–5 Dante’s lines read, literally translated: ‘I stopped with my feet and with my eyes passed across the streamlet, to gaze.’
42 besprent: Sprinkled, strewn.
48–51 In Classical myth, Proserpine, while gathering flowers, was taken away by Pluto to the underworld to rule there with him; distraught, her mother Ceres wandered over the entire world searching for her.
Our text is based on PBS’s unfinished and untitled draft in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 9, pp. 346–8 (see BSM XIV). Probably composed in summer 1820, possibly before the Shelleys left Pisa for Livorno on 15 June. In 1824, where the lines were first published, MWS supplied the title and the date, 1821. There is little in the draft to suggest a specific location, although as Poems III, p. 421, observes, the windswept ‘Town’ described in ll. 10–12 would be apt for early nineteenth-century Pisa, where the population had been in decline for some time. The Ponte a Mare was the westernmost of the three bridges that then crossed the Arno at Pisa. The brief shift to the past tense in l. 14 would seem to be an inadvertence.
13–16 See note to ll. 63–4 of ‘To Jane—The Recollection’ and cp. ‘Ode to Liberty’, ll. 76–9.
15–16 Cp. Wordsworth, ‘Elegaic Stanzas’ (first published in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807)), ll. 7–8: ‘thy Image still was there; / It trembled, but it never pass’d away.’
17–18 PBS cancelled ‘Indies’ and left l. 17 unfinished, but the sense is clear: you could go to the ends of the earth and return to find the city reflected in the river as always.
20 cinereous: Ashen, ash-coloured.
PBS’s draft is in the Bodleian Library (BSM V), as is a partial Italian translation by him of stanzas 1–13 and 19 (BSM III). A transcript of ll. 1–21 by MWS of a now-lost intermediate fair copy also survives, in the Houghton Library at Harvard University (see MYR (Shelley) V). PBS sent a copy of the poem, which was probably composed between early May and 12 July 1820 (see Letters II, pp. 213–14), to T. L. Peacock in London on the latter date with instructions to publish it with Prometheus Unbound. It appeared as the final poem in 1820, which supplies our copy-text.
‘Ode to Liberty’ (the ‘Ode’) is a free imitation of the odes of the ancient Greek poet Pindar (c.522–c.443 BC) in honour of the victors in athletic contests. In this case, the victory celebrated – or anticipated – is that of liberty over political oppression. The primary occasion of the poem was the military uprising in Spain in early 1820, which prompted King Ferdinand VII to grant a return to the broad reforms provided for in the liberal constitution of 1812, and which PBS saw as part of the growing advance of liberty across mainland Europe. The ‘Ode’ surveys the history of liberty from its origins in Classical Greece until the early nineteenth century, finishing with a glance at some national struggles for freedom and independence in contemporary Europe. In this respect, then, it retraces in concentrated poetic form the political history that PBS had charted in A Philosophical View of Reform and also anticipates the progress of artistic creation that he imagines in A Defence of Poetry. As well as its debts to Classical sources, the ‘Ode’ had notable modern precedents in, for example, James Thomson’s Liberty (1735–6), Thomas Gray’s ‘The Progress of Poesy’ (1757), William Collins’s ‘Ode to Liberty’ (1746) and Coleridge’s ‘France: An Ode’ (1798).
On publication, the ‘Ode’ was attacked by the conservative reviews for its explicitly anti-religious and anti-monarchical stance. Interesting commentary is given in Chernaik, pp. 97–108, and William Keach, Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 151–8.
Epigraph From Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV (1818), stanza 98, ll. 1–2. The stanza concludes Byron’s own review of the history of political liberty.
1–2 PBS here compares Liberty to an electrical charge, which Spain now sends forth for a second time, the previous occasion having been the Spanish resistance to French occupation in 1807–8. Cp. PBS’s Preface to Prometheus Unbound: ‘The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring, or is about to be restored’ (here).
6 plumes: Plumage, feathers. Images of the soul taking flight through poetry are common in Classical and Renaissance literature. In PBS’s translation of Plato’s Ion (1821) the souls of poets are ‘arrayed in the plumes of rapid imagination’ (Ingpen and Peck, VII, p. 238).
8 a young eagle: Webb 1995 identifies an allusion to Pindar’s Nemean Odes III.80–82, in which the poet compares his art to an eagle swooping on its prey.
11–15 The ‘whirlwind’ and the ‘voice out of the deep’ recall traditional figures for divine communication and inspiration: e.g. Job 38:1, Acts 9:4 and Revelation 1:10–12, 16:17. Cp. The Mask of Anarchy, ll. 1–3. The ship is a conventional figure for the poetic imagination, e.g. Dante, Purgatorio I.1–3.
11 rapt it: Carried it away; enraptured the poet’s ‘soul’ (l. 5).
16 The words of the ‘voice’ of l. 15 are ‘recorded’ from here until l. 270.
18 daedal: Intricate, or cunningly made – after Daedalus, the master-craftsman (and father of Icarus) in Greek mythology. Cp. ‘Mont Blanc’, l. 86 and note to ll. 84–95).
19 the world: i.e. the ‘universe’ (l. 21).
23 thou: Liberty.
28 their violated nurse: The earth.
41 The sister-pest: Institutional religion; ‘pest’ = ‘plague’, ‘pestilence’.
42 pinions: Wings.
43 Anarchs: Tyrants who promote misrule; cp. ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October, 1818’, l. 152 (p. 157), and The Triumph of Life, l. 237.
45 astonished: Stunned, bewildered.
46 nodding: The sense is elusive: perhaps the image is of promontories covered with trees ‘nodding’ in the wind.
47 dividuous: The sense is not immediately clear. OED defines the word as ‘divisible, characterized by division’; so PBS may have intended ‘(a large number of) individual waves’. Webb 1995 suggests ‘which break up’.
48–9 Perhaps referring to arguments made by, for example, the German classicist Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68), on the climate and landscape of Greece and the flourishing of Classical Greek culture.
51 unapprehensive: Deficient in understanding.
53 savage: Uncultivated.
58 Parian stone: Fine white marble from the island of Paros, prized by ancient Greek sculptors.
73 mock: Imitate.
74 that hill: The Acropolis, the citadel on a rocky plateau dominating Athens which included the Parthenon and other magnificent temples built in the fifth century BC.
75 PBS identifies Athens as both the historical birthplace of liberty and an emblem of what mankind might achieve in the future.
76–9 Cp. ‘Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa’, ll. 13–16.
92 Like a wolf-cub … [Shelley’s note]: A Maenad, in Greek myth, was a frenzied female follower of Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy (cp. l. 171). Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Semele, one of the daughters of Cadmus; in Euripides’ play The Bacchae, the Maenads were Semele’s sisters, the other daughters of Cadmus (hence ‘Cadmaean’). PBS here blends the figures of Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome, supposed to have been suckled by a she-wolf, with the report of a Maenad suckling a wolf-cub in The Bacchae. On Maenads, see also Prometheus Unbound II.iii.7–10, IV.473–5.
93 thy dearest: Athens.
94 Elysian: From Elysium, the paradise of Greek and Roman myth.
95 terrible: Awe-inspiring.
98 Marcus Furius Camillus (c.446–365 BC) was a Roman statesman and military commander, sometimes known as the second founder of Rome after he returned from exile to defend the city from a besieging army of Gauls in 386 BC; PBS described Camillus as ‘that most perfect & virtuous of men’ (Letters II, p. 86). Marcus Atilius Regulus (consul 267 and 256 BC) led the Roman invasion of Africa during the First Punic War and was taken prisoner by the Carthaginians. Tradition had it that, sent to Rome to sue for peace, he instead advised the Romans to continue fighting, and then honourably returned to Carthage knowing he would be executed.
99 thy robe … whiteness: The Vestal Virgins, priestesses of the cult of Vesta, Roman goddess of the hearth, were charged with keeping alight a perpetual flame which guaranteed the safety of Rome.
100–105 PBS associates the Capitoline Hill in Rome with the founding of the Republic, and the Palatine Hill (l. 103) with the Empire.
104 Ionian: Here probably signifying the Greek, and specifically Athenian, attachment to political liberty celebrated in stanzas V and VI.
106 Traditionally wild and rugged, Hyrcania was a region south of the Caspian (Hyrcanian) Sea, in modern-day Iran and Turkmenistan.
111 Naiad: In Greek myth, Naiads were female spirits associated with particular rivers, lakes, or fountains.
115 Scald … Druid: Skalds were the court poets of Scandinavia and Iceland during the Viking era; Druids were priests in Celtic Britain, Ireland and France.
116 shattered: Some editors have emended to ‘scattered’, but ‘shattered’ could also mean ‘dispersed’ (OED).
119 The Galilean serpent: Christianity (as opposed to Jesus, whose teachings, PBS believed, had been perverted by the institutional Church).
123 Alfred’s olive-cinctured brow: Alfred the Great (848–99), King of Wessex, repelled a Danish invasion and introduced legal and political reforms. In ancient Greece, an olive wreath was awarded to the victor in the Olympic Games and is a traditional symbol of peace (‘cinctured’ = ‘encircled’).
124–35 PBS compares the rise of the Italian city states in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, which maintained liberty in opposition to religious-political tyranny and created conditions which allowed the arts to flourish, to the rise of volcanic islands from the sea.
136 huntress … Moon: In Greek myth, Artemis was goddess of the hunt and of the moon.
141 In PBS’s view, Martin Luther (1483–1546) inspired a religious awakening but did not go far enough in challenging ecclesiastical authority. See A Defence of Poetry: ‘Dante was the first religious reformer, and Luther surpassed him rather in the rudeness and acrimony than in the boldness of his censures of papal usurpation’ (here).
145 England’s prophets: The writers and thinkers of the English Renaissance, including Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton. Cp. ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, ll. 31–2, and A Philosophical View of Reform: ‘Shakespeare and Lord Bacon and the great writers of the age of Elizabeth and James the 1st were at once the effects of the new spirit in men’s minds and the causes of its more complete development’ (Prose, p. 231).
147–50 The restoration of the Stuart monarchy, a political calamity for the republican Milton, was a sombre circumstance beyond which his vision allowed him to see.
148–9 Contrasting Milton’s prophetic powers with his physical blindness.
151–65 The stanza is a symbolic celebration of the progress of enlightened thought in Europe from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth century, the period that included the American Revolution.
158 the destroyer: Death.
166–73 Centuries of oppression issued in the bloodshed that marred the French Revolution, the supporters of monarchy and the Church behaving like drunken revellers. For ‘Bacchanals’, see note to ‘To —–’ (‘Corpses are cold in the tomb’), l. 19.
174 one: Napoleon Bonaparte; for PBS’s attitude to Napoleon, cp. ‘Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte’, ‘Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon’ and The Triumph of Life, ll. 215–31.
181–7 As Geoffrey Matthews was the first to point out (‘A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley’, ELH 24 (1957), pp. 191–228), PBS deploys contemporary scientific investigations into the subterranean connections between volcanoes to symbolize the inevitable spread of revolution across Europe.
185–6 The Aeolian (or Lipari) Islands are a volcanic archipelago located off the north coast of Sicily. Pithecusa (Ischia) is south-west of Naples and Pelorus (Punta del Faro) lies at the north-eastern tip of Sicily.
188 The brilliant light diffused by the volcanic eruptions of Liberty obscures the heavenly bodies.
189–90 The interests of the wealthy, which England could easily shake off if it wished, contrast with the long traditions of absolutism in Spain which require a resolute struggle.
194 West: Referring to democratic developments in America, probably both North and South.
196 Arminius (c.18 BC–AD 21): A Germanic tribal chieftain who inflicted a defeat on the Romans in AD 9, effectively halting further Roman expansion into Germania.
201 While he was composing ‘Ode to Liberty’ PBS felt that a revolution in Germany was imminent. Cp. A Philosophical View of Reform: ‘everything … wears in Germany the aspect of rapidly maturing revolution’ (Prose, p. 237).
204 lost Paradise: In Julian and Maddalo, l. 57, Italy is described as ‘Paradise of exiles’.
212 KING: Replaced by four asterisks in 1820; PBS authorized the substitution when he sent the poem to London in July 1820 (Letters II, pp. 213–14), because ‘imagining or compassing the king’s death’ constituted high treason.
217–18 According to legend, Gordius, King of Phrygia, bound his chariot in a temple with a highly complicated knot; an oracle foretold that whoever untied the knot would become king of all Asia. Alexander the Great, having failed to undo it, simply sliced through it with his sword. Hence, ‘gordian’ = ‘intricate’, ‘hard to solve’.
220 irrefragably: Obstinately, intractably.
221 The axes and the rods: The fasces, an axe tied in a bundle of rods, which was a symbol of public authority in ancient Rome, and became so again in fascist Italy.
224 thou: Liberty.
225 reluctant: ‘Struggling, writhing’ (OED).
231–3 Cp. PBS’s characterization of those open to imaginative power in A Philosophical View of Reform: ‘they are … compelled to serve, that which is seated on the throne of their own soul. And whatever systems <they> may professedly support, they actually advance the interests of Liberty’ (here). See also the final paragraph of A Defence of Poetry (here).
233 power unknown: From Queen Mab onwards, PBS’s work makes reference to a force which animates the natural world and which is distinct from the human mind and will. Cp., for example, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and ‘Mont Blanc’.
234–40 PBS evinces an acute awareness of the limitations and distortions of language, in e.g. ‘On Life’ and in his MS note to ‘On Love’: ‘These words inefficient & metaphorical—Most words so—No help—’ (here).
240 In this secular version of the Last Judgement, words finally stand ‘before their Lord’, presumably the ‘aweless soul’ or ‘power unknown’ (l. 233).
241 He: Commentators have suggested that the antecedent is ‘their Lord’ in the previous line, or that ‘He who’ is used for ‘Whoever’.
243–5 Cp. ‘Sonnet: Political Greatness’.
246–7 A challenge to Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), which had identified famines and wars as necessary means of keeping in check a population whose growth threatened to exceed the increase of natural resources available to support it. Cp. l. 263 and note.
254 Cp. Coleridge, ‘France: An Ode’, l. 60: ‘them that toil and groan’.
255 thy … hers: Liberty’s and Nature’s.
258 Eoan: Eastern; from ‘Eos’, the Greek goddess of the dawn.
259 pennons: Wings.
263 life’s ill-apportioned lot: Poems III suggests a possible reference to Malthus’s notorious phrase ‘the unhappy persons who, in the great lottery of life, have drawn a blank’ (An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), chapter 10).
273 a wild swan: Cp. PBS’s portrait of Byron as ‘a tempest-cleaving Swan / Of the songs of Albion’ in ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills’, ll. 174–5.
This well-known and much-anthologized lyric was composed at Livorno in late June 1820 and published in 1820, which supplies our copy-text, though its punctuation and capitalization have been modified with reference to PBS’s fair copy in Harvard MS Eng. 258.2 (see MYR (Shelley) V). MWS later recalled the occasion that provided the germ of the poem: ‘It was on a beautiful summer evening, while wandering among the lanes whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the sky-lark which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems’ (1839 IV, p. 50). In the letter from Livorno to T. L. Peacock of 12 July 1820 that probably enclosed the press copy of the poem, PBS wrote: ‘I wonder why I write verses, for nobody reads them’ (Letters II, p. 213). Together with several other poems published in 1820 – ‘The Sensitive-Plant’, ‘The Cloud’, ‘An Exhortation’, ‘Ode to the West Wind’ – ‘To a Sky-Lark’ takes a closely observed aspect of the natural world as the starting place for a meditation on imaginative creation. Recent lyrics apostrophizing a bird, which PBS knew and which bear interesting comparison with his poem, include Wordsworth’s ‘To a Sky-Lark’, ‘To the Cuckoo’ and ‘The Green Linnet’ – all in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). The stanza of four lines of five or six syllables followed by an alexandrine of twelve syllables has been compared both to the lark’s song and to its slowly rising flight and sudden fall.
5 unpremeditated: The word had come to describe genuine inspiration following Milton’s allusion to his ‘celestial’ Muse Urania, who inspires his ‘unpremeditated verse’ in Paradise Lost IX.21–4.
8 cloud of fire: A cloud lit up by the setting sun, as in ll. 11–13 or, as G. M. Matthews suggests (Shelley: Selected Poems and Prose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964)), a burst of smoke and flame sent up by a volcano.
22 silver sphere: The planet Venus as the morning star.
33–5 The ‘Drops’ are those that continue to fall from a cloud after the sun has appeared, creating a rainbow.
45 bower: Abode, or perhaps a chamber or bedroom (OED 2a).
64 love or wine: Themes traditionally associated with the Greek lyric poet Anacreon (born c.570 BC) and his imitators.
66 Chorus Hymeneal: Song sung at a wedding; Hymen was the Greek god invoked at marriage ceremonies.
86 Adapting Hamlet’s words on human mental powers: ‘he that made us with such large discourse, / Looking before and after, gave us not / That capability and god-like reason / To fust in us unused’ (Shakespeare, Hamlet, ‘Additional Passages’ in Wells and Taylor OUP edition, here; see headnote to Notes).
103 madness: The traditional idea of the poet’s inspiration as ‘divine madness’, without which he could not create true poetry whatever his technical skill, PBS will have encountered in Plato’s Phaedrus, which he read in May 1819, and perhaps in Plato’s Ion, which he was to translate in early 1821.
Composed between late June and early July 1820, and probably sent to Maria Gisborne in London, with a letter from MWS, on 7 July. PBS’s draft survives in the Bodleian Library (see BSM XIV). The fair copy he sent to Maria Gisborne has been lost, as has a transcript made of that copy by the Gisbornes in 1822, at MWS’s request. MWS’s transcript, now in the Huntington Library (MS 12338: see MYR (Shelley) III), probably derives from the copy made by the Gisbornes. A further copy, made by John Gisborne in 1831, presumably from the original sent by PBS, also survives in the Bodleian Library (MS Abinger d.19). Our text is based on the John Gisborne transcript, with some readings supplied from PBS’s draft and MWS’s transcript (see also note to ll. 272–3). First published in 1824, the poem was given the present title in 1839. MWS records in her ‘Note on the Poems of 1820’ in 1839:
We spent a week or two near Leghorn [actually 15 June–4 August], borrowing the house of some friends who were absent on a journey to England … [PBS] addressed the letter to Mrs. Gisborne from this house, which was hers: he had made his study of the workshop of her son, who was an engineer. Mrs. Gisborne had been a friend of my father in her younger days. She was a lady of great accomplishments, and charming from her frank and affectionate nature. She had the most intense love of knowledge, a delicate and trembling sensibility, and preserved freshness of mind after a life of considerable adversity. As a favourite friend of my father, we had sought her with eagerness; and the most open and cordial friendship was established between us. (IV, p. 50)
PBS first met Maria Gisborne, to whom William Godwin had proposed marriage in 1799 after Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, her husband John, and son Henry, at Livorno (Leghorn) on 9 May 1818. A close friendship soon developed between the two families. PBS, in a letter to T. L. Peacock, described Maria Gisborne as ‘a sufficiently amiable & a very accomplished woman’ (Letters II, p. 114). She introduced him to the work of the Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681) and began to tutor him in Spanish (see ll. 175–86). PBS, for his part, lent financial backing to Henry Reveley (her son by a previous marriage) for his (ultimately abandoned) plan to construct a steamboat to sail between Livorno and Marseilles (see ll. 15–21). MWS, in 1840 (ELTF), writes:
He [PBS] set on foot the project of a steam-boat to ply between Marseilles and Leghorn, for their benefit, as far as pecuniary profit might accrue; at the same time that he took a fervent interest in the undertaking, for its own sake. It was not puerile vanity, but a nobler feeling of honest pride, that made him enjoy the idea of being the first to introduce steam navigation into the Gulf of Lyons, and to glory in the consciousness of being in this manner useful to his fellow-creatures. (I, pp. xxii–xxiii)
The light-hearted tone of the poem contrasts with the domestic difficulties facing the Shelleys in June 1820: the result of ongoing financial wrangling with Godwin, who was importuning PBS for yet another in a series of loans (see ll.196–201), and of accusations that PBS had fathered an illegitimate child that was born in Naples during the winter of 1818–19 (Bieri II, pp. 102–15).
The verse epistle in rhyming couplets addressed to a friend or acquaintance was a form practised by Ben Jonson and Alexander Pope, and by Leigh Hunt, Thomas Moore and Keats among PBS’s contemporaries. PBS’s ‘Letter’, not intended for publication, encompasses private allusions, some acerbic personal opinions, and a range of literary references appropriate to the cultivated set of friends among whom it was intended to circulate. Relaxed and conversational in tone, its detailed observations and delighted attention to the ordinary contribute to its celebration of the varied pleasure of friendship.
For critical comment on the poem, see Ann Thompson, ‘Shelley’s “Letter to Maria Gisborne”: Tact and Clutter’, in Essays on Shelley, ed. Miriam Allott (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1982), pp. 144–59; and Timothy Webb, ‘Scratching at the Door of Absence: Writing and Reading “Letter to Maria Gisborne”’, in The Unfamiliar Shelley, ed. Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 119–36.
1 The spider: In The Battle of the Books (1704), Jonathan Swift contrasts the spider as an emblem of the modern writer, who spins his subjects out of his own entrails, with the bee representing the ancient writer, who seeks his subjects far and wide.
4 His: PBS’s draft and John Gisborne’s transcript both read ‘Her’; ‘His’, the reading in MWS’s transcript and 1824, strengthens the identification of the ‘silkworm’ (l. 3) with PBS himself, but might not have his authority.
5 PBS refers to the attacks on his work and character made by Quarterly Review XXI (April 1819), in a review of Laon and Cythna/The Revolt of Islam (1817–18). See also ll. 106–14.
6–14 PBS spins words and ideas to make a cocoon from which when he is dead his winged verse will emerge to win fame and loving remembrance.
10 that: i.e. the ‘decaying form’ (l. 6) of PBS’s body.
12 asphodels: Lily-like plants, in Greek myth growing in the Elysian Fields, immortal resting place of the heroic and the good after death.
15 I wist: I know.
16 mighty mechanist: One skilled in the construction of machines (but also, as Poems III observes, comprising the sense of one holding a mechanistic view of the universe), here associated with the Greek mathematician, scientist and inventor Archimedes of Syracuse (c.287–212 BC). A claim attributed to Archimedes – ‘Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth’ – serves as epigraph to Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna (1817).
19–21 PBS alludes to the steamboat which Maria Gisborne’s son, Henry Reveley, was planning to build, with his financial backing (see headnote). A ‘gin’ is an intricate or clever device (see OED n. 12).
23–4 Vulcan … Titans: Vulcan was the Classical god of the forge. On the orders of Jove (Jupiter), Vulcan constructed an ever-spinning wheel to which Ixion was bound in punishment for having committed parricide and for having attempted to seduce Juno, the wife of Jove. Vulcan also fashioned a number of the restraints with which Jove imprisoned the defeated Titans, including the chains which bound Prometheus to his mountain prison.
25 St. Dominic (c.1170–1221): The founder of the Dominican Order, which conducted the Spanish Inquisition, notorious for its severity in repressing heresy.
27–43 These lines allude to the disastrous fate of the Spanish Armada, which the Catholic Philip II of Spain and his council (ironically qualified as ‘philanthropic’), sent against the Protestant England of Elizabeth I in 1588. After defeat by the English fleet, the Armada, in attempting to flee back to Spain, suffered heavy losses in storms off Scotland and Ireland.
33–4 who now … Freedom’s hearth: After a military insurrection earlier in 1820, King Ferdinand VII of Spain had accepted demands for a constitutional government, inaugurating three years of liberal rule. See ‘Ode to Liberty’, ll. 1–5.
35 Instruments of torture associated with the Spanish Inquisition.
45 Proteus: In Greek myth, a sea god who could change shape at will.
51 Tubal Cain: In Genesis 4:22 ‘an instructer of every artificer in brass and iron’.
53 what: The planned steamboat.
55 knacks and quips: ‘Ingenious contrivances’ (OED 3) and ‘curious objects’ (OED 2), respectively.
56 catalogize: Make a catalogue of.
58 quicksilver: Mercury, which is liquid at room temperature.
gnomes: Diminutive goblin-like creatures dwelling underground, guardians of mines.
59 swink: Work.
60 daemons of the earthquake: Cp. ‘Mont Blanc’, l. 72.
65 rouse: A large or full cup, drunk as a toast (OED n. 21).
75 A rude idealism: A rough imitation of; PBS loved to make and sail paper boats.
83 statical: ‘Of or relating to the science of statics’ (OED 1b); that is, concerned with the effects of weight and the distribution of forces.
84 rosin: Resin.
95 Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) was a French mathematician and astronomer; PBS drew on his influential Exposition du système du monde (1796) in Queen Mab. Nicholas Saunderson (1682–1739), professor of mathematics at Cambridge University and disciple of Isaac Newton, designed an abacus for complex calculations and published a treatise on algebra. Sims is usually identified as Robert Simson (1687–1768), whose textbook Elements of Euclid (1756) went through many editions.
98 Baron de Tott’s memoirs: François Baron de Tott (1733–93), a French diplomat, served in Istanbul and the Crimea, and published his widely read Mémoires sur les Turcs et les Tartares in 1784.
103 mo: More; this form occurs in Spenser and other Renaissance writers, and in Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto I (1812), stanza 93, l. 4, where the form is ‘moe’.
104 the pregnant womb of time: Echoing Shakespeare, Othello I.iii.368–9: ‘There are many events in the womb of time.’
106 Archimage: Chief ‘mage’ or magician, recalling ‘Archimago’, the evil enchanter in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. See note to l. 186 of The Witch of Atlas.
107–14 PBS likens the nautical steam engine Henry Reveley was planning to the mental mechanism of his own imagination which produces poetry that attracts abusive reviews. See notes to Adonais, ‘Preface’.
114 Libeccio: The south-west wind. On 12 July 1820, PBS wrote to Peacock: ‘the Libecchio [sic] here howls like a chorus of fiends all day’ (Letters II, p. 213).
129–30 war / Of worms: Cp. ‘Ode to Liberty’, l. 29
132 quaint: Cunning, wise, insightful (OED 1).
137 second-sighted: Gifted with second sight, visionary, prophetic.
141 sweet oracle: i.e. ‘Hope’ (l. 139).
142 the sad enchantress: i.e. ‘the quaint witch Memory’ (l. 132).
149 transverse lightning: Lightning extending across the sky.
157–8 or is … believe: Cp. ‘The flower that smiles today’, ll. 3–7.
160 anatomize: Examine in minute detail.
164–6 ‘When we shall be as safe in death as we were before we were born’ (G. M. Matthews, Shelley: Selected Poems and Prose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964)).
168 visionary rhyme: Poems III suggests that PBS may refer to Prometheus Unbound, which he read to the Gisbornes in the autumn of 1819. Cp. The Witch of Atlas, l. 8.
175–86 See headnote and note to ll. 33–4.
175 indued: ‘Put on’, as an article of clothing.
180 ‘My name … Legion!’: A demon in Mark 5:9 answers Jesus: ‘My name is Legion: for we are many.’
181 Calderon: See headnote.
196–201 PBS describes his father-in-law, the novelist and political philosopher William Godwin (1756–1836), adapting Milton’s description of himself in Paradise Lost VII.24–6: ‘with mortal voice, unchanged / To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days, / On evil days though fallen’. In summer 1820, Godwin was causing MWS and PBS considerable distress with requests for money.
202–8 See note on Coleridge in Peter Bell the Third, ll. 373–97.
209–25 Hunt: James Henry (Leigh) Hunt (1784–1859) was a poet, journalist and editor of the liberal weekly The Examiner, which published some of PBS’s poetry. PBS dedicated The Cenci to Hunt, one of his closest friends.
210 the salt of the earth: In Matthew 5:13, Jesus thus describes his followers.
213 Shout: Robert Shout (1764–1843), a London sculptor who made plaster copies of Classical statuary.
215 coronals of bay: Wreathes of laurel (bay) leaves, symbolic of literary achievement.
220 duns: Debt collectors.
226–32 Thomas Jefferson Hogg (1792–1862), PBS’s friend since student days in Oxford, from which they were both expelled in March 1811. MWS characterizes Hogg in a letter to Leigh Hunt of 6 April 1819: ‘You say that you think that he has a good heart – and so do I – but who can be sure of it – he wraps himself up in a triple veil – and places or appears to place a high wall between himself & his fellows’ (MWS Letters I, p. 91).
232–47 Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866), PBS’s friend since 1812, married Jane Gryffydh from the mountainous Snowdonia region in north Wales on 22 March 1820, having become an employee of the British East India Company (hence ‘Indian’ and ‘Hindoo’ in ll. 235–6) the previous year. Poet, author of a number of satirical novels, including Headlong Hall (1815), Melincourt (1817) and Nightmare Abbey (1818), and of The Four Ages of Poetry (1820), which provoked PBS’s reply in A Defence of Poetry.
240 cameleopard: Giraffe.
250 Horace Smith (1779–1849): Poet, parodist (with his brother James), banker, friend and financial adviser to PBS since 1816.
257 unpavilioned: The sense seems to be ‘without clouds’; cp. Prometheus Unbound IV.181–4.
260 Cp. ‘Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici’, ll. 8–9.
261 the inverse deep: The sky as counterpart to the sea.
266 hackney-coaches: Horse-drawn carriages available for hire.
267 lordly: MWS’s transcript, 1824 and John Gisborne’s transcript all read ‘lonely’, apparently the result of miscopying: PBS’s draft has ‘lordly’.
269–71 The night watchman acts as pimp for the drunken prostitute.
272–3 MWS wrote this couplet in the margin of PBS’s draft; it was printed in 1840, though not in 1824 or 1839. Nor is it in MWS’s transcript, though it is in John Gisborne’s. Rather than PBS’s, it may be the work of MWS or of Maria Gisborne. The allusion is to Apollonia (Pollonia) Ricci, the daughter of the Gisborne’s landlord at Livorno, whose attraction to Henry Reveley (apparently reciprocated) is jokingly referred to by MWS in a letter to Maria Gisborne of 18 June 1820 (MWS Letters I, pp. 146–8).
274–7 PBS describes the garden of Casa Ricci, the Gisborne’s house at Livorno.
278 unsickled: Not cut or harvested.
286 contadino: A countryman, peasant.
294 low-thoughted care: Echoing Milton, Comus, l. 6.
299–301 Replaced by lines of asterisks in 1824 and 1839, to suppress the reference to PBS’s estrangement from his father, Sir Timothy Shelley.
305 syllabubs: Flavoured mixtures of milk or cream to which wine has been added.
308 Grand Duke: Ferdinando III was Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1790 to 1801, and again from 1814 to 1824.
310–15 PBS says that, should his nerves become agitated during the Gisbornes’ visit, he will settle them by studying geometry, avoiding altogether the excitement of composing poetry or falling in love.
312 descant: Discussion.
316 laudanum: Tincture of opium; prescribed for a variety of ailments.
317 Helicon … [Shelley’s note]: The spring of Hippocrene on Mount Helicon was sacred to the Muses; the river Himera, in Sicily, gave its name to the Greek colony which grew up around it. (Himeros was a deity of erotic desire.)
318 God: Replaced by three asterisks in MWS’s editions.
323 The last line of Milton’s Lycidas.
As the MSS make clear, this exercise in sustained vituperation, written between summer and early autumn 1820 and published in part in 1839, complete in 1840, is addressed to John Scott, Earl of Eldon (1751–1838). In 1801–6 and 1807–27, Eldon held the office of Lord Chancellor; as such he was head of the judiciary and presided in the House of Lords. It was he who in March 1817 delivered the legal judgement that deprived PBS of the custody of the two children of his first marriage, to Harriet Westbrook, following her suicide the previous autumn. The court’s decision cited the necessity of preventing PBS from inculcating in the children (what in its view were) the ‘immoral and vicious’ principles that his behaviour had demonstrated in leaving his first wife to cohabit with the then Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. T. L. Peacock remembered that PBS spoke of Eldon with ‘feelings of abhorrence’ only equalled by his revulsion at the bullying he had suffered at Eton (Life II, pp. 312–13). The present poem may be compared to the curse which the Phantasm of Jupiter recalls Prometheus had directed against Jupiter in Prometheus Unbound I.262–301. Our text is taken from MWS’s transcription with corrections by PBS in the Houghton Library at Harvard University: the title ‘To Lxxd Exxxn’ is cancelled, suppressing the reference to one of the most powerful men in the country, and ‘To —–’ substituted for it. In an earlier fair draft, ‘Lord Chancellor’ is scored through in the title (for both, see MYR (Shelley) V). Minor modifications to punctuation have been made.
2 many-headed worm: The mythical Hydra was a serpent with several heads.
3 Priestly Pest: Eldon was a devoted advocate of the Church of England’s role in public life.
4 buried form: In 1839 MWS identifies this as the court of Star Chamber, abolished in 1641, which delivered arbitrary judgements in secret proceedings and was held to be politically motivated.
7 fraud-accumulated gold: Eldon grew wealthy in office.
14 daughter’s hope: PBS’s children with his first wife were Eliza Ianthe, born 23 June 1813, and Charles, whom he never knew, born 30 November 1814.
19 prove: Feel, experience.
21–4 This stanza was first cancelled then restored in the MS.
22 were: Were as.
stranger’s hearth: Ianthe and Charles were in the care of guardians.
36 why not fatherless: Poems III glosses the phrase ‘since they are to lose their father, why not execute him?’
40–41 Between these two stanzas another is cancelled in the copy-text:
By thy most impious Hell, and all its terror,
By all the grief, the madness, & the guilt
Which [for Of] thine impostures, which must be their error
That sand on which thy crumbling Power is built.
47–8 Eldon was known to weep in court. See The Mask of Anarchy, ll. 14–21.
48 millstones: Ironically recalling Christ’s words in Matthew 18:6: ‘But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.’
As he declares in l. 36, PBS composed the 672 lines of The Witch of Atlas (WA) in three days, 14–16 August 1820. This prodigious creative performance followed immediately upon his return from a two-day excursion from Bagni di San Giuliano near Pisa to Monte San Pellegrino (1,529 metres high) in the Apennines, where a shrine on the summit attracted pilgrims in the summer months. On 20 January 1821 the poem was posted to Charles Ollier in London, who chose not to publish it. MWS included it in 1824 without the dedication, the first three stanzas of which she supplied in 1839, and the remaining three in 1840. Our text is based on 1824 and, for the dedication, 1839 and 1840. The punctuation of these editions has been modified and some readings have been adopted from PBS’s fair copy in Bodleian MS Shelley d. 1 (see BSM IV).
Leigh Hunt astutely defined the scope of WA as encompassing both the ‘fairy region’ of imagination and the ‘mortal strife’ of the world as it is (Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: H. Colburn, 1828) I, p. 352). PBS’s vehicle for bringing the fanciful and the real into critical relation is loosely constructed around major elements of story – birth, artistic creation and voyage of discovery – which he ends abruptly, conspicuously refusing to bring it to any narrative completion. For the details of WA’s episodes he drew upon a rich variety of sources in myth and poetry, history, philosophy and prose fiction. These range from Herodotus’ Histories and Plato’s dialogues through Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Milton’s Paradise Lost to the modern mythological poetry of T. L. Peacock’s Rhododaphne (1818) and Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810). The ottava rima stanza of eight lines, rhyming abababcc, which PBS had adopted in July 1820 for his translation of the Homeric Hymn to Mercury, he had most recently encountered in the Italian comic epic Il Ricciardetto (1738) by Niccolò Forteguerri, which he read aloud in that month, as well as in Byron’s Don Juan I and II, which he read the previous January. Poems III, pp. 380–85, assesses the role of these and other sources.
WA celebrates the animation of nature to be found in ‘the graceful religion of the Greeks’ which PBS considered as having been deformed and rejected by Christianity (Letters II, p. 230) – and in particular the natural eroticism represented by Pan, together with his Sylvans and Fauns, beings originally imagined as embodying ‘all that could enliven and delight’ (see the extract from ‘On the Devil, and Devils’). Poet that she is, the Witch is captivated by the beauty and strangeness of the world and creates from its materials with exhilaration, not neglecting on occasion to work the touch of mischief to which her powers tempt her. MWS found that the poem illustrated ‘that sense of mystery that formed an essential portion of [PBS’s] perception of life’ (Preface to 1840). Nevertheless, in the ‘Note’ on WA in 1840 she argues her conviction, playfully mocked in the dedication, that PBS would have taken ‘his proper rank among the writers of the day’ had he adopted ‘subjects that would more suit the popular taste’.
Important readings of WA include: Harold Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 165–204; Richard Cronin, Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 55–76; Michael O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley’s Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 126–56; and Stuart Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse: The Narrative and Dramatic Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 143–57.
9 fly: The ephemerid or mayfly, one of an order of winged insects whose life lasts a day or less.
12 swan … sun: The swan, fabled to sing just before its death, was sacred to Apollo, god of the sun, poetry and music.
17–24 PBS dedicated his poem Laon and Cythna (1817), revised as The Revolt of Islam (1818), to MWS, laying it metaphorically ‘at thy feet’ (Dedication, l. 11). It includes a scene in which ‘a winged youth’ appears in a dream (l. 500). The sales of the poem had been disappointing and it had been harshly reviewed. See the Dedication before Laon and Cythna’ and the headnote to Peter Bell the Third.
21 watery bow: Rainbow.
25–32 Wordsworth claimed in the Dedication before his Peter Bell (1819) that he had worked intermittently at improving the poem since finishing it in 1798. See headnote to Peter Bell the Third.
34 Ruth or Lucy: Characters in Wordsworth’s poems ‘Ruth’ and ‘Lucy Gray’ in Lyrical Ballads (1800).
37–8 Contrasting the ‘Light’ and ‘flowing’ verse that clothes his Witch with the ‘stays’ (as in a corset) that constrict Wordsworth’s style.
40 The quotation is from Shakespeare, King Lear III.iv.31, in which Lear pities the poor whose tattered clothes offer no protection against the storm.
42–3 See Peter Bell the Third, ll. 21–5. In his review of Peter Bell, Leigh Hunt had accused Wordsworth of promoting fear of hell.
42 hyperequatorial: Hotter than at the equator.
44 mark: Target.
45 Scaramouch: A cowardly braggart in Italian farce.
47 shrive you: Absolve you.
55 lady-witch: Commentators have noted the resemblance of PBS’s Witch to the Massylian priestess evoked in Virgil’s Aeneid IV.480–91, guardian of the Hesperides’ temple (see note to l. 57 below), who with her spells can bring ease or care to human minds and has the power to alter the course of nature and raise the dead.
Atlas’ mountain: The highest peak of the Atlas range of mountains in present-day Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia is Toubkal in south-western Morocco. PBS here intends the mythical mountain into which the giant Atlas – forced by Zeus to bear the weight of the heavens on his shoulders – was transformed when shown the Medusa’s head by Perseus.
57 Atlantides: Daughters of Atlas, also called the Hesperides; after their death they became the constellation Pleiades.
58–64 The stanza is indebted to Spenser’s Faerie Queene III.vi.7 ff., recounting the conception and birth of the twin sisters Belphoebe and Amoret.
70 in a fit: Temporarily obscured; cp. ‘To S[idmouth] and [Castlereagh]’, l. 9.
73 the Mother of the Months: The moon.
74 the folding-star: Venus as the evening star, which appears at the time sheep are gathered into the fold.
89 spotted cameleopard: Giraffe.
92 Of his own volumes intervolved: Coiled in his own spirals.
93 sanguine: Bloody, carnivorous.
97 brinded: Brindled: tawny or brownish with differently tinted streaks or spots.
99 pard: Leopard or panther.
104 imparadise: Enrapture.
105 Silenus: A satyr-like minor woodland deity, a repository of wisdom and tutor to Dionysus – represented as fat, ugly, often drunk, and riding on an ass.
108 Cicadae: Cicadas were proverbially happy and carefree and supposed to drink dew, as in Anacreon, Ode 34.
109 Dryope … Faunus: In Ovid, Metamorphoses IX.329–93, Dryope is transformed into a lotus tree as punishment for having plucked one of its flowers, which shed the blood of a nymph who had herself been metamorphosed into the tree. She is mentioned as the mother of the warrior Tarquitus, fathered by Faunus, in Aeneid X.550–51. Originally a benevolent Roman god, Faunus was known as the protector of shepherds and flocks, associated with the forest demons known as fauns, who were half men and half goat. He was also revered as a legendary king of Latium before the founding of Rome.
110 the God: Silenus, who is teased to sing a song in Virgil, Eclogues VI.
113 Universal Pan: An Arcadian rural deity of shepherds and flocks, a satyr (half man and half goat), a follower of Dionysus and endowed with prodigious sexual energy. The Greek word pan means ‘all’, and in Greek religion of late antiquity Pan became known as a ‘universal’ god.
116 want: A mole (Norton 2002).
122 every shepherdess of Ocean’s flocks: Oceanides, daughters of Oceanus (l. 124).
125 quaint Priapus: Priapus was a god of gardens, vineyards and orchards. Statues represent him as a small man with enormous genitalia – hence ‘quaint’ in the sense of ‘strange’ (OED III.8) or, perhaps ironically, ‘cunningly contrived’ (OED I.3a).
129–36 Commentators have traced the human and other creatures mentioned in this stanza to various Classical sources, especially Herodotus’ Histories and Pliny’s Natural History. See Poems III.
130 Garamant: A region in Libya said to be inhabited by a primitive people.
133 Polyphemes: One-eyed giants or Cyclopes such as Polyphemus in Homer, Odyssey IX.187 ff.
134 Centaurs and Satyrs: Centaurs were mythical creatures, half man and half horse. For Satyrs, see note to l. 113.
135 clefts: Crevices.
141 betrayed: Revealed.
156 cells: Small compartments as in a honeycomb.
161 quaint: see note to l. 125.
171 Clipt: Tightly enclosed.
174 vans: Wings.
185–95 Stored on scrolls in the Witch’s cave, the wise spells of a benevolent sorcerer of the Age of Gold (when Saturn ruled the earth) could teach men how to recover the Golden Age by redeeming the vice they acquired as a birthright by being born in the Age of Iron. See Hesiod, Works and Days, ll. 109 ff., and Ovid, Metamorphoses I.89 ff.; ll. 189–91 clearly refer to the Age of Iron as described in Metamorphoses I.
186 Archimage: A chief or great enchanter, and the name of the wicked magician in Spenser’s Faerie Queene whose books contain evil charms (I.i.36–8). See ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, ll. 106 ff.
199 the prophane: The uninitiated.
217–24 The nymphs specific to various natural locations ask the Witch if they might become immortal in her service. Hamadryades, Oreads and Naiads are nymphs, respectively, of trees, mountains and streams/rivers.
224 satellite: Attendant.
245 knell: A sound resembling a knell, i.e. the sound of a bell or other sound announcing a death (OED 3, citing this text).
247 serene: ‘Unruffled expanse’ (OED serene, adj. and n. B b).
253 woof: Woven fabric.
274 that cold hill: Mount Atlas.
276 asphodel: See note to ‘The Sensitive-Plant’, Part First, l. 54.
283 bearded star: A comet (with its following tail).
289–90 Vulcan, the blacksmith god of fire and husband of the goddess of love, makes a chariot in which the planet Venus, morning and evening star, travels across the sky.
292 that sphere: The third of the heavenly spheres, that of Venus. See note to ‘The Sensitive-Plant’, Part First, l. 88, and to l. 338 below.
294 car: Chariot.
297–9 Love is the first of the gods to be born, according to Plato’s Symposium, which PBS translated in summer 1818 (Ingpen and Peck VII, p. 171). See also Prometheus Unbound II.iv.32–3.
301 mould: Soil as a growing medium.
302 his mother’s star: The planet Venus.
312 circumfluous: Flowing around; in ancient geography the ocean was imagined as a stream surrounding the earth.
317 Evans: Evan was a name of Bacchus, often represented in a chariot drawn by panthers.
318 Vesta: The Roman goddess of the hearth in whose temple a perpetual flame, held to preserve the Roman state, was tended by the Vestal Virgins.
327–8 Pygmalion fell in love with an ivory statue of a beautiful woman he had sculpted and which Venus brought to life in response to his prayer.
329 sexless thing: Hermaphroditus (as the creature is addressed in l. 388), offspring of Hermes/Mercury and Aphrodite/Venus, was a youth desired so passionately by the nymph Salmacis that the gods answered her prayer and moulded them together into a single being uniting both sexes (Metamorphoses IV.285 ff.). According to Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium, a third (androgynous and very powerful) sex originally existed but was divided into male and female as a punishment for challenging the gods. PBS’s translation of the passage is in Ingpen and Peck VII, p. 183.
338 the seventh sphere: The sphere of Saturn, the seventh of the nine or ten concentric hollow globes that in the Ptolemaic astronomy made up the basic structure of the heavens. The first seven revolved round the earth, carrying the planets.
344 with opposing feet: i.e. she sat facing Hermaphroditus.
349 pinnace: Small boat.
369 prone vale: Descending valley.
382 sunbows: Miniature rainbows formed by sunlight on spray or mist.
399 rime: Frozen mist or fog.
401 Elysian: Exquisitely delightful, as in Elysium. See ‘The Sensitive-Plant’, Part First, l. 108 and note.
417–18 Or … Or: Either … Or.
418 interlunar: Between the old and the new moon.
421 amain: ‘At once and fully’ (Concordance).
423 Austral: Of the southern hemisphere, southern generally.
424 Thamondocana: Timbuktu (Timbuctoo), in sub-Saharan Africa.
428 Canopus: The brightest star in the southern constellation, formerly known as Argo Navis, after the mythical ship in which Jason and the Argonauts sailed.
th’ Austral lake: Probably the Ethiopian lake that is the source of both the Nile and the Niger (Poems III).
435 solid vapours hoar: Possibly glaciers, as Poems III suggests, or icebergs.
447–8 The haven reflects Heaven as if it were a jewel engraved with an image of it.
451 Hydaspes: The modern river Jhelum in north-eastern Pakistan, where Alexander the Great won an important victory before returning westward.
453 quips and cranks: Antics and pranks; the phrase occurs in Milton, L’Allegro, l. 27, where it signifies witty remarks and verbal play.
462 meteor flags: A recollection of Satan’s ensign which ‘Shone like a meteor streaming to the wind’ in Paradise Lost I.537.
464 mere: Lake.
465–72 The lines recall the building of Pandemonium by the devils in Paradise Lost I.710–30.
466 exhalations: Mists.
467 lambent: Softly and mildly glowing.
469 cressets: Vessels containing fuel, such as oil, and mounted for illumination.
serene: The clear sky.
473 throne: The Witch’s throne is to be compared with Satan’s in Paradise Lost II.1 ff.
482 crudded rack: A mass of high cloud appearing as if curdled.
484 Arion: Herodotus, Histories I.23–4, recounts the legend of this supremely skilled musician who was travelling to Corinth in a ship when the crew attempted to rob and murder him. Having received their permission to play and sing one last time, Arion leapt into the sea, but one of the dolphins that had been charmed by his sweet music carried him safely to shore.
488 fire-balls: ‘Certain large luminous meteors’ or ‘lightning in a globular form’ (OED 1a).
498 Nilus: The Nile.
500 Axumè: Or Aksum, a city in the mountains of northern Ethiopia, once an important trading hub.
505 Moeris … Mareotid lakes: Lake Moeris lies some fifty miles south-west of Cairo, Lake Mareotis south and west of the city of Alexandria.
511 the great Labyrinth: An elaborate funerary and commemorative temple near Lake Moeris described in Herodotus, Histories II.148, and in Diodorus Siculus, Library of History I.lxvi.3–6.
512 pomp: Ceremonial display.
Osirian: Osiris was one of the principal Egyptian deities, brother and husband of Isis; patrons of male and female fertility and parents of the child-god Horus, they were imagined as ruling the underworld together. In religious myth, Osiris had been killed and cut to pieces by his brother Set but revived by Isis. As a god of regeneration and rebirth, Osiris was the object of a widespread cult which practised orgiastic rituals – as Poems III points out, citing Herodotus, Histories II.42, 144, and Diodorus Siculus, Library of History I.xi.3, xxii.6.
feast: Commemorative celebration of an event or personage of religious significance.
513–16 Cp. ‘Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa’, ll. 13–16.
519 fanes: Temples.
552 weltering: Tossing, tumbling.
577–84 Aurora, goddess of the dawn, counted the mortal Tithonus among her many lovers. She persuaded Jupiter to grant him immortality but neglected to ask also for perpetual youth; when Tithonus grew old and shrivelled, she shut him away. In some accounts he turns into a cicada. The myth of Adonis exists in various versions in which Proserpina detains the beautiful child or youth in Hades despite the pleas of Venus that he should be returned to her – until Jupiter decides that he should live part of the year with each of them. The Heliades were daughters of the Sun (Helios). The reference here (‘The Heliad’) appears to be to the Witch herself, who is also a daughter of the Sun (ll. 57–88). For further detail, see Poems III.
587–8 Diana, the virgin goddess of the moon, fell in love with the beautiful shepherd Endymion, whom she visited nightly, he having been granted the gift of eternal sleep and eternal youth by Jupiter.
589 sexless: Not restricted to a single sex, able to enjoy both sexes, as the next line makes clear. Hermaphroditus is described as ‘sexless’ in l. 329.
594 panacea: A medicine that heals all illness.
595 wave: The fluid medicine of the previous line.
623 scribe: The word can designate a public official generally but here retains something of the sense attached to it in the New Testament – of a severe and hypocritical interpreter of the law, as in Matthew 23.
626 The Rosetta Stone, with its texts of an official proclamation in three languages – hieroglyphics, demotic Egyptian and Greek – had been on display in the British Museum since 1802. For Shelley, Greek was the language par excellence of civilization and the arts, and ‘in variety, in simplicity, in flexibility, and in copiousness excels every other language of the western world’ (Prose, p. 217).
627–32 The pantheon of ancient Egyptian animal deities included Apis, the divine bull kept at Memphis. Hawks were sacred to Horus and cats to the goddess Bast; ‘geese’ (probably appropriating the sense of goose as ‘a foolish person’, as Norton 2002 suggests) appears intended to ridicule the practice of animal worship.
641–4 The Cyclopes served as blacksmiths in the underground forge of Vulcan, god of fire (Aeneid VIII.416–53), where they helped fashion weapons for gods and heroic warriors.
645 Quoting Isaiah 2:4: ‘they shall beat their swords into plowshares … nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.’
647–8 Amasis was a tyrannical king against whom the people revolted in Memphis, capital of ancient Egypt.
647 I wis: ‘Iwis’, i.e. certainly, truly. By the separation into ‘I wis’, the word came to mean ‘I know’.
668 slights: i.e. ‘sleights’, cunning tricks, artifices, wiles.
670 weird: Strange, mysterious, fantastic.
671 garish: Extremely bright, glaring.
First published in 1824. Our copy-text is PBS’s fair copy in the Bodleian Library (MS Shelley adds. c. 5: see BSM XXII). In 1839 MWS dates the poem to 1821, and it is probably the sonnet sent to Charles Ollier for publication in February 1821 (Letters II, pp. 262, 269). However, another fair copy in PBS’s hand (MYR (Shelley) V), entitled ‘To the Republic of Benevento’, suggests a likelier date of composition: late summer 1820, shortly after the declaration of independence from the Neapolitan monarchy by the small papal state of Benevento, near Naples. Michael Rossington, ‘Shelley’s Neapolitan-Tuscan Poetics: “Sonnet: Political Greatness” and the “Republic” of Benevento’, provides a searching consideration of the sonnet’s political contexts (The Unfamiliar Shelley, ed. Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 137–56).
Title On the Bodleian fair copy PBS first wrote then cancelled ‘Sonnet to Naples’. In his draft he had experimented with the titles ‘The Republican’, ‘The True Republican’ and ‘Rex Sui’ (‘King of Himself’).
1 Nor … nor: Neither … nor.
6 glass: Mirror (as PBS had first written in his draft).
7 fleet: Rush.
9 numbers: Verse.
10–14 The relation between civic and personal virtue asserted here is one of the central convictions of PBS’s political writing; see e.g. Prometheus Unbound I.492 and III.iv.196–7; ‘Ode to Liberty’, ll. 241–5; and The Triumph of Life, ll. 209–15.
First published in Leigh Hunt’s Literary Pocket-Book (see headnote to ‘Love’s Philosophy’) for 1823. Two versions of the poem in PBS’s hand are extant, a fair copy in the Houghton Library at Harvard University (see MYR (Shelley) V) and a neat press copy in the Morgan Library and Museum (see MYR (Shelley) VIII), which supplies our copy-text. MWS published the poem in 1824, and in 1839 grouped it with ‘Poems written in 1820’. The exact date of composition is uncertain, but the melancholy tone suggests that it might have formed part of the collection of PBS’s ‘saddest verses’ which he gathered together in November 1820 and hoped to publish with Julian and Maddalo (p. 163) (Letters II, p. 246). A bitterly ironic challenge to the traditional carpe diem theme and an anticipation in brief of The Triumph of Life (p. 570), the sonnet varies the rhyme scheme but retains the final couplet characteristic of the English or Shakespearean form of the sonnet.
1 grave: PBS first wrote and cancelled ‘dead’, then substituted ‘grave’, which he also cancelled; his final choice is not clear. The Harvard MS and MWS’s editions read ‘dead’.
3 livery: Uniform, typically worn by a servant.
6–7 Cp. The Triumph of Life, l. 398: ‘Shew whence I came, and where I am, and why’. Poems III cites John 8:14: ‘Jesus answered and said unto them, Though I bear record of myself, yet my record is true: for I know whence I came, and whither I go; but ye cannot tell whence I come, and whither I go.’
Written between late 1820 and early 1821 and published in 1824 with the present title; in 1839 the poem is grouped by MWS with those written in 1821. An untitled draft survives in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 8 (BSM VI). A fair copy in PBS’s hand, also untitled, on which our text is based, is in the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia (MYR (Shelley) VIII). PBS’s draft continues for a further thirty-four lines beyond the end of the text given below; he did not transcribe these lines into the fair copy.
The poem’s debts to the Gothic tradition (the ‘mad weather’, l. 54; the ‘tyrant Father’, l. 53; the rescued bride) recall some of PBS’s earliest poetry, including ‘Song’ (‘Fierce roars the midnight storm’) and ‘Fragment, or The Triumph of Conscience’ in the present selection (pp. 5, 7). There are similarities to the narrative of escape in Epipsychidion, ll. 383 ff., which PBS drafted in the same notebook, as well as to poems by Walter Scott, Thomas Campbell and Thomas Moore, for which see Poems IV. Elements of ‘The Fugitives’ resonate with PBS and MWS’s elopement in July 1814 and may also have been prompted by the situation of Teresa (‘Emilia’) Viviani, for whom PBS had developed an erotic and sentimental attachment at the time the poem was composed (see headnote to Epipsychidion).
18–19 It would be a brave pilot who would follow us in these conditions.
18 I trow: I believe.
27 beacon-cloud: Poems IV gives the sense as ‘signal-smoke’.
28 In the gales of the storm the sound of the cannon cannot be heard.
30 From the direction opposite the one from which the wind is blowing.
36 boat-cloak: ‘A large cloak worn at sea’ (OED).
47 portress: Gate-keeper; the feminine form preserves the rhyme. Cp. ‘the portress of hell gate’ in Milton, Paradise Lost II.746.
54 To his: Compared to his.
56–60 Recalling the old king’s cursing of his youngest child, Cordelia, in Shakespeare, King Lear I.i.108–19, and Count Cenci’s curse on his daughter Beatrice in The Cenci IV.i.114–36, 141–57.
58 devotes: Gives over to; cp. the sense of ‘devote’ as ‘to invoke or pronounce a curse upon’ (OED 3).
Our text of this lyric is based on PBS’s untitled draft in the Bodleian Library (Bodleian MS Shelley adds e. 8: see BSM VI), which probably dates from very late 1820 or very early 1821. Below the two stanzas given here is the opening line of what appears to be an abandoned third stanza: ‘As desire when hope is cold’. MWS transcribed the draft, supplying the title ‘Memory’, but published it as ‘To —–’ in 1824, where the order of the stanzas is reversed. Commentators have taken the latter title as an indication that the poem was addressed to Emilia Viviani (see note to l. 3 below and headnote to Epipsychidion: p. 808). There has been considerable debate on how to construct an accurate text from PBS’s draft, for which see BSM VI and Chernaik, pp. 281–4.
3 thy thoughts: Perhaps the writings on love by Emilia Viviani (see headnote to Epipsychidion, below) are intended.