The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, given from his own editions and other authentic sources, collated with many manuscripts and with all editions of authority, together with his prefaces and notes, his poetical translations and fragments and an appendix of Juvenilia. Edited by H. B. Forman

Front matter

SHELLEY'S POETICAL WOEKS VOLUME I men Are cradled into poetry by wrong, They learn iu suffering what they teach in song. His left hand held the lyre, and in his right The plectrum struck the chords— unconquerable Up from beneath his hand in circling flight The gathering music rose— and sweet as Love The penetrating notes did live and move Within the heart j^sreat-Apollo . . . THE POETICAL WORKS OF PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY GIVEN FROM HIS OWN EDITIONS AND OTHER AUTHENTIC SOURCES COLLATED WITH MANY MANUSCRIPTS AND WITH ALL EDITIONS OF AUTHORITY TOGETHER WITH HIS PREFACES AND NOTES HIS POETICAL TRANSLATIONS AND FRAGMENTS AND AN

Appendix

OF JUVENILIA EDITED BY HARRY BUXTON FORMAN IN TWO VOLUMES VOL UME I LONDON REEVES & TURNER 196 STRAND aBallant'cnc (press BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO. EDINBURGH AND LONDON CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. PAGE Preface by the Editor ix Alastor ; or, The Spirit of Solttude : and other Poems Preface 1 Alastor 3 To Coleridge 22 Stanzas. — April, 1814 23 Mutability • . .24 "There is no work, nor device" &c 25 A Summer-Evening Church- Yard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire 26 Sonnet. — To Wordsworth 27 Sonnet. — Feelings of a Eepublican on the fall of Bonaparte 27 Superstition 28 Sonnet, from the Italian of Dante (Dante Alighieri to Guido Cavalcanti) 29 Sonnet. — Translated from the Greek of Moschcb . 29 The Dæmon of the World [Part I] .... 30 The Dæmon of the World ; Part II ... . 38 Mont Blanc. Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni . 47 Cancelled Passage of Mont Blanc VI CONTENTS.

PACK Laon and Cythna ; or the Revolution of the Golden City (Usually known as the Revolt of Islam) Preface 52 Dedication 62 Canto I 66 Canto II 81 Canto III 94 Canto IV 103 Canto V 112 Canto VI 129 Canto VII 143 Canto VIII 154 Canto IX 162 Canto X 171 Canto XI 183 Canto XII 190 Rosalind and Helen, a Modern Eclogue ; with other Poems Advertisement 201 Rosalind and Helen 202 Lines written among the Euganean Hills . . . 237 Hymn to Intellectual Beauty 247 Sonnet. — Ozymandias 250 The Cenci Dedication 251 Preface 252 Act I 258 Act II 272 Act III 283 Act IV 300 Act V . CONTENTS. VII PACK Prometheus Unbound ; a Lyrical Drama : with other Poems Preface 340 Act I 345 Act II 371 Act III 393 Act IV 4t)8 The Sensitive Plant, Part I 426 The Sensitive Plant, Part II 430 The Sensitive Plant, Part III 431 The Sensitive Plant, Conclusion 435 A Vision of the Sea 436 Ode to Heaven 440 An Exhortation 442 Ode to the West Wind 443 An Ode [Written, October, 1819, before the Spaniards had recovered their liberty] . ... . 445 Cancelled Stanza 446 The Cloud 446 To a Skylark 449 Ode to Liberty 452 Cancelled Passage of the Ode to Liberty . . . 460 Œdipus Tyrannus ; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant.

A Tragedy. Translated from the Original Doric Advertisement 461 Act 1 462 Act II 477 Epipsychidion Stanza from Dante 490 Advertisement CONTENTS. PAGE Epipsychidion — continued. Epipsychidion 491 Studies for Epipsychidion and Cancelled Passages 507 Adonais ; an Elegy on the Death of John Keats Preface 512 Adonais 514 Cancelled Passages of the Preface .... 528 Cancelled Passages of the Poem .... 529 Hellas ; a Lyrical Drama Dedication 531 Preface 531 Hellas 535 Notes 568 Lines Written on Hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon 571 FRONTISPIECE. Portrait of Shelley by Miss Curran, Etched by William Bell Scott. PKEFACE BY THE EDITOR. The ready and wide acceptance of my annotated Library Edition of the Works of Shelley induces me to believe that there is place for an edition of the text, given accurately from the most authentic sources without annotation of any kind.

In the following pages, therefore, I have separated from the extensive notes and appen dices of the Library Edition the text as there printed, adopting also the same principles of arrangement. There must be many students of Shelley who have no time or inclination to go into the pros and cons of textual discussion, but who would gladly have under their hands in a portable and readable form the ipsissima verba of the master in what has the best claim to be considered their ultimate developement. To this class of readers, variorum readings even are of no sufficient interest to compensate for repetition and the distraction of coming to a conclusion on the relative merits of the several readings ; and for such, it will be enough to have the ultimate work in its entirety and integrity. The present Edition contains every poem or fragment of verse by Shelley which has ever as far as I am aware been published, and a few dozens of lines not included in any previous edition.

All his prefaces, dedications, notes, and mottoes are given, together with all his poetic translations, and an appendix consisting of the whole series of Juvenilia, from the Verses on a Cat written when he was some eight years old to the remarkable poem by which he is still perhaps most widely known — Queen Mob. This I have given in its original form among the Juvenilia ; while including in the series of mature works, notwithstanding the considerable repeti tions involved, the revision made in 1815 under the title of The X Dæmon of the World — which I was enabled to complete from the copy mentioned in Medwin's and Middleton's Lives of Shelley. And there are other instances in which studies and cancelled pas sages of importance are retained as a portion of the text of Shelley's poetry, albeit including lines and expressions which occur in the finished forms.

To produce in the case of Shelley as near an approximation as may be to the text that the poet intended to issue, is a more than ordinarily difficult task, — not from any lack of materials, for the mass of material extant is astonishing when we consider the vicis situdes to which his works have been subjected. The difficulty is in deciding what shall be the authority for the text in each particular poem. In respect of books seen through the press by himself, there ought to be no difficulty whatever, except as regards isolated words and stops ; but unfortunately he did not revise while at press one half of the entire bulk of his poetry, several of the volumes having been printed in England while he was abroad, and read through the press by friends. The proportion of his mature works, from Alastor onwards, which had the advantage of his personal revision when in type, would, I think, be liberally estimated at one third ; and the largest of the volumes seen through the press by himself is infamously printed.

Generally speaking, however, where there is no manuscript extant, the text as printed in Shelley's life-time must be accepted as the nearest obtainable approach to an authority ; and even when there is a manuscript extant, it is by no means a final authority as a matter of course. The relative value of a poem as printed in Shelley's life-time and as written out by him must depend not only upon the revision of the press by the author or his substitute, but upon the teclmical quality of the printer's work, and the amount of care bestowed upon the manuscript. If the printed version is obviously a careless piece of typography, it loses much of its authority even though seen through the press by Shelley himself. This is preeminently the case with Laon and Cythna ; and the extant manuscript fragments tend to shew that the printer had not one of Shelley's best manu scripts to work from.

Alastor, on the contrary, seems to me a very creditable piece of printer's work, on the whole ; and, if a manuscript of that volume were discovered, I should not expect it to authorize more than two important verbal alterations. The Rosalind and Helen volume, again, of which proof sheets were certainly not seen by Shelley, is inferior to the Alastor volume as an authority ; but probably the manuscript of the eclogue itself would be found very hasty and inconsistent in the matters of detail in which alone the printed text is suspicious to any great extent. These three instances are merely typical of the kind of considera tion applicable to every one of Shelley's volumes ; and to reprint his published series just as they stand, without correcting palpable errors, would thus be an inadequate attempt to approach the genuine text.

I have therefore not scrupled to remove many small blemishes of three classes, (1) those for which the printer is clearly responsible, (2) those for which Shelley may be responsible, but would certainly have removed if he had observed them, and (3) those for which Shelley's substitute for the time being is pro bably responsible. No alteration has been made unless I have felt sure the original was not what Shelley meant it to be, or would have wished it to be ; and, I may almost add, unless it has been perfectly obvious what change should be made. Conjecture has no part nor lot in the matter. It is easy enough to go on the assumption that everything in a text is right, and reprint it in sac-simile ; and it is not much less easy to go on the opposite assumption that everything a little out of one's ordinary experience is wrong, and altar it forthwith.

But the difficulty, witli such texts as Shelley's, is to discriminate between unintentional inaccuracies in printing or writing and intentional eccentricities of style, metre, punctuation, and ortho graphy. In my opinion the least correct of all the volumes pub lished by Shelley during his life-time is very far pleasanter to read, and very much nearer the fact of his intention, than any of the posthumous texts published up to the year 1876. The chief reason of this I take to be a want of veneration on the part of his editors,— a failure to perceive that Shelley's eccentricities, even his errors if errors there be, must be far more interesting to intelli gent humanity at large than any punctilious correctness not Shelley's. Even if the aggregate genius of the present generation were brought to bear upon the task of systematizing Shelley's style and grammar and so on, we might perhaps not obtain anything comparable to the real Shelley ; and I conceive it to be a good service to his memory to restore in every instance what he wrote or meant to write.

I have therefore adopted as a principle, that it is better to leave unchanged any doubtful passage, about which there may be several opinions, and which is not, as a matter of certainty, corrupt. Corrupt as nearly all the posthumous texts of Shelley certainly are, the course of my studies has led me to think that the original editions are not nearly so corrupt as they are generally said to be, or as might be expected, and also that much has been called cor rupt which is really nothing but elliptical, or unusual in point of grammar, of construction, of orthography, or of punctuation. Sufficient allowance has not been made for unusual features of Shelley's work which were deliberate, or which he would have seen no reason, as far as we can judge, for altering. To take as an example a single curious instance of seeming inconsistency, I would draw attention to his use of the interjection O or Oh.

Throughout his works 0 and Oh are used interchangeably without any apparent rule ; and, more than this, they are sometimes fol lowed by a comma, sometimes by no stop at all, sometimes by a note of exclamation. To me it appears most objectionable to interfere with this irregularity. "Whatever Shelley's view on this small but important word may have been, I do not presume to think he unerringly carried out that view in writing ; but 0 is so constantly used within a line or two of Oh, that I cannot think he would have left so many of these divergences of practice had they been wholly unintentional Of the half-dozen different ways of using the two forms of interjection, no two, if minutely con sidered, are of precisely the same metric value ; and it is hardly fantastic to suppose that a slightly different intonation or stress is indicated by these slightly different interjections, though Shelley may have been wholly unconscious of any intention in the matter and have simply written in each case what seemed to convey the weight of thought and word his mind was uttering.

The bearing on metric effect of what at first sight may appear to be mere slovenlinesses of grammar, orthography, and punctu ation, is not easy to estimate in the case of so subtle a master of music as Shelley : I suspect his punctuation often depended more on euphony than on grammar ; and it must always be intrinsically safer to leave the text as it is in these minute particulars than to tamper with it, unless there be a strong presumption that it has become corrupt since it left his hands. At all events, not only has this seemed to me safer and more in accordance with editorial obligations ; but I have even thought it well worth while to preserve in the present text so much of the minute history of Shelley's mind as is unfolded to us in the peculiarities and inconsistencies of his orthography &c, — at least when it has seemed likely that the orthography &c. were his, and deliberately adopted.

But here again there are difficulties ; for occasionally we come upon divergences of practice for which there is double and con flicting authority. In such cases, if I find clear evidence of a certain rule recognized by Shelley, I do not hesitate to apply his rule in correction of the text even where there is some sort of manuscript authority against the change, — because very often the manuscript giving such authority is either hastily dashed off or seemingly immature, and the change such as the poet might reasonably be expected to have made when reading the proof sheets, or whenever he discovered the departure from his own rule. I have of course often left the punctuation or orthography of the text as I found it, even in cases where I have not been convinced of its being precisely as Shelley left it, but where the matter was of very little importance, and could not possibly be decided.

In the first volume of the present edition Shelley's various mature poetic issues are reprinted in chronological order, with the exact titles which he gave them, the dedications, mottoes, &c, and with the original arrangement of contents preserved. This plan seems to me to afford a marked artistic advantage. There is a decided interest in knowing precisely what Shelley thought appropriate as minor poems to append to his larger ones ; and although this knowledge might of course be afforded even in a rearranged edition, still the effect must be lost in such an edition. That effect in such an instance as that of the poems issued with Prometheus Unbound, is simply magical. Never since the age dominated by the genius of Æschylus was anything of like lyric exaltation produced in dramatic literature ; and never, perhaps, since, in our poet's own words, " God first dawned on Chaos," had there been any human soul that " panted forth a flood of rapture so divine " as that incomparable group of lyrics which follow the incomparable fourth act of Prometheus, — still sounding in diverse echoing keys and under infinite variations of melody the same intense intellectual passion, the same most holy love of humanity, the same godlike perception of ideal beauty.

A "flood of rapture " still more divine remained to crown the work of the master in Epipsychiditm, and a still more certain grasp on the combined resources of the lyric and dramatic crafts was yet to be shewn in Hellas, — the one put forth by itself, the other with a single lyric of astonishing fitness ; but the fact remains that the selection and arrangement of lyrics to accompany Prometheus was a thing unequalled in perceptiveness ; and in that case, at all events, the highest importance is to be attached to the preservation of Shelley's order among these lesser poems, — lesser only than greater things of his own, and greater than anything lyric to be found elsewhere in modern literature. At the same time I have not hesitated to interpolate, between the poems published with Alastor and Shelley's next published poem Mont Blanc, the recently discovered Second Part of The Dæmon of the World — so as to place the two parts of that redaction in sequence and leave the poem to be conveniently apprehended as a whole.

To the mass of posthumous poems, translations, and juvenilia, no rigid principle of reproduction could be usefully applied ; here an editor has a larger option ; but of one thing I am convinced, that all distinctly immature work should form a separate chronology ending with Queen Mab. Shelley lived to protest against its being published at all ; but, as it has now become an inalienable part of the world's possessions, all we can do out of respect to his memory is to assign to it the position which he assigned, — that of a juvenile work — albeit the book has had a more decided career than perhaps any other poem of striking immaturity in our literature. It has seemed to me that the best plan for the arrangement of the rest of Shelley's poetry is to follow up the series of mature works published in his life-time, with the principal posthumous poems produced contemporaneously with that series ; to place POEMS PUBLISHED IN SHELLEY'S LIFE-TIME: ALASTOR (1816) TO HELLAS (1822). next in order the small posthumous poems of the same period, grouped under separate years, as Mrs. Shelley grouped them ; and to keep the translations apart, at the end of the mature works, and arrange them according to the chronology of the original authors.

In carrying out this arrangement I have innovated somewhat in the matter of fragments. The fact that a poem was unfinished did not with Shelley form per se an obstacle to its publication ; for we have A Vision of the Sea, ending abruptly in the middle of a sentence, put forth by him in his life-time, as were also The Dæmon of the World and Superstition ; and the fragment of Prince Athanase was also sent for publication. Thus I have been obliged to introduce fragments into the chronological series of reprinted volumes ; and it certainly seems to me better to follow the same principle in regard to the posthumous fragments, and group them with the poems of each year. I think they have a stronger interest so grouped than when separated and arranged in an independent chronology. They thus shew more readily' what Shelley was doing, as far as we can ascertain, in the way of original poetry, in each year.

For these reasons I have imported the Fragments of an Unfinished Drama, Charles the First, and Tlie Triumph of Life into the series of principal posthumous poems ; and for similar reasons I have placed can celled passages, belonging obviously to given poems, immediately after such, instead of in a separate section. The Letter to Maria Gisborne has been brought into the series of principal or more important posthumous poems, because, though comparatively short, it is among the most perfect and to my mind important of Shelley's smaller compositions, and is in some respects unlike all else. It ought perhaps to be explained that the poems which are arranged between Julian and Maddalo and The Mask of Anarchy, namely Prince Athanase and a few lyrics, are so placed to carry out an intention expressed by Shelley : he told his publisher that Prince Athanase was to accompany Julian and Maddalo, and he afterwards sent for the same purpose some poems which he described as all his "saddest verses raked up into one heap." Both the specified works appeared for the first time in Posthu mous Poems ; and the rest here arranged irl connexion with those EDITOR'S

Preface

. two are chosen from the same volume as answering to the descrip tion given above. The question why there should be any need to do more than simply reprint those poems which were printed in the first instance under Shelley's own supervision, invites further con sideration. We have heard enough and too much about Shelley's being "a careless writer," — enough because such truth as there is in this current assertion has been long ago laid to heart by those who are discerning in such matters, and too much because very few are discerning, and the text that cost the greatest lyric poet of England infinite pains to elaborate has been held fair ground whereon every clumsy or thoughtless emendator (or rather innovator) might do just what suited his fancy. If, therefore, we admit at all that Shelley was a careless writer, we must guard such admission round about with saving clauses, and clearly understand in what sense the intrinsically damaging word careless is used.

That he would have done himself no credit before a Chinese board of examiners in pen-craft and orthography and the punctilio of smart composition, may be safely admitted ; and those who would fain fit his compositions for presentation before such a board are not qualified by natural proclivity for the labour of editing the works of a great poet. But that he was careless as an artist in any sense in which it behoved such an one to be careful, is amply refuted by the fact for which Mr. Garnett vouches in the following striking paragraph from the Relics of Shelley, pages xi and xii : " They [the pieces in the Relics'] appear to have been hitherto overlooked, for the reason that must also serve as an excuse for the imperfect manner in which they are even now presented to the public — the extremely confused state of these books [Shelley's manuscript note-books], and the equal difficulty of deciphering and connecting their contents.

Being written in great haste, and frequently with pencil, the hand-writing is often indistinct of itself ; and rendered far more so by erasures and interlineations ad infiniturn, Shelley appears to have composed with his pen in his hand, and to have corrected as fast as he wrote ; hence a page full of writing frequently yields only two or three available lines, which must be painfully disentangled from a chaos of obliterations. Much that at first sight wears the appearance of novelty, proves on inspection to be merely a variation of some thing already published ; and sometimes the case is reversed, as in the Prologue to Hellas, so buried in the MS. of that drama (which has in itself on the average ten lines effaced for one retained), as to be only discoverable or separable upon very close scrutiny."

Mr. Garnett adds a note to the effect that, when Shelley wrote for the printer, his handwriting was " singularly neat and beautiful " ; and it seems to me that the proportion of lines rejected and lines retained in his rough drafts, taken in connexion with the quality of his " printer's copy," is the best possible proof of due care. As regards the statement that his drafts for the printer were beautifully written, I can confirm that from the evidence of the copy of Julian and Maddalo which he sent from Italy to Hunt, to have published : not only is the writing most careful and beautiful ; but the punctuation is at once eminently characteristic and peculiar, and generally adequate and accurate from the poet's own point of view. This is still more noteworthy, inasmuch as Shelley wrote the poem out with his own hand twice at least, in ink.

One copy is in a book among those in Sir Percy Shelley's possession ; the other, on what seem to be the gilt-edged leaves of a pocket-book, is that already referred to, of which a specimen is given in sac-simile in the Library Edition. That the confused note-books described by Mr. Garnett imply care, not the reverse, must be evident to any one who thinks for a moment : these were Shelley's means of putting his thoughts on record at once as they came burning upon him ; and they were never meant for any one's guidance but his own. It was a need inherent in the fiery exaltation of his lyric mood that the result should be set down at once ; and, for mere temporary memoranda, it mattered not how intricately one poem might be blended with another. He knew how to disentangle and write them fairly, or dictate them to Mrs. Shelley ; and, had he lived to have the slight est suspicion how we should venerate every scrap of paper bearing the impress of his hand and pen, he would, we may be sure, have taken ample care to place these note-books beyond our reach.

The subject of Shelley's method of composition, a right under- VOL. I. b standing of which is the first requisite for any one aspiring to edit his works, would be a very fruitful theme for prolonged discus sion. In one of the keenest and at the same time most enthu siastic of recent contributions to Shelley literature this theme is very happily touched upon. I refer to an article in Die Edinburgh Review for April 1871, written d. propos of Mr. Rossetti's edition of Shelley, — an article which I am authorized to connect with the name of Professor Thomas S. Baynes of St. Andrew's University, and which I cannot do better than quote. "It is," says Professor Baynes, "a curious psychological pro blem how it is that amongst modern poets Shelley should be dis tinguished by his comparative neglect of minute verbal accuracy ; how it comes to pass that the text even of poems which he himself carefully revised should be so extremely imperfect."

Negligence, care, imperfection ! This is a strange association of words ; but in that association Professor Baynes seems to me to go right home to the facts of the case. The problem, he says, is, how it happens that in the poems which Shelley himself revised "there are gram matical laxities and metrical oversights, which are not only stumbling-blocks to readers of ordinary cultivation, but the despair of acute and accomplished verbal critics. " This uncritical negligence, the want of minute accuracy in the details of his verse, seems to us intimately connected with the whole character of Shelley's mind, and especially with the lyrical sweep and intensity of his poetical genius. He had an intellect of the rarest delicacy and analytical strength, that intuitively per ceived the most remote analogies, and discriminated with spon taneous precision the finest shades of sensibility, the subtilest differences qf perception and emotion.

He possessed a swift soaring and prolific imagination that clothed every thought and feeling with imagery in the moment of its birth, and instinctively read the spiritual meanings of material symbols. His fineness of sense was so exquisite that eye and ear and touch became, as it were, organs and inlets not merely of sensitive apprehension, but of intellectual beauty and ideal truth. Every nerve in his slight but vigorous frame seemed to vibrate in unison with the deeper life of nature in the world around him, and, like the wandering harp, he was swept to music by every breath of material beauty, every gust of poetic emotion. Above all, he had a strength of intellectual passion and a depth of ideal sympathy that in moments of excitement fused all the powers of his mind into a continuous stream of creative energy, and gave the stamp of something like inspiration to all the higher productions of his muse.

His very method of composition reflects these characteristics of his mind. He seems to have been urged by a sort of irresistible impulse to write, and displayed a vehement and passionate absorption in the work that recalls the old traditions of poetical frenzy and divine possession. His conceptions crowded so thickly upon him, were embodied in such exquisite verbal forms, and so enriched by illustrations flashed from remote and multiplied centres of association, that while the fever lasted his whole nature was carried impetuously forward on a full tide of mingled music and imagery. From this exuberance of poetical power some of his critics have reproached him with accumulating image upon image without pausing to select, discriminate, or contrast them. And it is no doubt true that there are passages in which metaphors and similes are heaped on each other in almost dazzling profusion.

But even in his most opulent and ornate descriptions there is hardly a trace of conscious labour or deliberate effort. In his higher work the brilliant diction and splendid imagery glow with kindled emotion, and are wrought into the very substance of the poem by the sus tained vehemence and rapture of his impassioned verse. Many of his most exquisite pieces were in this way produced almost at a sitting — at a single heat, as it were — and some of his longest poems, such as The Revolt of Islam and The Cenci, were completed in a few months. Once engrossed with a great poetical conception, all his powers were kindled to a pitch of the highest intensity, and amidst the crowding realities of imagination the whole world of sense grew pale and dim, and everything around became for the time unsubstantial as a dream.