Romanticism X
28 November 2007
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
--T.S.Eliot: "... how far it is possible to enjoy Shelley's poetry without approving the use to which he put it: that is, without sharing his views and sympathies" ("Shelley and Keats" in The Use of poetry and the Use of Criticism, 1933)
--F.R.Leavis: "This poetry induces--depends for its success on inducing--a kind of inattention that does not bring the critical intelligence into play; the imagery feels right, the associations work appropriately, if […] one accepts the immediate feeling and does not slow down to think." ("Shelley" in Revaluation, 1936)
--Revaluation by deconstruction and the New Historicism
Letter to Peacock, 7 Nov.1818: "I always seek in what I see the manifestation of something beyond the palpable."
Prometheus Unbound (II.iv.116.) "The deep truth is imageless"
Letter to Lord Byron,1816: "The French Revolution is still the master theme of the epoch in which we live."
A Defence of Poetry (1821, pbl. 1840)
--A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not....
---A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sound...
---Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
MATURITY: 1818-1822
Letter to Peacock: "Fancy Demosthenes thundering his Philippics against the billows of the Atlantic Ocean."
Letter of January 1820: "I wish I had something better to do than furnishing this jingling food for the hunger of oblivion, called verse: but I have not...and cannot hope to have."
"Peterloo" 16 August 1819: Song to the Men of England, Sonnet: England in 1819
The Mask of Anarchy: medieval dream-poem, allegory [passive resistance--Ghandi]
Murder: Castlereagh (Foreign Secretary); Fraud: Eldon (Lord Chancellor); Hypocricy: Sidmouth (Home Secretary); Anarchy: “Like Death in the Apocalypse“ (Revelations 6:8) -- Hope (Daughter of Time)
....Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war.[…]
With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear and less surprise
Look upon them as they slay
Till their rage has died away.[…]
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chain to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few. (319-22; 344-347; 368-372)
Ode to the West Wind (October 1819) 5 sonnet-like verse paragraphs in terza rima
V
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Change and permanence: In notebook from the same time: "The roses arose early to blossom, and they blossomed to grow old, and found a cradle and a sepulchre in the bud." (Transl. from Calderon)
If I look on Spring's soft Heaven
Something is not there which was
Winter's wonderous cold and snow,
Summer clouds, where are they now?
Prometheus Unbound (1818-19)--
Preface: The only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgement, a more poetical character than Satan because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire of personal aggrandisement, which, in the hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest.
Prometheus: human mind or mankind: imagination; Asia: love; Jupiter: reason: tyranny; Demogorgon: Necessity
Mary Shelley: ...That man could be so perfectionised as to be able to expel evil from his own nature and from the greater part of the creation, was the cardinal point in his system.
Asia's song (II.5, 72-110)
My soul is an enchanted boat,
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;
And mine doth like an angel sit
Beside the helm conducting it
While all the world with melody is ringing.
It seems to float ever, forever,
Upon that many winding river,
Between mountains, woods, abysses,
A paradise of wildernesses!
Till, like one in slumber bound,
Borne to the ocean, I float down, around,
Into the sea profound, of ever-spreading sound.
Meanwhile thy Spirit lifts its pinions
In Music’s most serene dominions,
Catching the winds that fan the happy Heaven.
And we sail on, away, afar,
Without a course - without a star -
But by the instinct of sweet music driven
Till, through Elysian garden islets
By thee, most beautiful of pilots,
Where never mortal pinnace glided,
The boat of my desire is guided -
Realms where the air we breathe is Love
Which in the winds and on the waves doth move,
Harmonizing this Earth with what we feel above.
We have passed Age's icy caves,
And Manhood's dark and tossing waves
And Youth's smooth ocean, smiling to betray;
Beyond the glassy gulfs we flee
Of shadow-peopled Infancy,
Through Death and Birth to a diviner day,
A Paradise of vaulted bowers
Lit by downward-gazing flowers
And watery paths that wind between
Wildernesses calm and green,
Peopled by shapes too bright to see,
And rest, having beheld - somewhat like thee,
Which walk upon the sea, and chaunt melodiously!
The Cenci: Elisabethan drama of an incestuous passion
Adonais (1821): elegy on Keats's death (Moschus: "Elegy for Bion",
Milton: "Lycidas") Spenserian stanzas
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines; Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.--Die,
If thou wouldst be with that thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!--Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.( st. 52)
Essay on Love (July 1818) (Plato: Symposium)...We are born into the world, and there is something within us which, from the instant that we live, more and more thirsts after its likeness. It is probably in correspondence with this law that the infant drains milk from the bosom of its mother; this propensity develops itself with the development of our nature. We dimly see in our intellectual nature a miniature as if were of our entire self, yet deprived of all that we condemn or despise, the ideal prototype of everything excellent or lovely that we are capable of conceiving as belonging to the nature of man.
Epipsychidion (Plato: immortal soul: sun; the higher mortal soul: moon; the lower mortal soul - unruly passions - comet) [Hadrian: “De Animula”; T.S.Eliot: “Animula”]
One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,
One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,
And one annihilation Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of Love’s rare Universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire, --
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!(584-591)
The Triumph of Life (1822) Dante, Petrarch
(medieval dream-poem: vision in a dream explained by Rousseau)
Life has always corrupted the idealism of mankind: two exceptions:
All but the sacred few who could not tame
Their spirit to the Conqueror, but as soon
As they had touched the world with living flame
Fled back like eagles to their native noon,
Or those who put aside the diadem
Of earthly thrones or gems, till the last one
Were there; for they of Athens and Jerusalem
Were neither midst the mighty captives seen
Nor with the ribald crowd that followed them
Or fled before... (128-137)