The Poems of Shelley: Volume Three

1819 - 1820

Jack Donovan, Cian Duffy, Kelvin Everest, Michael Rossington, Jack Donovan, Cian Duffy, Kelvin Everest, Michael Rossington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781405840347
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317905141
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the major Romantic poets, and wrote what is critically recognised as some of the finest lyric poetry in the English language. This is the third volume of the five-volume The Poems of Shelley, which presents all of Shelley's poems in chronological order and with full annotation. Date and circumstances of composition are provided for each poem and all manuscript and printed sources relevant to establishing an authoritative text are freshly examined and assessed. Headnotes and footnotes furnish the personal, literary, historical and scientific information necessary to an informed reading of Shelley's varied and allusive verse.

Most of the poems in the present volume were composed between autumn 1819 and autumn 1820. The poems written in response to the political crisis in England following the 'Peterloo' massacre in August 1819 feature largely, among them The Mask of Anarchy and 'An Ode (Arise, arise, arise!)'. The popular songs, which Shelley intended to gather into a volume to inspire reformers from the labouring classes, several accompanied by significantly new textual material recovered from draft manuscripts, are included, as are the important political works 'Ode to Liberty', 'Ode to Naples' and Oedipus Tyrannus, Shelley's burlesque Greek tragedy on the Queen Caroline affair. Other major poems featured include 'The Sensitive-Plant', 'Ode to the West Wind', 'Letter to Maria Gisborne', an exuberant translation from the ancient Greek of the Homeric 'Hymn to Mercury', and the brilliantly inventive 'The Witch of Atlas'.

In addition to accompanying commentaries, there are extensive bibliographies, a chronology of Shelley's life, and indexes to titles and first lines. Leigh Hunt's informative Preface of 1832 to The Mask of Anarchy is also included as an Appendix. The volumes of The Poems of Shelley form the most comprehensive edition of Shelley's poetry available to students and scholars.

331 Dante’s Purgatorio Canto XXVIII, 1–51

[Matilda Gathering Flowers]

S.’s translation of a celebrated passage from Dante’s Purgatorio is drafted on pp. 39–42 of Nbk 14. The pages carry no extraneous matter, and the ink and pen-point appear to be the same throughout the draft, so it may have been completed at one sitting. Medwin recalled that he had had

the advantage of reading Dante with [S.]; he lamented that no adequate translation existed of the Divina Commedia, and though he thought highly of Cary’s work, with which he said he had for the first time studied the original, praising the fidelity of the version—it by no means satisfied him. What he meant by an adequate translation, was, one in terza rima; for in Shelley’s own words, he held it an essential justice to an author, to render him in the same form. I asked him if he had never attempted this, and looking among his papers, he shewed, and gave me to copy, the following fragment from the Purgatorio, which leaves on the mind an inextinguishable regret, that he did not employ himself in rendering other of the finest passages. (Medwin (1913) 244–5)

Medwin then gives lines 1–9, 22–51 of S.’s rendering of Purgatorio XXVIII, 1–51, the third time he published lines from the translation, all of which include significant variants from S.’s draft. They are considered below. His recollection that S. searched out the translation from ‘among his papers’ and allowed him to copy it seems all but certain to refer to the period from 22 October 1820 to 27 February 1821 during which Medwin stayed with the Shelleys, first at the Bagni di Pisa, then in Pisa. In Nbk 14 S.’s fair copy of ll. 35–84 of The Cloud (no. 319) (composed between mid-April and mid-May 1820) finishes on p. 37; the translation from the Purgatorio begins on p. 39. As Carlene Adamson points out (BSM v p. xlv), the draft of WA (no. 341, 14–16 August 1820), which runs in the reverse direction of Nbk 14, skips over pp. 39–42, no doubt because they were already filled by the translation. These indications would narrow the period of composition to between April and mid-August 1820. S. is likely to have translated Purgatorio I 1–6 (see no. 314) at about the same time.

In a MS note in his interleaved copy of Medwin (ii 16) Medwin says that he ‘carefully copied’ S.’s translation, altering the incomplete 9th line: Ernest J. Lovell, Jr., Captain Medwin: Friend of Byron and Shelley (1962) 73. In fact in the Nbk 14 draft S.’s 9th line is complete though it does not make the required rhyme with ll. 5 and 7. Having misread the final word of l. 5 in S.’s MS as ‘steep’ (a mistake easily made), Medwin altered the third stanza to accommodate it:

Against the air, that in that stillness, deep

And solemn, struck upon my forehead bare,

Like a sweet breathing of a child in sleep.

This ‘improvement’, although it reads pleasantly and produces a regular terza rima stanza, involves a substantial departure from both S.’s translation and Dante’s Italian, and is representative of Medwin’s practice when faced with an imperfect or unresolved passage in the draft. His treatment of the stanza accords in many respects with what Mary wrote of him as translator of Dante in January 1821: ‘he fills his verses with all possible commmonplaces he understands his author very imperfectly—and when he cannot make sense of the words that are he puts in words of his own and calls it a misprint’ (Mary L i 178). The first printing of Medwin’s translation of ll. 1–9, 22–51 (which influenced all subsequent texts until de Palacio’s in 1962) is given in the Appendix. Selected variants from the editions mentioned below are given in the notes. More detailed collations can be found in de Palacio and in BSM v 376–80: see below.

Medwin’s exploitation of the translation he copied began the year after S.’s death when he incorporated—without acknowledgement and with some omissions and additions—lines 1–9 and 22–39 into his own Ahasuerus, The Wanderer: A Dramatic Legend (1823). The borrowed lines make part of a speech which is delivered by the character Eda to Ahasuerus with whom she is in love and which recount a dream she has had of wandering through ‘an enchanting wilderness’ where a mysterious voice apprises her that ‘Love is life! and life is love!’ (p. 32). The fuller version (1–9, 22–51) of the translation that appears in Medwin he had already published (Medwin claimed for the first time) in his The Angler in Wales, or, Days and Nights of Sportsmen (1834) ii 218–20 where it is inserted as an appropriate literary analogue to a beautiful landscape in Wales. The entire 51 lines of S’s translation (under the title Matilda Gathering Flowers) were included by Garnett in Relics in a text which clearly derives from Nbk 14 but which also follows the printing in Medwin in a number of instances. More recently, the Nbk 14 text has been critically edited by Jean de Palacio in Revue de Littérature Comparée 36 (1962) 571–8 and by Timothy Webb in Webb 313–14.

Despite his express reservations at the ‘dark and extravagant fiction’ of the Divina Commedia and its religious tenor (Julian vii 224), during his years in Italy S. developed an enthusiastic and profound admiration for Dante which reached its high point in the lyrical praise of his creative power and influence in DP (paras 27–9: Reiman 2002) and in the neo-Dantean visions (in terza rima) of TL. S. had reread the Purgatorio with Mary in summer 1819 (Mary Jnl i 294–5) and in a letter to Hunt of c. 20 August he cited ‘Matilda gathering flowers’ as an example of ‘all the exquisite tenderness & sensibility & ideal beauty, in which Dante excelled all poets except Shakespeare’ (L ii 112). Later that autumn in On the Devil, and Devils (November–December 1819) he judged the Purgatorio ‘a finer poem than the Inferno’ (Julian vii 101). The defining qualities of style that Dante shared with Petrarch and Boccaccio, his ‘energy and simplicity and unity of idea’, had their roots in the historical epoch in which he lived, ‘the vigour of the infancy of a new nation’—whose energy nourished the republics of Florence and Pisa and indirectly inspired Raphael and Michelangelo (L ii 122). S. held it a writer’s duty to school himself by acquaintance with the best poetic models in his own and former ages. The combined spareness and expressive vigour of Dante’s style delivered a chastening lesson to a poet measuring himself against such a standard; S. recognised as much when he told Medwin that ‘reading Dante produced in him despair’ (Medwin (1913) 160). A fortiori such qualities set a stringent test for the translator: S. maintained in discussion with Byron that Dante was ‘the most untranslatable of all poets’ (Medwin’s Conversations with Lord Byron, ed. E. J. Lovell, Jr. (1966) 160). The task of translation was the more daunting because the rationale of the exercise demanded a result that would be ‘purely English’ while retaining the original terza rima, better-adapted to Italian and notoriously difficult to reproduce in a language less copious in rhymes (Medwin (1913) 244–5). The incomplete and imperfect rhymes in S.’s draft and the importing of words to adhere to the rhyme-scheme testify to the difficulty of attaining his self-imposed standards. Even so, his draft, though not perfectly polished, manages to be both inventive and faithful to the original, while the fluidity of the narrative is enhanced by incr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Note on Illustrations
• Preface to Volume Three
• Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• Chronological Table of Shelley’s Life and Publications
• Abbreviations
• The Poems
• 210 ‘A winged City, like a ?[troop] of cloud’
• 211 ‘[She] was the [ ] Sepulchre’
• 212 ‘I have had a dream tonight’
• 213 ‘He [ ] cometh forth ?[from] among men’
• 214 ‘Perhaps the only comfort that remains’
• 215 ‘I love. What me? aye child, I love thee too’
• 216 ‘To lay my weary head upon thy lap’
• 217 ‘What think you the dead are?’
• 218 ‘Come thou Awakener of the spirit’s Ocean’
• 219 ‘His face was like a Snake’s, wrinkled and loose’
• 220 ‘Like an eagle hovering’
• 221 ‘I hear, ye hear/The sudden whirlwind’
• 222 ‘A lone wood walk, where meeting branches lean’
• 223 ‘?[Oh] Music, thou art not “the food of Love”’
• 224 To Night
• 225 ‘And like a dying lady lean and pale’ [The Waning Moon]
• 226 ‘Mine eyes [] like two ever-bleeding wounds’
• 227 ‘?[Minds] perceive but not create’
• 228 ‘Polluting darkness tremblingly quivers’
• 229 ‘The gentleness of rain is in the Wind’
• 230 ‘The fitful alternations of the rain’
• 231 The Mask of Anarchy
• 232 ‘And in that deathlike [ ] cave’
• 233 ‘her dress/Antique and strange and beautiful’
• 234 ‘I more esteem’
• 235 ‘The roses arose early to blossom’
• 236 ‘[Bind] eagle wings upon the lagging hours’
• 237 ‘With weary feet chasing Unrest and Care’
• 238 ‘There was a gorgeous marriage feast’
• 239 Peter Bell the Third
• 239 Appendix Drafts for Peter Bell’s ‘Ode to the Devil’
• 240 ‘My dear Brother Harry—for if all Kings are brothers’
• 241 ‘A golden-wingèd Angel stood’
• 242 ‘A daughter, mother and a grandmother’
• 243 ‘Proteus Wordsworth, who shall bind thee?’
• 244 An Ode (‘Arise, arise, arise!’)
• 245 ‘Gather from the uttermost’
• 246 ‘If I walk in Autumn even’
• 247 ‘A swift and hidden Spirit of decay’
• 248 ‘The memory of the good is ever green’
• 249 ‘His bushy, wide and ?[solid beard]’
• 250 ‘The vale is like a vast Metropolis’
• 251 Ode to Heaven
• 252 To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]
• 253 ‘As deaf as adders—and as poisonous too’
• 254 ‘My lost William, thou in whom’ [To William Shelley]
• 255 England in 1819
• 256 ‘’Twas the 20th of October’
• 257 ‘And what art thou, presumptuous, who profanes’
• 258 ‘Within the surface of the fleeting river’
• 259 Ode to the West Wind
• 260 ‘Is not today enough? [why do I peer]’
• 261 ‘Child of Despair and Desire’
• 262 ‘What hast thou done then… Lifted up the curtain’
• 263 On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, in the Florentine Gallery
• 264 Love’s Philosophy
• 265 ‘An infant in a boat without a helm’
• 266 ‘Sucking hydras hashed in sulphur’
• 267 ‘A Poet of the finest water’
• 268 ‘Now the day has died away’
• 269 ‘One atom of golden cloud, like a fiery star’
• 270 ‘Why would you overlive your life again?’
• 271 ‘Thou art fair, and few are fairer’ [To Sophia]
• 272 To —— (‘I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden’)
• 273 Music (‘I pant for the music which is divine’)
• 274 On a Dead Violet: To ——
• 274A ‘Follow to the deep wood, sweetest’
• 275 Time Long Past
• 276 ‘Holy, my sweet love’
• 277 Goodnight
• 278 ‘a metropolis/Hemmed in with mountainous walls and [craglike] towers’
• 279 ‘He wanders, like a day-appearing dream’
• 280 God and the Devil
• 281 ‘People of England, ye who toil and groan’
• 282 ‘What men gain fairly, that should they possess’
• 283 An Exhortation
• 284 ‘It was a winter such as when birds die’
• 285 ‘At the creation of the Earth’
• 286 An Allegory
• 287 ‘The dashing of the [stream] is as the voices’
• 288 The Question———
• 289 ‘’Twas in a wilderness of roses, where’
• 290 A Satire upon Satire
• 291 Song: To the Men of England
• 292 To —— (‘Corpses are cold in the tomb’)
• 293 ‘Thou widowed mother, whose wan breasts are dry’
• 294 ‘O thou power, the swiftest’
• 295 ‘By the everlasting God’
• 296 The Sensitive-Plant
• 297 ‘What if the suns and stars and Earth’
• 298 ‘If the clouds which roof the sky’
• 299 ‘The whirlwind spoke—and the clouds were driven’
• 300 Liberty
• 301 ‘Time who outruns and oversoars whatever’
• 302 ‘Thou at Whose Dawn the Everlasting Sun’
• 303 ‘There is a wind which language faints beneath’
• 304 ‘O thou, Immortal Deity’
• 305 To ——— [Lines to a Reviewer]
• 306 ‘una vallata verde’
• 307 ‘Pantherlike Spirit! beautiful and swift’
• 308 ‘Is it that in some ?[happier] sphere
• 309 ‘Is there more on earth than we’
• 310 ‘I sing of one I knew not’
• 311 ‘Arethusa arose’
• 312 ‘Arethusa was a maiden’
• 313 ‘God save the Queen!’
• 314 Dante’s Purgatorio Canto I, I – 6
• 315 Song of Proserpine, While Gathering Flowers on the Plain of Enna
• 316 Song (‘Rarely, rarely comest thou’)
• 317 Song of Apollo
• 318 Song of Pan
• 319 The Cloud
• 320 ‘Like a black spider caught’
• 321 A Vision of the Sea
• 322 Ode to Liberty
• 323 ‘Within a cavern of man’s inmost spirit’
• 324 324 Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa
• 325 Letter to Maria Gisborne
• 326 ‘It was a bright and cheerful afternoon’
• 327 ‘Ever round around thee flowering’
• 328 To Music (‘Silver key of the fountains of tears’)
• 329 ‘In isles of odoriferous pines’
• 330 To a Sky-Lark
• 331 Dante’s Purgatorio Canto XXVIII, 1–51
• 331 Appendix Medwin’s Text of S.’s translation of Dante, Purgatorio XXVIII, 1–9, 22–51
• 332 ‘[?] [sweet flower that I had sung]’
• 333 A Ballad (‘Young Parson Richards stood at his gate’)
• 333 Appendix Draft passages for A Ballad not retained in the fair copy
• 333A A to ——— [the Lord Chancellor]
• 334 ‘I had two babes—a sister and a brother’
• 335 To ——— [Lines to a Critic]
• 336 Hymn to Mercury
• 337 Death
• 338 ‘An eagle floating in the golden [glory]’
• 339 ‘Where art thou, beloved Tomorrow?’
• 340 ‘If the good money which I lent to thee’
• 341 The Witch of Atlas
• 341 Appendix Unused stanzas for The Witch of Atlas
• 342 Sonnet: Political Greatness
• 343 Ode to Naples
• 344 Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant. A Tragedy, in Two Acts.
• 344 Appendix Fragments connected with Oedipus Tyrannus
• 345 ‘Bound in my hollow heart they lie’
• 346 ‘Deluge and dearth, ardours and frosts and earthquake’
• 347 ‘I stood upon a heaven-cleaving turret’
• 348 ‘Eagle! why soarest thou above that tomb?’ [Spirit of Plato]
• 349 To Zanthippe
• 350 ‘A man who was about to hang himself’ [Circumstance]
• 351 ‘Kissing Helena, together’
• 352 To Stella
• 353 ‘[Archeanassa, thou of Colophon]’
• 354 ‘The lancinated gossamers were glancing’
• 355 ‘The dewy silence of the breathing night’
• 356 ‘Ye hasten to the [grave]! What seek ye there’
• 357 ‘The death knell is ringing’
• 358 From the Arabic—imitation
• Appendix A: The Order of the Poems in 1820
• Appendix B: Leigh Hunt’s Preface to The Masque of Anarchy (1832)
• Index of Titles
• Index of First Lines