Reading and Studying Literature
Florafoza
RomanticLives-Chapter2-PercyShelly.pptxA230A Reading and Studying Literature
Arab Open University
Kuwait Branch
2017/2018
Nour Dakkak
Chapter II
Percy Bysshe Shelley: inner and outer lives
In this seminar:
You will be briefly introduced to Percy Shelley’s life, and how his poetry reveals his personal and political life.
We will explore how Mary Shelley’s (his wife’s) editing of the poems was an attempt to draw an image of her deceased husband that is different from the one people had of him during his life.
We will read the two poems: ‘To a Skylark’ and ‘Ode to the West Wind’ to see how these poems conform to Mary Shelley’s goals, and what they tell us about Shelley himself.
We will observe how the FORM of the poem has plenty to reveal about its meaning.
Quick notes on the poems:
We will first analyse two of Shelley’s celebrated lyric poems and odes (poems of direct address) (written in Italy after a year of leaving England in 1818): ‘To a Skylark’ and ‘Ode to the West Wind’. These poems explore the centrality of the imagination to the vocation of the poet.
Then we will explore the radical and intellectual Shelley through his poems ‘England 1819’ (a sonnet), ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ and ‘To the Lord Chancellor’ which feature the figure of the poet in the voice of the accuser through offering a satire of the establishment (religion and monarchy).
This image becomes one of a historical observer in ‘Ozymandias’ (1817) and ‘Written on Hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon’ (1821). The two poems show how the Romantic period is involved in and witnessing a historical turn.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Shelley is a major Romantic poet who had a notorious reputation during his life.
We will get to know why Shelley is considered an archetypal (original) Romantic poet through different ways in this chapter:
1- the words on his tomb-stone in Italy.
2- John C. Baily’s (later Chairman of the English Association) description of him in 1911.
3- the image his wife Mary Shelley tries to preserve by editing his work after his death.
4- small selection of his short poetry.
When you are studying Shelley’s poetry, compare and contrast these different views.
1. Shelley through the allusion on his tombstone
The poet’s sudden death by drowning is elevated through an allusion written on his tomb-stone from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611):
Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Ding-dong. Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.
2. Shelley through the words on his tombstone
This allusion memorialises the author as a figure who himself has participated in the ‘rich and strange.
This sets Shelley as different from Wordsworth whose gravestone evokes notions of home, simplicity and rootedness in nature.
Shelley’s grave conveys ideas of exile, the heart, mysteriousness, and classical affinities (suggested by the Latin inscription).
The words on the poets’ gravestones could tell us about the poets’ lives.
1. Shelley through the words on his tombstone
Unlike Wordsworth, Shelley did not attempt to project onto his poetry the grand unified ‘self’ described through consciousness, autobiographical acts of recollection.
The versions of the poet in Shelley’s work are varied, elusive, often accusatory and sometimes prophetic in tone.
The persona of Shelley is dramatized in his poetry, rather than recollected through memories like Wordsworth, and they are shifting rather than stable.
The keynotes of Shelley’s Romantic life in his poetry is expressed through its kaleidoscopic and rootless nature.
2. John C. Baily (1911): what does his account suggest about Shelley?
the gulf between us and Shelley lies in the fact that we are of the earth earthy and he is airy of the air. His landscape is not our well-loved trees and flowers, not so much ever our worshipped sea and mountains; it is night and day, dark and dawn, winds and clouds and the movements of elemental air, the stars in their courses, the sun and the moon, not as givers of earthly light, but as circling worlds, immeasurably distant, solitary and aloof.
2. John C. Baily (1911): what does his account suggest about Shelley?
Elevated: exists on another level from the rest of us.
Ethereal creature, similar to the spirit Ariel inscribed on his tombstone.
Airy figure: has access to the higher powers of the cosmos: the stars, moon, ‘circling worlds’ of other planets.
He shares the characteristic of the worlds he has access to: he is distant, solitary and aloof (remote).
This description suggests that his poetry deals with the natural elements (fire, water, air) even scientific elements rather than the local world we encounter in our everyday life.
This account doesn’t show that Shelley engages with the contemporary issues of his day, or as a poet that writes about himself and his experiences.
Think about this account in relation to the political poems’ we will read next week. Does it represent the full image of Shelley?
3. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)
Mary was also a Romantic genius, who edited Shelley’s poetry collection after his death.
The act of editing and annotating the poems was also an act of ‘editing’ Shelley’s short life: assembling its fragments into a Romantic reputation which would endure and erasing the memory of Shelley’s notoriety in his own day.
Shelley’s reputation was that of a worldly creature. His poetry contained all kinds of attacks on monarchy and religion.
Shelley fully intended his poem Queen Mab to shock an orthodox public, and his own open advocacy of atheism and free love furthered the reputation it earned him.
Shelley was even cited in a custody case after his death due to bad parental behaviour.
3. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)
The poetry published by Mary in 1839 was coloured by her own feelings, and almost constituted a dual biography of events foreshadowing her husband’s death and her widowhood.
In one of her notes on the poems of Shelley’s final year, she expresses her ‘burning desire to impart the world, in worthy language, the sense I have of virtues and genius of the Beloved and the Lost’.
Her comments, although acknowledge the poet’s radical reputation, provide the foundation stones of the mythology of Shelley, the tragic genius, rather than the notorious figure.
3. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)
Although she addresses her late husband’s ‘didactic’ poems, she remakes Shelley to a different and more inwardly focused pattern.
Her Shelley is far less political than the Shelley who had been feted by radicals in the circulation of Queen Mab. She notes under this poem that:
‘Shelley did not expect sympathy [...] from the public, but the want of it took away a portion of the ardour (enthusiasm) that ought to have sustained him while writing’
‘he loved to shelter himself rather in the airiest flights of fancy forgetting love and hate, and regret and lost hope.’
The Archetype Shelley?
We can notice how Baily’s account on Shelley, especially that of the ‘airy’ figure, reverberates Mary’s notes on her husband’s poem.
In the next two poems, we will explore this airy version of Shelley in both the form and language of two of his lyric poems.
4. Shelley through his short poems
The poems we will study do not represent all of Shelley’s work, for he is equally known for his narrative poems, verse dramas and Romantic allegories drawing on classical mythology.
But studying this scattered collection is not wrong, for the Romantic writers and artists believed that the human imagination could aspire at best to momentary and transitory self-insight and grasp of life’s ultimate truths.
We cannot study Shelley like Wordsworth due to his short life (he died before 30). The versions of his persona, you will notice, will always be fluid and subject to change.
‘To a Skylark’
1820
To a Skylark
This is arguably the poem that best conveys the image of the poet that Mary Shelley wanted preserved.
She recalls this poem was written in Italy: ‘It was on a beautiful summer evening, while wandering among the lanes whose myrtle-hedges were the bowers for the fireflies, that we heard the carolling of the skylark which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems’.
READ THE POEM
To a Skylark: biographical context
Although we can note that the poem suggests the image of Shelley his wife evokes, thinking about this poem biographically we can note that the joyous raptures imagined in this poem are VERY different from the events in their real life. A period of ‘domestic difficulties and gloom’.
Shelley was struggling to find a publisher for his political poetry in London, they were pursued by demands for money from Mary’s father, and Shelley was anxious about the health of his daughter Elena who is also a mystery, and wo died couple of days after that evening walk that inspired the poem.
To a Skylark
Knowing the biographical context, do you think this poem could represent:
An escape from reality? (escapist)
Does the ‘imaginative’ world involve turning away from this difficult world?
Does the shape and movement of the poem (along with the biographical context) help revealing the true meanings?
Is the poem really turning away from the real world? Or is it turning back to it?
To a Skylark: the form
The stressed and unstressed syllables in the first stanza of the poem (trochaic metre) where stress is found in awkward words and its sudden and unexpected shifts from trochaic metre to iambic metre could suggest that the rhythm soars up and away in the final line to create the impression of a bird rising and singing in the sky.
Shelley has apparently discovered the ‘purest form’ to capture the image of flight and compare it with the liberating impetus (energy) of poetic creativity. The liberated from reflects his radical style (and life)?
The irregularity and tension in his style could also suggest that the unease of Shelley’s real world is not transcended, regardless of what Mary Shelley thinks about his ‘forgetting…regret and lost hope’.
To a Skylark: the form
The poem’s attractiveness and power depend on the interplay between such patterns of sound and movement in their variation.
While the poem’s rhyme scheme follows a regular pattern of ababb, it is varied by the introduction of the occasional half-rhyme (similar but not exact).
For example, in lines 67-69The fact that we are denied the satisfaction of a full rhyme here enacts the sense of lack in the stanza itself: human song can never aspire to ‘match’ that of the skylark.
‘Ode to the West Wind’
1819
‘Ode to the West Wind’ 1819
This poem was written earlier than ‘To a Skylark’ and, according to Shelley, it was again composed in a moment of direct inspiration when he and Mary were living in Florence.
In a note included with the first publication, Shelley wrote:
This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno … on a day when the tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains.
- When reading the poem, look at the first and final stanzas and compare with ‘To a Skylark’.
READ THE POEM
‘Ode to the West Wind’ 1819
The poem is an ode, though the stanzas follow a sonnet form.
The three lines units used here are known as terza rima, a form borrowed from Dante’s The Divine Comedy (1308-21).
The allusions in the poem prompt us to recognise that what is apparently a nature poem has in fact references to literature, history and culture.
The allusions are evidence that the speaker of this ode is constructed as an educated, consciously literary figure (this is not found in ‘To a Skylark’.
Similarities and Differences between ‘To a Skylark’ and ‘Ode to the West Wind’
The two poems conform through their imagery (lexicon) and subject matter to the Romantic life constructed by Mary Shelley in which she explains how: ‘he loved to shelter himself rather in the airiest flights of fancy…’.
However, the urgency, demand, tone, and call for recognition in the two poems shows a contrasting image of a poet who wants more public engagement.
The winds from the Atlantic may hint revolutionary change which led to the creation of the united states of America in 1776. Shelley could be seen as a poet anticipating a regenerated society in ‘Ode to the West Wind’, but in ‘To a Skylark’ which was written later, we can see that the energy and optimism are infused with self desperation.
The two poems are linked through the imagination to the real world of ‘regret and lost hope’.
