This section turns its attention to Shelley’s lyric poetry, considering poems across his short, prolific career. ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ was composed during Shelley’s productive summer in Geneva in 1816 and published by Leigh Hunt in The Examiner on 19 January 1817. Tilottama Rajan argues that ‘Mont Blanc’ and the ‘Hymn’ ‘converge on the same problem: the mind’s need to transcend life by positing some transcendent, form‐giving fiction’,1 and this insight suggests the seriousness of the poetic philosophy explored in the poem. Shelley’s poetry may be characterized by William Hazlitt as ‘a passionate dream, a straining after impossibilities, a record of fond conjectures, a confused embodying of vague abstractions’,2 but the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ offers an intricate challenge to and a rehabilitation of the hymn genre. That genre involves religious hymns, but also eighteenth‐century hymns to abstractions, as well as French Revolutionary hymns.3 There is, indeed, much cogency in Richard Cronin’s observation that the poem ‘is not a hymn, but an ode’.4
Rational analysis and emotional inspiration blur, as does the line between self and speaker. Where Judith Chernaik can discern a definite autobiographical voice,5 Timothy Webb’s erudite argument for Shelley as adopting the features of the genre seems convincing: ‘Thus Shelley’s exclamation is a highly‐stylised cry of despair which must be seen as the culmination of a long tradition of prophetic poetry.’6 These critical differences point to the ways in which Shelley makes the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ an interpretative problem, as any certainties seem as evanescent for the reader as Intellectual Beauty is for Shelley himself.
Stanza 1, moving from simile to simile, dramatically enacts a drive to persist in producing more descriptions, more images, to bring his poem as close to his thought as possible. The perplexing yet enriching difficulty of creating a poetic form capable of containing vision, re‐visions, and adjusting perspectives plays throughout the ‘Hymn’. Shelley captures the ever‐shifting, ever‐changing nature of Intellectual Beauty as the language mirrors the condition of its elusive presence. Rather than mounting a complaint against language’s inadequacy, the poetry delights in capturing the fragility and evanescence of this visitant spirit. The strength of the speaker’s desire to achieve a union with this figure animates the poem, sending the poet to meditate on varying states named in the poem as ‘love and hate, despondency and hope’ (‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, 24). The rhetorical questions of stanza 2 show Shelley, after deliberately failing to define the named Power, in search of reasons why speaker and Intellectual Beauty cannot be completely unified. The mingled supplication, acceptance, and defiance in stanzas 2 to 4 keep the dramatic tension coursing through the lines, as Shelley moves between petition and plea, rebuke and demand. Stanza 3 begins in negatives as the poet gropes through uncertainty to get somewhere towards an understanding of the experience. Shelley skirts dangerously close to unveiling Intellectual Beauty as the divine but religion becomes a failed attempt to conceptualize its indefinable quality. ‘God, and ghosts, and Heaven’ (27) are revealed as labels attached to Intellectual Beauty by sages and poets, labels which stand as ‘the records of their vain endeavour’ (28) to define the ineffable. ‘Doubt, chance, and mutability’ (31) become the only certainties available. The figure of the poet comes under intense scrutiny as Shelley presents a gothic and autobiographical portrait where the visitant spirit touches him: ‘Sudden, thy shadow fell on me; / I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!’ (‘Hymn’, 59–60). This self‐portrait has, like many of Shelley’s supposed self‐revelations, attracted adverse criticism. Yet Shelley is creating a type of the self, a fictionalized ‘I’, rather than actually describing himself in a solely biographical way. Shelley the man paradoxically becomes both central to and unimportant for the creation of the poetic voice: ‘Here the poet is only a poet in so far as he speaks to and for that community. As an individual he has ceased to exist.’7 Shelley creates a distinctive poetic self within carefully wrought formal boundaries as the ‘Hymn’ represents his multi‐layered poetry in its complex fullness.
Written in July 1816 while touring the Chamonix Valley, ‘Mont Blanc’ was published in 1817 in the Shelleys’ History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, a travel narrative concerning two trips taken by the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont (Mary Shelley’s stepsister). ‘Mont Blanc’ reveals Shelley’s technical accomplishments and imaginative power. This complex and fluctuating poem is suggestive of the kinds of ambiguity and sublimity developed and then questioned throughout Shelley’s work through the power of language. Shelley makes poetic language a testing ground for his ideas as he places any theistic impulses in tension with his more questioning perspective.8 One evident formal sign of this drive to test any overall coherence shows in the use of rhyme in the poem. Shelley rhymes his lines, but he does so irregularly and glancingly, and often in swiftly enjambed syntactical units; the effect is to make the poem’s rhyming, in William Keach’s words, ‘both a stay against and a means of marking the chaos and blankness which are Mont Blanc’s special concerns’.9 To include a sense of ‘chaos and blankness’ and ‘stays’ against them suggests the scale of the ambition in ‘Mont Blanc’. Shelley’s structural subtlety belies any reading of the poetry as an emotionally raw and technically poor creation.10 Section 1 immediately situates Mont Blanc as an entity that is defined by its perception by the onlooker. It does not stress the static form of the mountain, concentrating instead on the fluid nature of perception:
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom— (‘Mont Blanc’, 1–3)
Passivity of the mind is suggested by the flow of things through it, and the process seems alogical as sense impressions are recorded. Shelley develops in the first half of the section an illusion of unfiltered vision, but this is partially shattered by Shelley’s philosophic addition into the description of the scene: ‘The source of human thought its tribute brings / Of waters, — with a sound but half its own’ (‘Mont Blanc’, 5–6; emphasis added). The poem is created out of external impressions on his individual mind, which overflows with different connections and ways of conceptualizing the mountain. Shelley refuses to impose one kind of controlling mould on to the natural world. Instead he relishes the plurality of interpretations possible by exposure to external stimuli. In section 2, Shelley shows a heightened awareness of the subjectivity of his imaginings in the second part of the second stanza: ‘Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee / I seem as in a trance sublime and strange / To muse on my own separate fantasy’ (‘Mont Blanc’, 34–6). Geoffrey Hartman points out with reference to ‘Mont Blanc’ that ‘the trance induced by the sublime landscape does not point to a loss or sacrifice of intellect’,11 and this possibility allows the poet to be entranced even as he remains in control of his mental landscape. Section 3 of ‘Mont Blanc’ opens up a questioning vein, aware of the temptation to mythologize even as he cannot resist creating a myth of origin: ‘Is this the scene / Where the old Earthquake‐daemon taught her young / Ruin? Were these their toys?’ (‘Mont Blanc’, 71–3) and the speaker longs for the mountain to ‘repeal / Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood / By all, but which the wise, and great, and good / Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel’ (‘Mont Blanc’, 80–3). The reader is left to question if the speaker can be included in this illustrious roll call, and if so, if he can manage this act of interpretation or sensibility. The exploration of the mountain’s great power continues into section 4, and an elegiac sense creeps into the lines which lament that ‘So much of life and joy is lost. The race / Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling / Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream, / And their place is not known’ (‘Mont Blanc’, 117–20).
By section 5, a sense of higher knowledge and inevitability creeps into the tone, as Shelley seems to comprehend some of the mountain’s knowledge:
Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there,
The still and solemn power of many sights,
And many sounds, and much of life and death. (‘Mont Blanc’, 127–9)
Yet this unnamed power seems to contradict the thrust of the poem; ‘Mont Blanc’ offers a statement of belief in profusion. These lines would reduce the poem to a single belief, but the poem continues as Shelley insists on holding all possibilities open to the reader. The final three lines represent Shelley at his most skilful, demonstrating his ability to pivot from one point to another without dismissing the previous idea or prioritizing the present concept. They are an affirmation of the power of the human mind to vivify and conceptualize the landscape with the imagination’s perceptive power:
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy? (‘Mont Blanc’, 142–4)
While affirming the power of the imagination, the lines contain an underlying ambivalence that Shelley communicates by formulating a question. The question seems a real enquiry rather than a rhetorical trope. While the densely packed perceptions of the poem attest to the primacy of the imagination, there is an underlying fear of vacancy as the inverse of the teeming mind of the poet. Shelley in ‘Mont Blanc’ creates and dismisses each attempt at coming up with a theory,12 indicating nothing more keenly than the fluidity and plurality of the human imagination. But glimmering beneath the narrator’s confident imaginative exercise is a fear that the human mind’s imaginings might finally point to humanity’s alienation from nature. The imagination’s need to fill a vacuum could prevent a possible interchange between man and nature, rendering it impossible for people to see nature in its own physical majesty. On the other hand, the fear that nature may indeed be dumb is equally horrifying. Either way it is apparent that the interchange between man and nature, if ever there was one, is broken. Careful observation and perception of the mountain entwine with Shelley’s demonstration of the colouring that ‘the human mind’s imaginings’ project on to nature, but ultimately, for Shelley, the human mind takes centre stage, becoming the final point of contemplation.
Written in late 1817, ‘Ozymandias’ was Shelley’s contribution to a competition with Horace Smith, and was published under a pseudonym in Hunt’s Examiner on 11 January 1818. As François Jost writes, ‘In English literature the prize for prosodic variety in sonnet composition undoubtedly goes to Shelley, if we restrict the competition to major poets up to his time … He never used the same [rhyme scheme] twice.’13 Shelley put pressure on the sonnet form and on his subject matter. Preoccupied by the relationship between art and history, Shelley’s sonnet refuses to settle for a single interpretation:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said—‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
The face, only half sunk, is shattered. But apparently, despite the weathered‐looking nature of the stone, the traveller can see clearly a ‘wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command’. Ozymandias is depicted as a tyrant, making the inscription on the statue seem like a mockery. Ozymandias’ boast could seem almost laughably hollow. Yet Ozymandias’ great works guaranteed immortality, of a sort. Shelley and all the poets and artists that judge him have to contend with the enduring legacy of this powerful leader, the self‐proclaimed King of Kings. Yet what the traveller describes is the triumph of art over history. It is the sculptor who defines the way in which Ozymandias is remembered. It is the artist, not Ozymandias in his own right, who has survived history. Nothing else remains; the statue is merely a ‘colossal Wreck’ in a sea of bare sands. The reader can expect history to yield us no certainties, no truths, nothing but a sculptor’s interpretation or a traveller’s story. We are returned to Shelley’s imaginative power, the poet who imagined the sculptor’s achievement and legacy, and presumably, the testimony of the traveller. Art and history come together, ensuring that ‘every act of reading the sonnet must pay attention to the precariousness of what we have just identified as the message of that writing’.14 The message of the sonnet is unstable, the opposite of the enduring universal monument. But the power of ‘Ozymandias’ is to open out the possibilities of art and history, viewing them less as competing forces than as irrevocably bound together.
‘Ode to the West Wind’, begun in Florence in October 1819 and published in Shelley’s 1820 volume, Prometheus Unbound, with Other Poems, encompasses ‘rebirth and regeneration in the personal and political spheres’.15 This terza rima poem turns on movement as Shelley makes it seem ceaselessly fluid even as he transforms each section into sonnets of a kind in his five‐part poem. Preoccupied by myth‐making and poetic power, Harold Bloom views the poem as deeply metapoetic: ‘The “Ode to the West Wind” is actually a poem about this process of making myths, a poem whose subject is the nature and function of the nabi and his relation to his own prophecies.’16 Shelley shows the development from priest, to prophet, to poet in ‘Ode’, as its sparkling terza rima swiftness moves the poem forward irresistibly. Opening with an invocation that views the ‘wild West Wind’ (1) as a godlike force, Shelley’s opening section positions the speaker as supplicant to the ‘unseen presence’ (2) of the wind. The ‘Pestilence‐stricken multitudes’ (5), a phrase that turns leaves into people, seem passively driven by the wind’s force, as ‘from an enchanter fleeing’ (3). Hymning the wind’s power in the second section, Shelley’s powerful lines almost delight in ‘thy congregated might’ (26) where the destructive power of the West Wind brings ‘Black rain, and fire, and hail’ to ‘burst’ (28) upon the earth. The poem then moves into a dreamily beautiful passage in section 3, where the wind wakes the Mediterranean, and then darkens the calm of the section’s earlier lines through fear of the West Wind’s violence in the closing couplet. Only by the fourth section does Shelley bring in the personal pronoun, changing from impersonal supplication to personal identification with the ‘wild West Wind’ (1). The lines show Shelley initially asking to be borne by the wind as a dead leaf, then requesting to become a cloud ‘to fly with thee’ (44), and finally to share in ‘The impulse of thy strength’ (46). Yet this yearning admits it cannot be fulfilled; the speaker is unable to be a natural phenomenon, even as he longs to be ‘only less free / Than thou, O, Uncontrollable!’ (47).
The climactic lines, ‘Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! / I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!’ (53–4), have been imbued with biographical readings, but Harold Bloom’s terse summary – ‘By now it ought to be evident that the thorns of life have nothing to do with Lord Chancellors, quarterly reviews, despotic fathers, etc’17 – has been instrumental in returning the focus to the poetry itself. Here, Shelley demonstrates the struggle and the agony involved in the process of myth‐creation. The final section is a confident invocation of the wind, as Shelley turns from supplicant into commander of this wind, insisting on controlling the change he imagines. The poetry ripples with potency as the poet demands that his words be scattered by the wind among mankind. This poetry, though it looks forward to ‘direct political action’ as William Keach argues,18 is at least as fascinated with poetic legacy and the dissemination of words as well as ideas by the ‘incantation of this verse’ (65). Such prophetic certainty is not sustained; the final two lines reveal less confidence than the rest of the section: ‘O, wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ (69–70). The magisterial voice has given way to something more circumspect.
In 1822, Shelley began writing poems for Jane Williams, including ‘With a Guitar. To Jane’, ‘To Jane (“The keen stars were twinkling”)’, ‘To Jane. The Invitation’, ‘To Jane—The Recollection’, ‘To — (“The serpent is shut out from Paradise”)’, ‘The Magnetic Lady to her Patient’, and ‘Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici’. These poems ‘illustrate the intimate entanglement of Shelley’s personal life and poetic ambition’,19 and display Shelley’s mastery of tonal complexities. The Shelleys met Jane and her second husband, Edward Ellerker Williams, early in 1821 while living in Pisa, and Shelley himself had a strong regard for both Jane and her husband. As Emilia Viviani was for Epipsychidion, so Jane Williams became for his lyrics; she is the idealized subject onto which Shelley could project his imagination.
‘To — (“The serpent is shut out from Paradise”)’, composed in January 1822 and sent to Edward Williams, shows Shelley testing the limits of artifice and biography in his modified ottava rima. The reference to the serpent, Byron’s nickname for his fellow poet, suggests that Shelley is the subject of the lines, and his adoption of Byron’s ottava rima suggests the older, rival poet is a presence in the poetry, perhaps ghosting the lines as his worldly success contrasts with the speaker’s disappointment with his reception at the hands of ‘the world’s carnival’ (31). The poem displays creativity even in the midst of its despair. The opening stanza offers three possible incarnations of the poet‐figure, ‘serpent,’ ‘wounded deer’, recalling Adonais and its ‘frail Form’ who ‘Actaeon‐like’ flees ‘With feeble steps o’er the world’s wilderness’ (Adonais 31.271, 276, 277), and ‘widowed dove’. Creative potential is undimmed despite the speaker’s exiled and wounded state and the rhyme of ‘again’ with ‘pain’ offers a poetic mastery that cannot quite redeem the speaker’s misery. Quasi‐Byronic in its initial proud scorn and ‘Indifference’ (10), this emotion gives way to grief and loneliness. Wearied sadness slows the lines as death seems to provide the only possible way out: ‘Doubtless there is a place of peace / Where my weak heart and all its throbs will cease’ (47–8), where the couplet rhymes insistently point to the grave as the only solution to the poet’s ‘forced part in life’s dull scene’ (4.28). Closing with an affirmation of his friends’ empathy, his hope comes to ‘look[ed] more like Despair’ (The Mask of Anarchy 88). ‘To Jane. The Invitation’ and ‘To Jane—The Recollection’ draw on an excursion taken by Jane Williams and the Shelleys and show Shelley’s command of the pastoral mode, where the poet almost transcends time with his polished summoning of ‘the universal Sun’ (‘To Jane. The Invitation’, 69). Mary’s disappearance from the poems seems less a troubling aporia than Shelley transmuting the dross of experience into the gold of poetic artifice. ‘To Jane. The Invitation’ almost resembles a carpe diem poem, but rather than allowing dark and melancholy undertones to lurk in the poem, Shelley openly banishes them, picking off Sorrow, Despair, Care, Death, and Expectation to affirm that ‘Today is for itself enough—’ (40). The invitation’s ephemerality lends the lines a poignancy as their beauty seems sustained by an act of the poet’s will. By the time of ‘To Jane—The Recollection’, Shelley recollects ‘The giants of the waste, / Tortured by storms to shapes as rude / As serpents interlaced’ (2.22–4), yet this threatening scene does not disrupt the serenity he discovered. Section 3 is the still centre of the turning world of the poem, where ‘How calm it was!’ (3.33) seems both delighted memory and painful contrast to his present circumstances. The speaker’s disturbed mind closes the poem, offering no sign of a future without torment on the horizon. ‘The Magnetic Lady to her Patient’ sees the speaker mired in tortured thought, where he is told to ‘forget me, for I can never / Be thine.—’ (26–7). As in ‘To — (“The serpent is shut out from Paradise”)’, Shelley is tormented by what momentarily mitigates his agony; the presence of the Magnetic lady. Moving strikingly close to biographical disclosure, the final lines instruct her to ‘tempt me not to break / My chain’ (44–5), with his marriage seeming as much like physical bondage as spiritual (dis)union. ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, ‘Mont Blanc’, ‘Ozymandias’, ‘Ode to the West Wind’, and the late poems to Jane Williams are united by their experimentation with the lyric genre; each questions even as it fashions a poet‐self.