Poems of Shelley

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Preface

Shelley, from whose poetry this book of Selections is made, can only, like all other poets, be judged justly, or fitly loved, when everything he wished to be published has been carefully studied. We can no more comprehend him in the right way by reading only his finest poems, .supposing we could choose them, than we can receive a true impression of the character of the scenery of a country by visiting a selection of its most beautiful places. Through his weakness we know part of his strength ; nor is it only for his power we love him. This necessity of reading all a poet's work, if we wish to know him truly, or to receive from him his special gift of pleasure, is the main objection to Selections ; but its weight is lessened when the intention of a book of this kind is not to represent Shelley fully, but to present, in a brief compass, enough of his poetry to induce those who are ignorant of it to read the whole. That is the only valid reason and excuse for Selections from a poet, and it is the object of this book. If the excuse be accepted, we may say that Shelley is more open to selection than many of the other poets. His whole work is short, and a great deal of it can be included in a small book. It is especially lyrical, and lyrics are the best material for selections.

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Some, too, of the longer poems, such as Alastor and Adonais, in which we can study his steadier and more ambitious effort, are brief enough to be inserted entire, and they break the lyrics pleasantly, and offer a more varied enjoyment to the reader. There is also one spirit in Shelley's work which fills and brings into unity all his poems. It is the spirit of youth. We are not troubled in reading these Selections, by such a change in the whole nature of the poet as age made in Wordsworth. Owing to this unity of spirit, I have been able to place together,, without fear of their jarring with one another, poems written at different periods of Shelley's life on the same or kindred themes. To group such poems together is the method followed in this book, and its fitness seems to be supported by the fact that Shelley, being very fond of his ideas, and also of the forms he gave them, repeated them continually. The impression made by one poem is therefore strengthened by another on the same subject. Shelley is his own best illustrator.

When Selections from any poet appear rapidly, it may be said that he has taken his place, that time and its verdict have distinguished him in his own country. And Shelley is now at home with us, and his praise becomes greater day by day. Some of that praise, especially when it exalts him, without distinctiveness of criticism, above his brother poets, seems undeserved, but there is no longer any doubt, among those worthy to judge, that Shelley has assumed his own separate throne among the greater poets of England.

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It is then somewhat strange to look back nearly sixty years, and to think that when Shelley died, scarcely fifty people cared to read his poetry, and even these did not understand it. Seven years after his death opinion began to change. He had so far influenced the young men of Cambridge, that its Union sent a deputation in November 1829 to the Oxford Union, to maintain Shelley's superiority over Byron. ''At that time,''' said Lord Houghton — speaking in 1866 — "■ we, the Cambridge undergraduates, were all very full of Mr. Shelley. We had printed his Adojiais in 1829 for the first time in England, and a friend of ours suggested that, as he had been expelled from Oxford, and very badly treated in that University, it would be a grand thing for us to defend him there.'" The young men, Arthur Hallam, Monckton Milnes, and Sunderland, were received by Gladstone, Francis Doyle, and Milnes Gaskell. Wilberforce of Oriel was in the Chair. Sir Francis Doyle (Christ Church) moved that Shelley was a greater poet than Lord Byron. He was supported by the three Cambridge men, and by Mr. Oldham of Oriel. The negative was defended by Mr. Manning; and on a division Byron was declared the greater poet by a majority of fifty-seven. This interesting story proves that some young men at Oxford and Cambridge were now awakened to Shelley's genius. They felt and loved him as the most ideal of the poets, and year by year he has increased the number of those who give him that special place and honor.

About 1832 his power over the minds of men viii PREFACE.

increased. At that time fresh poHtical and theological elements began to excite England, and then the other side of Shelley's work began to tell. The poems he had written as the prophet of liberty, equality, fraternity, and a Golden Age, were eagerly read by the more intelligent among the working classes, and by many who felt that the ideas of the French Revolution were again arising into activity after their winter sleep. It is a part of his work which still continues to do good.

Again, within the last few years, the sad, regretful, unsatisfied, self-considering, indefinite elements in the mind of educated English society have found food and expression in a certain number of Shelley\s poems, and this has increased the extent of his influence. That which has been called the " lyrical cry" belongs now to a whole section of society, and Shelley often echoes its regret and indefiniteness with great beauty.

Moreover, a great number of persons who care for Nature as Art cares for her, that is, as alive and not dead, being revolted by the materialistic aspect in which some scientific theories now present her, have turned with new pleasure to the spiritual representations given of her by such poets as Wordsworth and Shelley. That also has added a fresh impulse to the study of Shelley.

It may also be said that the forms, and especially the ideal forms of passionate love, have been, of late, more minutely dwelt on in poetry, and with greater curiosity, than they have been since the Elizabethan period. It is natural, then, that a poet like Shelley,

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who made ideal love his study, and the subject of so much of his work, should now receive and claim greater attention.

Shelley, reflecting and embodying these various phases, is then a much more comprehensive poet than the common judgment supposes. And he is all the more comprehensive because his nature and his work were twofold. The first thing to say of him is, that he lived in two worlds, thought in two worlds, and in both of these did work which was at once varied and distinct. One was the world of Mankind and its hopes, the other was the world of his own heart.

His poetic life was an alternate changing from one of these worlds to the other. He passed from poetry written for the sake -of mankind, to poetry written for his own sake and to express himself; from the Shelley who was inspired by moral aims and wrote in the hope of a regeneration of the world, to that other Shelley who, inspired only by his own ideas and regrets, wrote without any ethical end, and absolutely apart from humanity. The passionate lover of man crosses over the stage, singing of mankind, and disappears. The passionate poet succeeds, singing of himself, and disappears in turn. The interchange continues, but both the figures are the same man.

Shelley began as the prophet of the ideas of the French Revolution. Qiieen Mab, written with the enthusiasm of a youth for the overthrow of the evils that he thought oppressed mankind, and in hope of its deliverance into a world of love and peace, is not,

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as a poem, so " absolutely worthless " as he imagined it to be. The verse is musical ; there are two direct pictures of nature, both of the sky ; the journey through the stars has some of the imaginative power which realized the flight of Asia and the Hours in the Prometheus .1 but all the polemical part is very prosaic. It is like a sermon in verse, and it has just the poetical quality we expect in a sermon. The latter portion is naturally the best. The most remarkable element Queen Mab possesses is didactic force. But, owing to its uncultivated rhetoric, that force is likely to tell most on very young persons, and on uneducated but intelligent working men, who may sympathize with its opinions. The poem had such an influence, and that influence was widely extended.

Two years later, in 1815, all was changed. The circumstances of his life, illness, expectation of death, made him lose, in losing all vigor and joy, his interest in man, and Alastor, his next long poem, is entirely occupied with his own solitary thought and life. The preface he wrote explains the meaning of the poem, and, contrasted with the poem, reveals that double nature in Shelley of which I write. He repudiates in it, with all the sternness of a moralist, yet with self-pity, the life described in Alastor ; and the lines with which he closes the poem itself — "It is a woe too deep for tears," etc., are a cry of sorrow and reproach against one who desired to work for man, but who wasted his life in pursuit of that unattainable beauty his soul could dream of, but not realize.

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Of all Shelley's longer poems, Alastor leaves on the general reader the easiest impression of an artistic whole. The subject is one, and never varies from itself: it is closely clung to from beginning to end, and is deeply felt throughout. The poetry and its art, both imaginative and technical, are of course less great than they became in after work, but so far as unity of conception and steadiness of expression and form are concerned, even Adonais is less artistic than Alastor. Shelley's personality absorbs the poem. The extreme ideality of the treatment alone relieves the intensity of this personal revelation, and makes it not too overwhelming to give pleasure. The natural descriptions prove how deeply Shelley had felt some of the larger aspects of Nature, and the melody of their verse is at times like the harmonies we seem to hear among waters and woods ; but Nature in this poem is never described for herself alone, never for pure joy in her. She is made to reflect the thoughts and passion of the wandering poet until the very last, when his life and that of the moon ebb away together. This is deliberately done, and nowhere in a finer way than in the description of the long walk down the glen. We follow step by step the interpenetration of the poet's dying soul and of the various changes of the scene. As the brook flows to the precipice, so does his life ; as the valley alters its landscape, so does the landscape in his heart. The skill and intensity with which this is wrought out is the cause of the fascination that passage has for all who read it.

In the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and to Mont xii PREFACE.

Blanc, written after Alastor, Shelley, though writing only as the artist of his own thought, has recovered some of his hopes for Man. He tries to connect his worship of Beauty with the redemption of the race ; he speaks of the Power hidden in the great mountain to "repeal large codes of fraud and woe." His Continental journey had brought him new health, and his life, new happiness, and with them came back the old longing and the old interest to play his part in the movement of the world. The result was the Revolt of Islam. Its genesis and its aim are explained in the preface with which he accompanied the poem. It seemed to Shelley that the age of despair that followed the end of the French Revolution was over, and that now, when the reaction from that trance of failure had begun, the time had arrived for him to speak. In that belief he composed this poem. It strove to kindle afresh the flame of liberty, but it had no effect on the exhausted Englishmen of 1818. Nor, as poetry, did it deserve to have a great effect. It is the most unbalanced of all his works. The interest is human, but it is too frequently taken out of the world of actual human life to awaken practical emotion. Were the scenery of the poem all ideal, or all real, we should not be so troubled while we read. Were the poem supremely ethical or supremely emotional, had it any unity at all, it might keep its power over us. But it has no unity, not even in feeling. Its emotion is unequal ; we are continually changing the atmosphere, and are overchilled or overheated. There is no artistic fusion of the poetry which aims at giving a high pleasure with that which aims at

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awakening man to his duties. That fusion was made in the ProDietheiis Unbomid^ but here it was not made.

And now another of these changes took place. Shelley fell ill again, the threatened loss of his children preyed upon him, and he left England for ever in 1818. He lost again for a time his enthusiasm for man, and the characteristic of the work of this year is sadness deepening into misery. With very few exceptions the poems are personal. One, however, differs from all that preceded it. Julian and Maddalo, composed at the end of the year, is personal, but still not so much so as to prevent Shelley from painting, with a firm hand, another character than his own. It is the first instance of that power of losing himself in the creation of distinct personages which enabled him to write the drama of the Cenci. Jidian and Maddalo has unity, and the materials are carefully woven together. The style is subdued to a quiet level, and the imagination, which ran riot in the Revolt of Islam, is curbed to do its work, and only its special work, by the will of the poet. Reading it, we should predict that if again the enthusiasm for man should awaken in Shelley's heart, the work he would do on the subject would be more worthy of his power. It did awaken, and in how different a form it came ! It was no longer hampered by his notion that he must directly attack evil. It rose at once and easily, taking with it all the subjects of the Revolt of Islam, into the region of pure art, and there, in the world of passion and beauty and fire, he wrote the Prometheus Unbound. That poem xiv PREFACE.

is the marriage of Shelley's double nature, the fusion for creative work of the lover of man and the poet. He reaches in it that culminating point at which the thinker on man gives his best-loved materials to the artist, and the artist breathes into them life and beauty.

The same vivid interest in humanity was then made special in the Cenci, a tragedy wrought out with so much temperance of imagination, directness of emotion, and closeness of thought, that it is the strangest contrast to the Projnetheus . The range of power implied in the production of these two dramas within twelve months, each so great, and so unlike, is rarely to be paralleled among the poets below those of the highest order. It is all the more wonderful when we think that about the same time such poems were also created as the Sensitive Plant, the Skylark, the Cloud, Arethusa, and the Ode to the West Wind. The last alone is enough to place Shelley apart from the other lyrical poets of England. In it, as in the Prometheus, and still more splendidly, all his powers and his poetic subjects are wrought into a whole. The emotion awakened by the approaching storm sets on fire other sleeping emotions in his heart, and the whole of his being bursts into flame around the first emotion. This is the manner of the genesis of all the noblest lyrics. He passes from magnificent union of himself with Nature and magnificent realization of her storm and peace, to equally great self-description, and then mingles all nature and all himself together, that he may sing of the restoration of mankind. There is no song in the whole of our literature more

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passionate, more penetrative, more full of the force by which the idea and its form are united into one creation .

This , time, during which Shelley's twofold being was married for creative work, did not last long. The two elements always tended to separate, and now the special Shelley element, which fled from man into the recesses of his own heart, or communed with the ideal Nature which he made for himself out of the apparent world, began to absorb him, and finally drove out the other.

At the beginning of this reaction he was still gay, often bright ; and the Letter to Maria Gisborne is one of the rare poems in which Shelley is at peace. An air of home and happiness flows through its familiar and melodious verse. The Witch of Atlas also belongs to this time ; a poem in which he sent his imagination out, like a child into a meadow, without any aim save to enjoy itself. Now and again Shelley himself, as it were from a distance, alters or arranges the manner of the sport, as if with some intention, but never so much as to spoil the natural wildness of the Imagination's play. Enough is done to suggest that there may be a meaning in it all, but not enough to tell that meaning. " I mean nothing," Shelley would have said ; " I did not write the poem. My imaginatign made it of her own accord." Nor was he so self-absorbed at first as wholly to neglect the cause of man. The Ode to Liberty, the Ode to Naples, belong to this summer and autumn of 1820.

We pass into the isolated poet with the Sensitive Plant, the companionless flower ; and from this time xvi PREFACE.

forth the old Shelley, who loved Mankind, is dead. The only exception is the choral drama of Hellas, written in a transient enthusiasm for the cause of Greece. " I try to be what I might have been," he says, " but am not successful. It was written without much care, and in one of those few moments of enthusiasm which now seldom visit me, and which make me pay dear for their visits." Two poems, however, preceded Hellas ; Epipsychidion and Adoiiais. Both are written by the lonely artist; nor is there any trace in them of the Shelley who prophesied for Man. Of Epipsychidion I have spoken in the notes of this book. The ideal passion, in which it originated, hid him in the light of thought, far away from humanity, and he never quite got back again.

Adonais, awakened in him not only by his sympathy with Keats, but also by the resemblance of the fate of Keats to his own, is almost as much concerned with Shelley as with its subject. There is nothing in English poetry so steeped in passionate personality as the description of himself in stanzas xxxi-iv. It is almost too close, too unveiled, too intense to have been written. The only other poet — for Byron^s self-description is written with a view to effect — who has approached the wild self-sorrow of it, is Cowper, and he uses the same simile of the stricken stag. The poem is, as Shelley said, " a highly wrought piece of art." Its abstract spirituality, and its philosophy, remove it from the ordinary apprehension, and are the cause why it is less read than Alastor. But, in truth, Shelley himself, and the scenery and personages he creates in this abstract realm, are more

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real in this poem than in others which have to do with the actual world. It suited him to write about a spirit, and he wrote as he were himself a spirit. The Dreams which hover around Adonais, the Splendors and Glooms, Morning with the tears in her hair, Spring wild with grief, Echo singing in the hills, Urania flying to mourn beside the bier — Shelley has succeeded in giving them all being. While we read, we believe in the reality of this world as we believe in our dreams while we dream. The power of doing this is unique, and is due not only to imagination at its height, but also to keenness of abstract' intellect. His grip of these impalpable personages is quite certain. He creates them, and then he sees and hears them. Owing to this the conduct of the poem is clear. The unremitting beauty of the lines so engages attention as at first to forbid an analysis of the arrangement, but when that analysis is made, the pleasure Adonais gives is not disturbed, but doubled. And how passionate it is throughout, more passionate than most of his love poems! It is unceasingly strange, and the strangeness adds, from outside, to the charm of Shelley's poetry, to find him writing with a far greater intensity of feeling about the sorrow of Urania and the Dreams, about the Spirit of Love in the Universe, about Keats in the spiritual world, and about his own wearied and solitary heart, than he ever writes about men or women, about human love, or about the personal suffering of others.

A new element of isolation, that created by a passion which circumstances forbade him to pursue, separated him now, at the close of his life, still more xviii PREFACE.

from Mankind, and in that temper he died. But there are some proofs, to which I shall afterwards draw attention, that he would, as before, have passed out of this lonely inner life, and found himself again in sympathy with the external. Had he lived, he would have once more appeared as the Singer of Man, and in the cause of men. But the swift wind and the mysterious sea, the things he loved, slew their lover — a common fate — and we hear no more his singing. His work was done, and its twofold nature may well be imaged by the Sea that received into its uninhabited breast his uncompanioned spirit ; for, while its central depths know only solitude, over its surface are always passing to and fro the life and fortunes of humanity.

But the sea gave up its dead, and all of Shelley's body that was rescued from flood and fire lies now where the rise of the ground ends, in a dark nook of the Aurelian wall. So deep is that resting-place in shadow that the violets blossom later there than on " the slope of green access " where, seen from Shelley's grave, the flowers grow over the dust of Adonais. We may be glad that both were buried in Italy rather than in England, for, though no Italian could have written their poetry, yet it was, — in all things else different, — of that spirit which Italy awakens in Englishmen who love her, rather than of the purely English spirit. The Italian air, the sentiment of Italy, fled and dreamed through their poems, but most through those of Shelley. It was but fitting, then, that Shelley, whose fame was England's, should be buried in the city which is the heart of

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Italy. But he was born far away from this peaceful and melancholy spot, and grew up to manhood under the gray skies of England, until its Universities, its Church, its Society, its Law and its dominant policy became inhospitable to him, nay, even his own father cast him out. They all had, in the opinion of sober men of that time, good cause to make him a stranger, for he attacked them all, and it would be neither wise or true, nor grateful to Shelley himself,* were he to be put forward as a genius unjustly treated, or as one who deserved or asked for pity. Those who separate themselves from society, and war against its dearest maxims, if they are as resolute in their choice, and as firm in their beliefs as Shelley, count the cost, and do not or rarely complain when the penalty is exacted. He was exiled, and it was no wonder. The opinion of the world did not trouble him, nor was that a wonder. But as this exile is the most prominent fact of his life, its influence is sure to underlie his work. The second question that any one who writes of Shelley has to ask, is, How did this exile from the Education, Law, Religion, and Society of his country, and from the soil of his country itself, affect his poetry?

It had a very great influence, partly for good and partly for evil. The good it did is clear. It deepened his individuality and the power which issued from that source. It set him free from the poetic conventions to which his art might have yielded too much obedience in England — a good which the obscurity of Keats also procured for him — it prevented him from being worried too much by the blind worms

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of criticism, it enabled him to develop himself more freely, and it placed him in contact with a natural scenery, fuller and sunnier than he could ever have had in England, in which his love of beauty found so happy and healthy a food that it came to perfect flower. In Italy also, where impulse even more than reason urges intelligence and inspires genius, lyrical poetry, which is born of impulse, is more natural and easy, though not better, than elsewhere, and the very inmost spirit of Shelley, deeper than his metaphysics or his love of Man and inspiring both, deeper even than any personal passion, was the lyrical longing of his whole body, soul, and spirit — " O that I had wings like a dove ; then would I flee away, and be at rest."

But the good this exile did his art was largely counterbalanced by its harm. Shelley's individuality, unchecked by that of others, grew too great, and tended not only to isolate him from men, but to prevent his art from becoming conversant enough with human life. The absence of critical sympathy of a good kind, such as that which flows from one poet to another in a large society, left some of his work, as it left some of Keats's, more formless, mon*. intemperate, more impalpable, more careless, more apart from the realities of life, than it ought to have been in the most poetical of poets since the days of Elizabeth. Even in his lyric work, the impassioned impulse would have failed less often to fulfil its form perfectly ; there would not have been so many fragments thrown aside for want of patience or power tr complete them, had he been less personal, less sut-

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ject to individual freakishness, more subject to the unexpressed criticism which floats, as it were, in the air of a large literary society, and constrains the art of the poet into measured act and power. And as to Nature, we should perhaps have had, with his genius, a much wider and less ideal representation of her, had he not been so enthralled by the vastness and homelessness of Swiss, and by the ideality of Italian, scenery. Even when he did write in England itself, the recollected love of Switzerland and the Rhinf. mingled with the impressions he received from the Thames, and produced a scenery, as in certain passages in Alastor and the Revolt of Islam, which is not directly studied from anything in heaven or earth. It is none the worse for that, but it is not Nature, it is Art.

These are general considerations, but there were some more particular results, partly good and partly evil, of this separation of Shelley from the ordinary religious and political views of English society.

A good deal of his poetry became polemical, and polemical, like satiric poetry, is apart from pure art. It attacks evil directly, and the poet, his mind being then fixed not on the beautiful but on the base, writes prosaically. Or it embodies a creed in verse, and, being concerned with doctrine, becomes dull. In both cases the poet misses, as Shelley did, that inspiration of the beautiful which arises from the seeing of truth, not from the seeing of a lie ; from the love of true ideas, not from their intellectual perception. The verses, for example, in the Ode to Liberty, which directly attack kingcraft and priestcraft, however

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gladly one would see their sentiments in prose, are inferior as poetry to all the rest ; and it is the same throughout all Shelley's poetry of direct attack on evil. This polemical element in the Revolt of Islam., and the endeavor to lay down in it his revolutionary creed, are additional causes of the wastes of prosiac poetry which make it so unreadable. Th-e very splendor and passion of the passages devoted to Nature and Love contrast so sharply, like burning spaces of sunlight on a gray sea, with the wearisome whole, that they lose half their value, and disturb, like so much else, the unity of the poem. The same things seem true of Rosalind afid Helen., and of those political poems which are direct attacks on abuses in England. On the other hand, when Shelley wrote on these evils indirectly, inspired by the opposing truths, concerned with their beauty, and borne upwards by delight in them, his work entered the realm of art, and his poetry became magnificent. There is no finer example of this than Prometheus Unbound. The subject, is at root the same as that of the Revolt of Islain, the things opposed are the same, the doctrine is the same, but the whole method of approaching his idea and fulfilling its form is changed, and all the questions are brought into that artistic representation which stirs around them inspiring and enduring emotion.