Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Percy Bysshe Shelley

• Poetry

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Contents

• - Percy Bysshe Shelleys biography
• - Poetry
• -- Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
• -- Ozymandias
• -- England in 1819
• -- To a Skylark

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Percy Bysshe Shelleys biography

• Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on August 4,
  1792 at Field Place, near Horsham in Sussex, to
  Sir Timothy Shelley and Elizabeth Pilfold
  following their marriage in October of 1791.
  Percy was the eldest of six children John, Mary,
  Elizabeth, Hellen, Margaret.
• Being of a wealthy family, Percy became
  heir to the 2nd baronet of Castle Goring in 1815
  and received much of his early education by
  tutor, Reverend Thomas Edwards of Horsham. In
  1802, Shelley entered the Sion House Academy of
  Brentford before heading to Eton College in 1804
  and on April 10, 1810 to the University of
  Oxford.
• While at Oxford, Shelley was published for
  the first time Gothic novel, Zastrozzi (1810).
  The same year, Shelley and his sister Elizabeth
  Co-published Original Poetry by Victor and
  Cazire. At Oxford, Shelley and another, possibly
  Thomas Jefferson Hogg, published a collection of
  verse, Posthumous Fragments of Margaret
  Nicholson. And in 1811 Shelley published a
  pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, which led to
  his expulsion from Oxford on March 25, 1811 along
  with Hogg.
• Shelley however, could have been reinstated
  if he recanted his views, but refused. This led
  to a breakdown between himself and his father's
  relationship.
• At the young age of 19, just four months
  after his expulsion, Shelley eloped to Scotland
  with a 16-year-old schoolgirl, Harriet Westbrook.
  Shelley invited his friend Hogg along with his
  wife to share their household and engage in open
  marriage activities. However, Harriet refused to
  be apart of such actions, so the couple left to
  live in the Lake District.

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• Being distracted by political events,
  Shelley left to Ireland and began spreading his
  radical ideas, giving him much attention, however
  unfavorable, of the British government.
• The following years, Shelley wrote and
  published Queen Mab. At this point the Shelleys
  marriage was an unhappy one. Often Shelley would
  leave his wife and two children while visiting
  William Godwin's home and bookshop in London.
  While there, he met and fell in love with his
  daughter, Mary.
• In July 1814, Shelley eloped once again with
  a 16-year-old, Mary. The two brought along Mary's
  step-sister Jane, later named Claire, Clairmont,
  who was also 16. The three crossed much of Europe
  travelling through France and later settling in
  Switzerland. The Shelleys later published a
  journal accounting the adventure.
• After just six weeks, Shelley, Mary and Jane
  returned to England and found Godwin refusing to
  speak with Mary or Shelley due to their practice
  of free love.
• In the fall of 1815, Shelley produced
  Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude, a verse
  allegory. The poem held little attention at the
  time, but later became recognized as one of
  Shelley's most powerful works. Around this time,
  much of Shelley's works were influenced by
  Wordsworth's poetry.

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• During the summer of 1816, Shelley and his
  wife Mary made a second trip to Switzerland. The
  couple visited there only because of Mary's
  sister, Claire, had commenced with Lord Byron and
  entered exile in mainland Europe. Around this
  time, Byron had lost much of his interest in
  Claire, but she used the opportunity of meeting
  the Shelley's as bait to head to Geneva.
• The Shelleys and Byron rented neighbouring
  houses on the shores of Lake Geneva, holding
  regular conversations and influencing much of
  each others poetry. On a boating trip Shelley was
  inspired to write Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,
  his most significant work since Alastor and while
  at the French Alps wrote Mont Blanc. The same
  time, Mary was inspired to begin writing
  Frankenstein.
• By the end of the summer, the Shelleys and
  Claire returned to England with Claire being
  pregnant. After their returned, Shelly's life was
  tragic. Mary's half-sister Fanny Imlay, committed
  suicide in late Autumn and in December of 1816,
  Shelley's wife, estranged and pregnant, Harriet
  drowned herself in the Serpentine River in Hyde
  Park. Shelley and Mary then married, intending to
  secure Shelley's custody, but the marriage was
  found in vain and the children were handed over
  to foster parents.
• The Shelleys moved to the village of
  Marlow, Buckinghamshire surrounding themselves
  with a literary circle, including Leigh Hunt and
  John Keats. Shelley's major work during this time
  was Laon and Cythna, a long narrative poem
  attacking religion and featured a pair of
  incestuous lovers. The poem was later edited and
  republished as The Revolt of Islam in 1818.

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• In early 1818, the Shelleys and Claire left
  again to deliver Byron and Claire's daughter to
  Byron where they took up residence in Venice.
  However, in 1818 and 1819 tragedy struck the
  Shelleys again as his son Will died of fever in
  Rome and his infant daughter died during another
  move.
• Over the years the Shelleys travelled
  throughout much of Italy. Shelley completed
  Prometheus Unbound in Rome and spent the rest of
  his summer of 1819 writing tragedy including The
  Masque of Anarchy, Men of England and The Witch
  of Atlas.
• In 1821, Shelley wrote the elegy Adonais
  which was inspired by the death of Keats. Shelley
  and Byron arranged for James Henry Leigh Hunt to
  accompany them in Italy to create a journal named
  The Liberal, which would disseminate their
  writings and act as a counter to conservative
  periodicals in 1822.
• The same year, tragedy struck the Shelleys
  once again, this time to Shelley himself. Percy
  Bysshe Shelley died on July 8, 1822 by drowning
  during a sudden storm while sailing back from
  Pisa and Livorno to Lerici in his schooner, the
  Don Juan.
• Shelley's body washed ashore and was later
  cremated and interred in the Protestant Cemetery
  in Rome. His heart however, was taken by Edward
  Trelawny and given to Mary Shelley, who kept it
  until her dying day.

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Poetry

• The central thematic concerns of Shelley's
  poetry are largely the same themes that defined
  Romanticism, especially among the younger English
  poets of Shelley's era beauty, the passions,
  nature, political liberty, creativity, and the
  sanctity of the imagination. What makes Shelley's
  treatment of these themes unique is his
  philosophical relationship to his subject
  matterwhich was better developed and articulated
  than that of any other Romantic poet with the
  possible exception of Wordsworthand his
  temperament, which was extraordinarily sensitive
  and responsive even for a Romantic poet, and
  which possessed an extraordinary capacity for
  joy, love, and hope. Shelley fervently believed
  in the possibility of realizing an ideal of human
  happiness as based on beauty, and his moments of
  darkness and despair (he had many, particularly
  in book-length poems such as the monumental Queen
  Mab) almost always stem from his disappointment
  at seeing that ideal sacrificed to human
  weakness. Shelley's intense feelings about beauty
  and expression are documented in poems such as
  "Ode to the West Wind" and "To a Skylark," in
  which he invokes metaphors from nature to
  characterize his relationship to his art. The
  centre of his aesthetic philosophy can be found
  in his important essay A Defence of Poetry, in
  which he argues that poetry brings about moral
  good. Poetry, Shelley argues, exercises and
  expands the imagination, and the imagination is
  the source of sympathy, compassion, and love,
  which rest on the ability to project oneself into
  the position of another person. He writes,

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• A man, to be greatly good, must imagine
  intensely and comprehensively he must put
  himself in the place of another and of many
  others. The pains and pleasures of his species
  must become his own. The great instrument of
  moral good is the imagination and poetry
  administers to the effect by acting upon the
  cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the
  imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of
  ever new delight, which have the power of
  attracting and assimilating to their own nature
  all other thoughts, and which form new intervals
  and interstices whose void forever craves fresh
  food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the
  organ of the moral nature of man, in the same
  manner as exercise strengthens a limb.
• No other English poet of the early
  nineteenth century so emphasized the connection
  between beauty and goodness, or believed so
  avidly in the power of art's sensual pleasures to
  improve society

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Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

• Summary
• The speaker says that the shadow of an
  invisible Power floats among human beings,
  occasionally visiting human hearts--manifested in
  summer winds, or moonbeams, or the memory of
  music, or anything that is precious for its
  mysterious grace. Addressing this Spirit of
  Beauty, the speaker asks where it has gone, and
  why it leaves the world so desolate when it
  goes--why human hearts can feel such hope and
  love when it is present, and such despair and
  hatred when it is gone. He asserts that religious
  and superstitious notions--"Demon, Ghost, and
  Heaven"--are nothing more than the attempts of
  mortal poets and wise men to explain and express
  their responses to the Spirit of Beauty, which
  alone, the speaker says, can give "grace and
  truth to life's unquiet dream."

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• Love, Hope, and Self-Esteem come and go at
  the whim of the Spirit, and if it would only stay
  in the human heart forever, instead of coming and
  going unpredictably, man would be "immortal and
  omnipotent." The Spirit inspires lovers and
  nourishes thought and the speaker implores the
  spirit to remain even after his life has ended,
  fearing that without it death will be "a dark
  reality."
• The speaker recalls that when he was a boy,
  he "sought for ghosts," and travelled through
  caves and forests looking for "the departed
  dead" but only when the Spirit's shadow fell
  across him--as he mused "deeply on the lot / Of
  life" outdoors in the spring--did he experience
  transcendence. At that moment, he says, "I
  shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!" He
  then vowed that he would dedicate his life to the
  Spirit of Beauty now he asserts that he has kept
  his vow--every joy he has ever had has been
  linked to the hope that the "awful Loveliness"
  would free the world from slavery, and complete
  the articulation of his words.
• The speaker observes that after noon the
  day becomes "more solemn and serene," and in
  autumn there is a "lustre in the sky" which
  cannot be found in summer. The speaker asks the
  Spirit, whose power descended upon his youth like
  that truth of nature, to supply "calm" to his
  "onward life"--the life of a man who worships the
  Spirit and every form that contains it, and who
  is bound by the spells of the Spirit to "fear
  himself, and love all humankind."

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• Commentary
• This lyric hymn, written in 1816, is
  Shelley's earliest focused attempt to incorporate
  the Romantic ideal of communion with nature into
  his own aesthetic philosophy. The "Intellectual
  Beauty" of the poem's title does not refer to the
  beauty of the mind or of the working intellect,
  but rather to the intellectual idea of beauty,
  abstracted in this poem to the "Spirit of
  Beauty," whose shadow comes and goes over human
  hearts. The poem is the poet's exploration both
  of the qualities of beauty (here it always
  resides in nature, for example), and of the
  qualities of the human being's response to it
  ("Love, Hope, and Self-esteem").
• The poem's process is doubly figurative
  or associative, in that, once the poet abstracts
  the metaphor of the Spirit from the particulars
  of natural beauty, he then explains the workings
  of this Spirit by comparing it back to the very
  particulars of natural beauty from which it was
  abstracted in the first place "Thy light alone,
  like mist o'er mountains driven" "Love, Hope,
  and Self-esteem, like clouds depart..." This is
  an inspired technique, for it enables Shelley to
  illustrate the stunning experience of natural
  beauty time and again as the poem progresses, but
  to push the particulars into the background, so
  that the focus of the poem is always on the
  Spirit, the abstract intellectual ideal that the
  speaker claims to serve.
• Of course Shelley's atheism is a famous
  part of his philosophical stance, so it may seem
  strange that he has written a hymn of any kind.
  He addresses that strangeness in the third
  stanza, when he declares that names such as
  "Demon, Ghost, and Heaven" are merely the record
  of attempts by sages to explain the effect of the
  Spirit of Beauty--but that the effect has never
  been explained by any "voice from some sublimer
  world." The Spirit of Beauty that the poet
  worships is not supernatural, it is a part of the
  world. It is not an independent entity it is a
  responsive capability within the poet's own mind.
  
• If the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" is
  not among Shelley's very greatest poems, it is
  only because its project falls short of the
  poet's extraordinary powers simply drawing the
  abstract ideal of his own experience of beauty
  and declaring his fidelity to that ideal seems
  too simple a task for Shelley. His most important
  statements on natural beauty and on aesthetics
  will take into account a more complicated idea of
  his own connection to nature as an expressive
  artist and a poet, as we shall see in "To a
  Skylark. Nevertheless, the "Hymn" remains an
  important poem from the early period of Shelley's
  maturity. It shows him working to incorporate
  Wordsworthian ideas of nature, in some ways the
  most important theme of early Romanticism, into
  his own poetic project, and, by connecting his
  idea of beauty to his idea of human religion,
  making that theme explicitly his own.

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Ozymandias

• Summary
• The speaker recalls having met a traveller
  "from an antique land," who told him a story
  about the ruins of a statue in the desert of his
  native country. Two vast legs of stone stand
  without a body, and near them a massive,
  crumbling stone head lies "half sunk" in the
  sand. The traveller told the speaker that the
  frown and "sneer of cold command" on the statue's
  face indicate that the sculptor understood well
  the passions of the statue's subject, a man who
  sneered with contempt for those weaker than
  himself, yet fed his people because of something
  in his heart ("The hand that mocked them and the
  heart that fed"). On the pedestal of the statue
  appear the words "My name is Ozymandias, king of
  kings / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and
  despair!" But around the decaying ruin of the
  statue, nothing remains, only the "lone and level
  sands," which stretch out around it, far away.

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• Commentary
• This sonnet from 1817 is probably
  Shelley's most famous and most anthologized
  poem--which is somewhat strange, considering that
  it is in many ways an atypical poem for Shelley,
  and that it touches little upon the most
  important themes in his oeuvre at large (beauty,
  expression, love, imagination). Still,
  "Ozymandias" is a masterful sonnet. Essentially
  it is devoted to a single metaphor the
  shattered, ruined statue in the desert wasteland,
  with its arrogant, passionate face and
  monomaniacal inscription ("Look on my works, ye
  Mighty, and despair!"). The once-great king's
  proud boast has been ironically disproved
  Ozymandias's works have crumbled and disappeared,
  his civilization is gone, all has been turned to
  dust by the impersonal, indiscriminate,
  destructive power of history. The ruined statue
  is now merely a monument to one man's hubris, and
  a powerful statement about the insignificance of
  human beings to the passage of time. Ozymandias
  is first and foremost a metaphor for the
  ephemeral nature of political power, and in that
  sense the poem is Shelley's most outstanding
  political sonnet, trading the specific rage of a
  poem like "England in 1819" for the crushing
  impersonal metaphor of the statue. But Ozymandias
  symbolizes not only political power--the statue
  can be a metaphor for the pride and hubris of all
  of humanity, in any of its manifestations. It is
  significant that all that remains of Ozymandias
  is a work of art and a group of words as
  Shakespeare does in the sonnets, Shelley
  demonstrates that art and language long outlast
  the other legacies of power. Of course, it is
  Shelley's brilliant poetic rendering of the
  story, and not the subject of the story itself,
  which makes the poem so memorable. Framing the
  sonnet as a story told to the speaker by "a
  traveller from an antique land" enables Shelley
  to add another level of obscurity to Ozymandias's
  position with regard to the reader--rather than
  seeing the statue with our own eyes, so to speak,
  we hear about it from someone who heard about it
  from someone who has seen it. Thus the ancient
  king is rendered even less commanding the
  distancing of the narrative serves to undermine
  his power over us just as completely as has the
  passage of time. Shelley's description of the
  statue works to reconstruct, gradually, the
  figure of the "king of kings" first we see
  merely the "shattered visage," then the face
  itself, with its "frown / And wrinkled lip and
  sneer of cold command" then we are introduced to
  the figure of the sculptor, and are able to
  imagine the living man sculpting the living king,
  whose face wore the expression of the passions
  now inferable then we are introduced to the
  king's people in the line, "the hand that mocked
  them and the heart that fed." The kingdom is now
  imaginatively complete, and we are introduced to
  the extraordinary, prideful boast of the king
  "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" With
  that, the poet demolishes our imaginary picture
  of the king, and interposes centuries of ruin
  between it and us "'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."

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England in 1819

• Summary
• The speaker describes the state of England
  in 1819. The king is "old, mad, blind, despised,
  and dying." The princes are "the dregs of their
  dull race," and flow through public scorn like
  mud, unable to see, feel for, or know their
  people, clinging like leeches to their country
  until they "drop, blind in blood, without a
  blow." The English populace are "starved and
  stabbed" in untilled fields the army is
  corrupted by "liberticide and prey" the laws
  "tempt and slay" religion is Christless and
  Godless, "a book sealed" and the English Senate
  is like "Time's worst statute unrepealed." Each
  of these things, the speaker says, is like a
  grave from which "a glorious Phantom" may burst
  to illuminate "our tempestuous day."

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• Commentary
• For all his commitment to romantic ideals
  of love and beauty, Shelley was also concerned
  with the real world he was a fierce denouncer of
  political power and a passionate advocate for
  liberty. The result of his political commitment
  was a series of angry political poems condemning
  the arrogance of power, including "Ozymandias"
  and "England in 1819." Like Wordsworth's "London,
  1802," "England in 1819" bitterly lists the flaws
  in England's social fabric in order, King George
  is "old, mad, blind, despised, and dying" the
  nobility ("princes") are insensible leeches
  draining their country dry the people are
  oppressed, hungry, and hopeless, their fields
  untilled the army is corrupt and dangerous to
  its own people the laws are useless, religion
  has become morally degenerate, and Parliament ("A
  Senate") is "Time's worst statute unrepealed."
  The furious, violent metaphors Shelley employs
  throughout this list (nobles as leeches in muddy
  water, the army as a two-edged sword, religion as
  a sealed book, Parliament as an unjust law) leave
  no doubt about his feelings on the state of his
  nation. Then, surprisingly, the final couplet
  concludes with a note of passionate Shelleyean
  optimism from these "graves" a "glorious
  Phantom" may "burst to illumine our tempestuous
  day." What this Phantom might be is not specified
  in the poem, but it seems to hint simultaneously
  at the Spirit of the "Hymn to Intellectual
  Beauty" and at the possibility of liberty won
  through revolution, as it was won in France. (It
  also recalls Wordsworth's invocation of the
  spirit of John Milton to save England in the
  older poet's poem, though that connection may be
  unintentional on Shelley's part both Wordsworth
  and Shelley long for an apocalyptic deus ex
  machina to save their country, but Shelley is
  certainly not summoning John Milton.)

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To a Skylark

• Summary
• The speaker, addressing a skylark, says that
  it is a "blithe Spirit" rather than a bird, for
  its song comes from Heaven, and from its full
  heart pours "profuse strains of unpremeditated
  art." The skylark flies higher and higher, "like
  a cloud of fire" in the blue sky, singing as it
  flies. In the "golden lightning" of the sun, it
  floats and runs, like "an unbodied joy." As the
  skylark flies higher and higher, the speaker
  loses sight of it, but is still able to hear its
  "shrill delight," which comes down as keenly as
  moonbeams in the "white dawn," which can be felt
  even when they are not seen. The earth and air
  ring with the skylark's voice, just as Heaven
  overflows with moonbeams when the moon shines out
  from behind "a lonely cloud."

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• The speaker says that no one knows what the
  skylark is, for it is unique even "rainbow
  clouds" do not rain as brightly as the shower of
  melody that pours from the skylark. The bird is
  "like a poet hidden / In the light of thought,"
  able to make the world experience "sympathy with
  hopes and fears it heeded not." It is like a
  lonely maiden in a palace tower, who uses her
  song to soothe her lovelorn soul. It is like a
  golden glow-worm, scattering light among the
  flowers and grass in which it is hidden. It is
  like a rose embowered in its own green leaves,
  whose scent is blown by the wind until the bees
  are faint with "too much sweet." The skylark's
  song surpasses "all that ever was, / Joyous and
  clear and fresh," whether the rain falling on the
  "twinkling grass" or the flowers the rain
  awakens.
• Calling the skylark "Sprite or Bird," the
  speaker asks it to tell him its "sweet thoughts,"
  for he has never heard anyone or anything call up
  "a flood of rapture so divine." Compared to the
  skylark's, any music would seem lacking. What
  objects, the speaker asks, are "the fountains of
  thy happy strain?" Is it fields, waves,
  mountains, the sky, the plain, or "love of thine
  own kind" or "ignorance or pain"? Pain and
  languor, the speaker says, "never came near" the
  skylark it loves, but has never known "love's
  sad satiety." Of death, the skylark must know
  "things more true and deep" than mortals could
  dream otherwise, the speaker asks, "how could
  thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?"
• For mortals, the experience of happiness
  is bound inextricably with the experience of
  sadness dwelling upon memories and hopes for the
  future, mortal men "pine for what is not" their
  laughter is "fraught" with "some pain" their
  "sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest
  thought." But, the speaker says, even if men
  could "scorn / Hate and pride and fear," and were
  born without the capacity to weep, he still does
  not know how they could ever approximate the joy
  expressed by the skylark. Calling the bird a
  "scorner of the ground," he says that its music
  is better than all music and all poetry. He asks
  the bird to teach him "half the gladness / That
  thy brain must know," for then he would overflow
  with "harmonious madness," and his song would be
  so beautiful that the world would listen to him,
  even as he is now listening to the skylark.

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• Commentary
• If the West Wind was Shelley's first
  convincing attempt to articulate an aesthetic
  philosophy through metaphors of nature, the
  skylark is his greatest natural metaphor for pure
  poetic expression, the "harmonious madness" of
  pure inspiration. The skylark's song issues from
  a state of purified existence, a Wordsworthian
  notion of complete unity with Heaven through
  nature its song is motivated by the joy of that
  uncomplicated purity of being, and is unmixed
  with any hint of melancholy or of the
  bittersweet, as human joy so often is. The
  skylark's unimpeded song rains down upon the
  world, surpassing every other beauty, inspiring
  metaphor and making the speaker believe that the
  bird is not a mortal bird at all, but a "Spirit,"
  a "sprite," a "poet hidden / In the light of
  thought."
• In that sense, the skylark is almost an
  exact twin of the bird in Keats's "Ode to a
  Nightingale" both represent pure expression
  through their songs, and like the skylark, the
  nightingale "wast not born for death." But while
  the nightingale is a bird of darkness, invisible
  in the shadowy forest glades, the skylark is a
  bird of daylight, invisible in the deep bright
  blue of the sky. The nightingale inspires Keats
  to feel "a drowsy numbness" of happiness that is
  also like pain, and that makes him think of
  death the skylark inspires Shelley to feel a
  frantic, rapturous joy that has no part of pain.
  To Keats, human joy and sadness are inextricably
  linked, as he explains at length in the final
  stanza of the "Ode on Melancholy." But the
  skylark sings free of all human error and
  complexity, and while listening to his song, the
  poet feels free of those things, too.

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• Structurally and linguistically, this poem
  is almost unique among Shelley's works its
  strange form of stanza, with four compact lines
  and one very long line, and its lilting, songlike
  diction ("profuse strains of unpremeditated art")
  work to create the effect of spontaneous poetic
  expression flowing musically and naturally from
  the poet's mind. Structurally, each stanza tends
  to make a single, quick point about the skylark,
  or to look at it in a sudden, brief new light
  still, the poem does flow, and gradually advances
  the mini-narrative of the speaker watching the
  skylark flying higher and higher into the sky,
  and envying its untrammeled inspiration--which,
  if he were to capture it in words, would cause
  the world to listen.