Reader's Log 8

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), pp. 1710-1781. Read carefully the editors' introduction, pp. 1710-1712.

Shelley's democratic egalitarianism and his scorning of conventional religion estranged him from the grandfather from whom he stood to inherit a baronetcy, the lowest rank of the nobility (somewhat suspect by those higher of higher rank because the original holder of a baronetcy purchased it with cash rather than being awarded it for merit or signal service to the crown). Unhappy in his marriage, Shelley formed a scandalous liaison with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. After his estranged wife committed suicide, he married Mary. Nonetheless, he felt so completely ostracized by conventional English society that, like Byron, he lived his later years on the Continent, particularly in Italy. His disgrace in England also destined him to poetic obscurity. He was by and large a literary unknown, persevering in writing works we now recognize as masterpieces without an appreciative readership. His example reinforces the image of the Romantic poet as an anguished artist living outside conventional society (an image to which Blake and Byron also contributed). Shelley died prematurely by drowning. He had taken up sailing as a diversion. Becoming overly confident in his nautical abilities, he ventured with a friend along the Italian coast to visit Byron. During their return, their boat capsized in a squall. His body was cremated according to Italian law on the beach where it washed ashore. Byron plucked his heart from the burning body and bore it away for burial in the Protestant cemetery in Rome where Keats and Shelley's son had been buried.

Before moving to Italy, Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin lived briefly in Geneva with Byron. Responding to a challenge by Byron that she write something on an occult topic, Mary wrote her famous Gothic novel Frankenstein, published in 1818. This novel, duly tinged with horror and suspense, anticipates modern science fiction. Mary and Shelley suffered the loss of two of their children. Their third child, a son, survived. Following the poet's death, Mary was reconciled with Shelley's father, who provided for the education of the son. Eventually, that son inherited the baronetcy that Shelley had been denied.

Mont Blanc, pp. 1714-1717. Read particularly the editors' note # 1, p. 1714. You will see irregularity, perhaps even whimsey, in Shelley's use of rhyme throughout this poem. This piece functions much like Wordsworth's Lines above Tintern Abbey, alternating between vivid description of a natural scene and the poet's reflections upon the scene. The conclusion to which those reflections lead is, as your editors warn you, quite different from Wordsworth's. The poet writes from the perspective of a deep gorge, the ravine, as he calls it, of the river Arve, a mountain stream tumbling from the base of a glacier on a side of the highest peak in the Alps. Like countless other travelers before him, Shelley finds this alpine scene full of the sublime, a quality which rouses at the same moment the mixed emotions of reverence, awe, and dread. (Please memorize the foregoing defintion of the sublime, a term you will often encounter in literature.)

READER'S LOG. Mont Blanc, lines 60-83, pp. 1715-1716. Read these lines carefully, letting the editors' note help you interpret them. The sublime scene, says the poet, can engender a faith in either the calming beneficence or the terrifying hostility of nature toward humanity. Quote lines 76-79, p. 1716.

READER'S LOG. Mont Blanc, lines 127-144, p. 1717. Looking upward toward the vast, snow-covered bulk of the mountain, the poet comments on the power that governs its natural effects, unvisited and unseen by human beings (who would not manage to climb this peak for nearly another half century). In lines 139-141, the poet notes the correspondence between the power that operates the human mind and the power that makes the laws of nature, a typical Romantic insight into the relationship between the human Imagination and the spiritual heart of nature. State in your own words the essence of the question these lines ask.

READER'S LOG. Ozymandias, pp. 1719-1720. Read the editors' note # 1, p. 1719. This frequently anthologized sonnet is irregular in its rhyme scheme, coming closest to the Italian form. This poem depends on irony for its effect. State in your own words what is ironic about it.

READER'S LOG. A Song: "Men of England," pp. 1720-1721. Read the editors' note # 1, p. 1720. Although the Industrial Revolution and seafaring England's predominance in world trade had in fact made England generally more prosperous than ever before, the dislocations of the Napoleonic wars, a national economy changing from agriculture to industry, and a burgeoning population sent far more rural people into the cities than the new industries could hire (a phenomenon which half a century earlier Hogarth had already taken into account in some of his London engravings). It is remarkable that Shelley, raised among the lower aristocracy of England and slated to inherit a title had his grandfather not disowned him for just such behavior as writing this poem, sympathized deeply with the poor of England. The present poem expresses his solidarity with laboring men, whose wages were low and whose job security was nil. Quote lines 21-24 by way of reinforcing your perception of the revolutionary tenor of this poem (which would of course make it seem dangerous to the propertied classes).

Ode to the West Wind, pp. 1723-1725. Read the editors' note # 1, p. 1723. Note that the sonnet-length stanzas consist of four tercets and a couplet, another evidence of Shelley's innovations with verse. In reading this poem, it is important to know that the west wind, presently blowing in autumn, also blows during the spring. From this fact devolves the poem's chief insight, that just as spring and summer inevitably follow autumn and winter, so new life grows from death. (The fact that dead life forms furnish the nutrition upon which living life forms flourish favorably impressed many Romantics, including notably Walt Whitman, one of the major American Romantics, who named his chief book of poetry Leaves of Grass, in recognition that grass grows greener on graves, a useful metaphor for interpreting nature as beneficent despite the evident fact of predation and death.)

READER'S LOG. Ode to the West Wind, stanza 4, p. 1724. Read this stanza with special care. The poet reveals that he suffers from depression and lassitude and longs to be blown aloft and energized by the fierce west wind. Quote a line which strikes you as expressing the poet's despair forcefully.

READER'S LOG. Ode to the West Wind, stanza 5, p.1725. Also read this stanza carefully. Here the poet, likening himself in his depressed mood to a dead leaf, prays that the west wind will indeed renew his drive and creative spirit, to the point even that his "words," his poems, as we may understand, will serve as a "trumpet of a prophecy" "among mankind." Also of interest is the fact that, despite his despondency, the poet finds a similarity between the fierce west wind and his own personality. Quote several lines that reveal his estimate of himself as akin to the west wind.

Prometheus Unbound, pp. 1725-1748. You are not asked to read this play carefully. Browse in it enough to sample Shelley's intention and style. Read carefully the editors' introduction, pp. 1725-1726. Note that the central character Prometheus speaks generally in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, whereas other characters speak in passages of various rhyme schemes. The drama is based upon the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus, a minor god who, having helpfully given fire to mankind, was chained by Jupiter, the chief god, to a rock in the Caucasus Mountains where vultures perpetually fed on his liver. The format of the drama, which will seem strange to readers accustomed to the suspenseful realistic action of modern dramas, is modeled on the tragedies of Aeschylus, the least realistic of the three great tragedians of ancient Greece, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. This play is something like a pageant or a tableau vivant, in which allegorical characters personify principles and moral qualities and deliver long, eloquent speeches without much movement or change. It is a prime example of what is called a closet drama, a play that succeeds better when read than when enacted. (Another famous closet drama is Milton's Samson Agonistes.) Your brief exposure to this play will reinforce your understanding of how passionately committed Shelley was to a moral revolution among humanity.

READER'S LOG. Prometheus Unbound, lines 619-635, p. 1733. Although he is still defiant after ages of being bound in agony on a rock, Prometheus now wishes to recall the curse he made against his captor, Jupiter. His forgiving mood extends to the humanity whose behavior has disappointed him. On p. 1733 a Fury, a demi-goddess who inspires human beings to fierce, vengeful acts, reminds Prometheus that the humanity whom Prometheus has served by giving them fire is cruel, deceitful, and self-deluded. Prometheus replies that he nonetheless pities humanity. His pity "and the forgiveness which it implies"also extends to Jupiter. The astonished Fury abruptly departs. This happens so quickly that the reader is likely not to recognize it as a climax. It proves a catalyst for the positive turn which the play now takes, which will be summarized for you in the next item. Here, quote the climactic lines 632-634.

READER'S LOG. Prometheus Unbound, lines 124-141, p. 1745, and lines 192-204, p. 1746. These lines, and those between them, end Act III, originally the final act of the play. In them an allegorical figure, the Spirit of the Hour, prophesies a happy future for a humanity which has revolted against kings and the enchaining customs of the past and, inspired by Love and Beauty, has made a paradise of the earth. Shelley, like his fellow Romantics, ardently desires a better world. Disillusioned with violent revolution, he consoles himself by believing in a coming moral revolution among humanity, a revolution to be precipitated, as this play suggests, by Love and Beauty. Quote a few lines from lines 192-204, p. 1746, which in your opinion best express the happy future condition of humanity.

Adonais, pp. 1753-1767. Browse through this poem enough to make yourself familiar with its style and intention. Read the editors' introduction carefully, pp. 1753-1754, and sample the notes at the bottom of the pages from time to time. The full title of the poem is Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc. An elegy is an expression of praise and grief for someone who has died. A traditional pastoral elegy is a poem relying on conventions established by the Greek poet Theocritus and elaborated upon by the Roman poet Virgil. The canon of English literature boasts three great pastoral elegies: Milton's Lycidas from the late Renaissance, Shelley's Adonais from the Romantic period, and Matthew Arnold's Thyrsis from the Victorian period. The chief convention of the pastoral is that the poem is supposedly a song sung by a shepherd (or, sometimes, by two shepherds who are having a dialogue with each other). The setting is rural, with pastures and sheep nearby. The convention allows for a variety of topics, usually related to love and grief or, more rarely, social criticism. Note that Shelley has again turned to the Spenserian stanza with eight pentameter lines and a terminal hexameter line.

You should also to refresh yourself on Wordsworth's Michael: A Pastoral Poem, pp. 1463-1474. It is of interest that Wordsworth deliberately ignored the conventions of the traditional pastoral when he composed this poem. Its setting and events are drawn from the close vicinity of Wordsworth's home in the Lake District. There are no allusions here to classical literature, particularly the artificial paraphernalia of the shepherds singing their laments to fellow shepherds. The abundant, vivid description is realistic and local, and the narrative, developed in careful detail, is about a humble shepherd, his wife, and the son on whom they doted when he was a child and for whose abandonment they grieved in their old age.

READER'S LOG. Adonais, editors' introduction, pp. 1753-1754. By way of fixing in your mind a summary of this poem, quote the long, complex sentence beginning at the top of p. 1754 with "We recognize..." and ending with the paragraph with "...he doth not sleep."

READER'S LOG. Adonais, stanzas 42-43, p. 1764. State in your own words the condition into which Keats' soul, according to these stanzas, has entered following his death.

A Defence of Poetry, pp. 1768-1781. Read carefully the editors' introduction, pp. 1768-1769. Browse in this essay till you get a sense of Shelley's prose style and intention. "The Defence," write your editors in the last paragraph on p. 1768, "is an eloquent and enduring claim for the indispensability of the visionary and creative imagination in all the great human concerns." In the preceding paragraph they emphasize that by the word poetry Shelley means all the products of truly creative minds. These creative minds include not only writers but also "artists, legislators, prophets, and the founders of new social and religious institutions." Such a broad definition of poetry is consistent with the Romantic theory of the Imagination, which can obviously function upon media other than metrically arranged language. For sample of Shelley's assertion of this definition, read on pp. 1771-1772. Nonetheless, as you will see while you browse, the kind of poetry Shelley emphasizes in this essay consists of what is more conventionally understood by the word poetry, thought and emotion cast in metrical or versified language.

READER'S LOG. A Defence of Poetry, pp. 1768-1781. At the beginning of the paragraph in the middle of p. 1778, you read a frequently quoted assertion about poetry (in this context Shelley means poetry as it is conventionally understood): "Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds." This essay is full of such remarkable "quotable quotes," succinct variations on Shelley's general definition of poetry, cast in such pithy, notable language that they can stand alone as thought-provoking aphorisms. Locate and quote in your response at least two other succinct statements that in your opinion qualify as quotable quotes.