Poems of the Week: Shelley

Here we are: August 17th! So what, I hear you say. Well, this marks an anniversary: my first set of Poems of the Week was exactly one year ago: it comprised three poems, one by John Donne, Loves Deitie; one by William Wordsworth, Upon Westminster Bridge; and one by John Milton, Upon His Blindness. Each of these was introduced with a brief paragraph. Over the year I have become rather more prolix, and even perhaps at times even orotund! However, the good news is that we have now offered a total of one hundred and fifty six poems, not counting those quoted in the text. The word file for this (that is, not including the art work) is something like 2Mb, and if it were in book form it would be something like 200 pages. In addition, of course, we have had the So You Want to be a Poet articles, and so far there have been six or seven of those, for another 250 kb. The Editor of The Mediadrome (who in a good hour was born) tells me that we have had a pretty good number of hits on our poetry offerings, so that so long as it isn't exactly the same bunch of you all the time, we have introduced a very varied set of poems to a goodly number of people.

This week, we are going to talk about Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822). Over the last few months, we followed the careers of the Lake poets - William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834), and Robert Southey (1774 - 1843), who together are credited with starting the English Romantic School of poetry. Over a period of approximately ten years, beginning with Lyrical Ballads, whose first edition appeared in 1798, and ending with Wordsworth's Poems, in Two Volumes, published in 1807, they largely transformed the English approach to poetry. The next important group was composed of Shelley, John Keats (1795 - 1821), and George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788 - 1824). We wrote about Byron a few weeks ago, and I have used several of Keats's poems; up to now, so The Mediadrome Poetry Archive tells me, I have only used one poem by Shelley: Ozymandias.

Shelley came from a monied family; and in 1810 entered University College, Oxford; he was expelled in March 1811 for refusing to admit authorship of The Necessity of Atheism. In August of the same year he eloped with Harriet Westbrook, he younger daughter of a London tavern owner. Sometime this year, he wrote Queen Mab, his first major poem. Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature says he 'issued it' in 1813; in fact, he had it printed privately and distributed to his personal friends; it was never published in his lifetime, although in 1821 (I think) a bookseller in London 'surreptitiously' published it. Mary Shelley included it in her collection of his works, published in 1839, and in the second edition added some material that had been omitted from the first, because of a fear of 'shocking the general reader from the violence of their attack on religion'. In her Note on Queen Mab in the Complete Poems she writes "He looked upon religion, as it is professed, and above all practiced, as hostile instead of friendly to the cultivation of those virtues which would make men brothers."

In the spring of 1814 Shelley fell in love with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1797 - 1851) who was the only daughter of the social philosopher William Godwin and the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. She wrote several novels, of which by far the best-known is Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, although (again according to Merriam-Webster) The Last Man (1826) which describes the future destruction of the human race by a plague, is generally ranked as her best work. The two eloped to France in July, taking with them Mary's stepsister Jane (later Claire) Clairmont. In 1816, the three of them went to Geneva to join Lord Byron, with whom Claire had begun an affair; and during this summer Mary began Frankenstein. Shelley, meanwhile, had written Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and Mont Blanc. In September, Shelley's party returned to England, settling in Bath. Late that year, Harriet Shelley drowned herself in London, and on December 30th, 1816, Shelley and Mary were married.

The English weather had a severe effect on Shelley's fragile health, and in 1818, the Shelleys and Clairmont emigrated to Italy, where Byron was now living. Early in 1819, the Shelleys settled in Rome, and then in 1820 moved to Pisa. He spent a great deal of his time sailing, and they moved to a home in Lerici because the sailing was better there. On the 1st of July 1822 he sailed with his friend Edward Ellerker Williams and a young sailor boy, Charles Vivian, to Leghorn to meet his friend James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784 - 1859). In 1808 Leigh Hunt and his brother had founded a reformist weekly The Examiner, and in 1813 they were imprisoned because of their attacks on the Prince Regent. After their release in 1815 they moved to Hampstead, the home of John Keats, and in 1817 they introduced him to Shelley, whom they had known since 1811.

Shelley was very upset by Keats's death from tuberculosis in Rome on February 23rd, 1821, and wrote a poem entitled Adonais to mourn his friend.

Leigh Hunt was coming to Italy to talk to Shelley and Byron about their participation in a new periodical. On the voyage back, on July 8th, a sudden storm came up, and Shelley's boat sank; the three companions drowned.

In her notes that follow the Poems Written in 1822, Mary describes the details of the disaster, and this part I think is particularly poignant:

"There was something in our fate particularly harrowing. The remains of those that we lost were cast on shore; but by the quarantine-laws of the coast, we were not permitted to have possession of them - the law with respect to everything cast on land by the sea being such that it should be burned, to prevent the possibility of any remnant bringing the plague into Italy; and no representation could alter the law. At length, through the kind and unwearied exertions of Mr. Dawkins, our Chargé d'Affaires at Florence, we gained permission to receive the ashes after the bodies were consumed. Nothing could equal the zeal of Trelawny [Edward John Trelawny (1792 - 1881)] in carrying our wishes into effect. He was indefatigable in his exertions, and full of forethought and sagacity in his arrangements. It was a fearful task; he stood before us at last, his hands scorched and blistered by the flames of the funeral-pyre, and by touching the burned relics as he placed them in the receptacle prepared for the purpose. And there, in the compass of that small case, was gathered all that remained on earth of him whose genius and virtue were a crown of glory to the world - whose love had been the source of happiness, peace and good, -- to be buried with him!

The concluding stanzas of Adonais pointed out where the remains ought to be deposited; in addition to which our beloved child lay buried in the cemetery at Rome. Thither Shelley's ashes were conveyed; and they rest beneath one of the antique weed-grown towers that recur at intervals in the circuit of the massy ancient wall of Rome."

Mary Shelley comments that the last verse of Adonais is remarkably prophetic concerning Shelley's own death:

The breath whose might I have invoked in song
   Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven,
   Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
   Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
   The massy earth and spherèd skies are riven!
   I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
   Whilst through the inmost veil of Heaven,
   The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternals are.

William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939), whose status as one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th Century, had an interesting comment on Shelley, which is reproduced on the cover of the edition of The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley that I have:

"When I was in my early twenties Shelley was much talked about …… He had shared our curiosities, our political problems, our conviction that, despite all experience to the contrary, love is enough; and unlike Blake, isolated by an arbitrary symbolism, he seemed to sum up all that was metaphysical in English poetry. When in middle life I looked back I found that he and not Blake, whom I had studied more and with more approval, had shaped my life ….. I have re-read his Prometheus Unbound for the first time in many years ….. and it seems to me to have an even more certain place than I had thought among the sacred books of the world."

C. S. Lewis (1898 - 1963) is even more specific:

"If anyone who has read Prometheus Unbound still supposes that ….. Shelley is any other than a very great poet, I cannot help him."

Mary Shelley says, in her introduction to The Complete Poems that " …. his poems may be divided into two classes, -- the purely imaginative, and those which sprang from the emotions of his heart. Among the first may be classed The Witch of Atlas, Adonais, and his latest composition, left imperfect, the Triumph of Life... The second class is, of course, the more popular, as appealing at once to emotions common to us all; some of these rest on the passion of love; others on grief and despondency; others on the sentiments inspired by natural objects."

So: what to select for Shelley's Poems of the Week? Obviously, it is impossible to select Prometheus, or indeed any of the longer poems. I thought about To A Skylark:

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
     Bird thou never wert,
That from heaven, or near it,
     Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

My second poem dates from 1818, Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near Naples. Mary says that at this time his health was bad, and the medical attention he was receiving resulted in his suffering severe physical pain, without any beneficial results.

The last poem for this week was a difficult selection. I wanted to select something from 1816, and really this meant either Hymn to Intellectual Beauty or Mont Blanc. Eventually I have decided on the latter - but perhaps you might want to check out the former yourself!

I hope you enjoy these poems from one of England's most important poets.