The Poems of Shelley: Volume Two

1817 - 1819

Kelvin Everest, Geoffrey Matthews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317901068
• Subtopic: English 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 second 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.

This volume makes extensive use of the Shelley manuscripts in the Bodleian Library and draws on the substantial recent research which has appeared on Shelley's text and contexts, and on members of his circle such as Mary Shelley, Byron, Godwin and others. It offers significant new datings and contextual exposition of major works including Prometheus Unbound, Laon and Cythna, 'Julian and Maddalo', The Cenci, and Shelley's translations from the Greek, notably his highly original translation of Euripides' The Cyclops. There are also comprehensive treatments of some of Shelley's best known shorter poems, such as 'Lines written among the Euganean Hills' and 'Ozymandias'.

The annotation demonstrates the extraordinary range and richness of Shelley's literary intelligence, and situates his work in the revolutionary politics and social upheavals of the early nineteenth century. The text and annotation are supported by an extensive bibliography, a chronology, indexes, and appendices which include a detailed examination of the history of the Cenci story. The volumes of The Poems of Shelley form the most comprehensive edition of Shelley's poetry available to students and scholars.

143 Laon and Cythna*

* The poem has more usually been known by its revised title The Revolt of Islam: see pp. 15-17 and note on the full title, p. 31.

Edited by Jack Donovan*

† For help with various problems Jack Donovan would like to thank Jacques Berthoud, John Birtwhistle, Greg Dart, Stephen Minta, John Pickles, John Walker, P. G. Walsh, Timothy Webb and David Duff. The Leverhulme Trust granted a fellowship which provided relief from teaching and administrative duties in the autumn term 1997.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315846507-2

Composition and Publication

In March 1817 S. took up residence in Albion House, Great Marlow, Buckinghamshire where he lived until February 1818 with Mary (his wife since the previous December), their one-year-old son William and, from her birth on 2 September, their daughter Clara. For most of this period Mary’s step-sister Clare Clairmont and Alba (later Allegra), Clare’s infant child by Byron, also made part of the household. Thomas Love Peacock was a close neighbour and regular visitor. Leigh Hunt and his family stayed at Albion House from 10 April until 25 June, Hunt continuing to act as editor of the liberal weekly The Examiner during this time. From the home of Peacock and his mother, where the Shelleys were guests while preparing to enter their own, Mary had written on 2 March to Hunt: Our house is very political as well as poetical and I hope you will acquire a fresh spirit for both when you come here’ (Mary L i 29). It was among this circle of friends and working writers and in an atmosphere of anxious concern over public affairs, widely perceived to be in crisis over the question of parliamentary reform, that the epic romance L&C was composed in draft through the spring, summer and early autumn. Finished, transcribed, and seen through the press by about mid-November, it was on sale at the beginning of December. This is not a long period of time to spend on a poem of its length (4818 lines) and claims to high seriousness of purpose; to bring it to completion strenuous effort had to be kept up right through a season of intense imaginative creation which was, moreover, continually marked by the stress of personal adversity. Both S.’s first wife Harriet and Mary’s half-sister Fanny had committed suicide the previous autumn. At the end of March S. was deprived as morally unfit of the custody of the two children of his first marriage, while in late June/early July his exertions were clouded with foreboding by a recurrence of what were feared to be consumptive symptoms (L&C lines 89-90 and note). Replying on 11 December to a letter from his father-in-law Godwin, to whom a copy of L&C had been sent as soon as printing was finished, and who had returned ‘admonitions’ and ‘censures’, S. recalled the apprehensions he had experienced during the writing:

The Poem was produced by a series of thoughts which filled my mind with an unbounded & sustained enthusiasm. I felt the precariousness of my life, & I engaged in this task resolved to leave some record of myself. Much of what the volume contains was written with the same feeling, as real, though not so prophetic, as the communications of a dying man. I never presumed indeed to consider it anything approaching to faultless, but when 1 considered contemporary productions of the same apparent pretensions, I will own that I was filled with confidence. (L i 577)

The personal urgency and the writer’s self-assurance were attended by keen anxiety that L&C, a heroic poem boldly assuming a prophetic stance at a moment of national emergency, should attract the readers that S.’s earlier works had failed to find: ‘I have the fairest chance of the public approaching my work with unbiassed and unperverted feeling; the fruit of reputation (and you know for what purposes I value it) is within my reach’, he wrote to his publisher Charles Oilier in December (L i 580). Another circumstance must have further sharpened the urgency with which he wrote. S.’s cousin Thomas Medwin remembered: ‘Shelley told me that he and Keats had mutually agreed, in the same given time, (six months each,) to write a long poem, and that the Endymion, and Revolt of Islam [as Laon and Cythna was entitled after being withdrawn and reissued: see below p. 16] were the fruits of this rivalry’ (Medwin (1913) 178-9). It may be in private acknowledgement of this friendly competition with Keats – it is surely out of the anxiety expressed to Oilier and Godwin – that, in the Preface to L&C, S. duly forewarns his readers that the 300-page octavo volume he is introducing had been written rapidly: The Poem now presented to the Public occupied little more than six months in the composition’; a few lines later he varies the time slightly: ‘the mere composition occupied no more than six months’. When considered together with two other pieces of evidence, S.’s statement appears to fix the dates of this six-month period quite precisely. Mary entered in her jnl for 29 September 1817: ‘S. finishes his poem and goes up to town with Clare Teusday [sic] 23’ (Mary Jnl i 180). The next day S. wrote from Leigh Hunt’s in Paddington to Byron in Venice: ‘I have completed a poem which, when it is finished, though I do not tax your patience to read it, I will send you’ (I i 557). Taking the discrepancy in the Preface between ‘little more than’ and ‘no more than’ as an indication that S. is not counting to the day – and allowing, on the more generous of his calculations, perhaps a week or so beyond six months – a date around the middle of March 1817 would be the earliest that he could have begun to write the poem. Composition would then have started within a few days of the Shelleys’ taking possession of Albion House on 18 March (Mary Jnl i 166).

Although the period during which the poem was written can be, and has traditionally been, thus closely determined, some notations in Nbk 2, apparently an early calendar of composition, need also to be considered. On the first complete page of the nbk, which contains drafts for L&C Cantos I and II, S. wrote in a vertical column: ‘April 4-May-June-July-August 4’. 4 August 1817 would be his twenty-fifth birthday, and it may be that at this early stage he aimed to complete the poem which he described in the Preface as ‘my first serious appeal to the Public’ on that anniversary. Above and to the right of the column of months a series of figures begins with 5 and descends by doubling the figure until the number 320 is reached opposite the centre of the column of months. The figure 320 is multiplied, above and to the left of the dates, by 9 (the number of lines in the Spenserian stanza in which the poem is written) to give the total 2880; while below this figure the number 120, the approximate number of days in the 4 April-4 August span, is enclosed in a box. Other faint calculations in pencil would indicate that S. returned to this page at points later in the composition to record his progress. From these dates and figures it could be conjectured that S. originally, or at some early stage, planned that L&C should comprise 320 Spenserian stanzas and be finished on his twenty-fifth birthday. The conjecture seems to be supported by a letter addressed to Leigh Hunt in London written on the eve of that birthday, 3 August, and which contains – perhaps prompted by the date – the only reference in S/s surviving correspondence to L&C in the course of its composition: ‘I have arrived at the 380th stanza of my Poem’ (L i 551). On the hypothesis of 320 projected stanzas L&C would have grown as it was written well beyond the original estimate to its final length (including the Dedication) of 525 stanzas...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chronological Table
• Abbreviations
• The Poems
• 142 ‘Frail clouds arrayed in sunlight lose the glory’
• 143 Laon and Cythna
• 143 Appendix Fragments connected with Laon and Cythna
• 144 Rosalind and Helen, a Modern Eclogue
• 145 Ozymandias
• 146 Athanase
• 147 To Constantia (‘The red Rose that drinks the fountain dew’)
• 148 ‘arise sweet Mary rise’
• 149 ‘My head is heavy, my limbs are weary’
• 150 ‘Serene in his unconquerable might’
• 151 Address to the Human Mind
• 152 ‘Great Spirit whom the sea of boundless mind’
• 153 ‘My spirit like a charmèd bark doth swim’
• 154 ‘To thirst and find no fill’
• 155 To Constantia (‘Thy voice, slow rising like a Spirit, lingers’)
• 156-161 Translations of the Homeric Hymns
• 156 To Castor and Pollux
• 157 To the Moon
• 158 To the Sun
• 159 To the Earth, Mother of All
• 160 To Minerva
• 161 Hymn to Venus
• 162 Lament for Bion
• 163 To the Nile
• 164 ‘Now Heaven neglected is by Men’
• 165 ‘Listen, listen, Mary mine –’
• 166 Mazenghi
• 167 From Virgil’s Tenth Eclogue
• 168 From Virgil’s Fourth Georgic
• 169 ‘Heigh ho, wisdom and folly’
• 170 Scene for Tasso
• 171 ‘Silence; oh well are Death and sleep and thou’
• 172 The Cyclops
• 173 Sonnet (‘Lift not the painted veil which those who live’)
• 174 ‘Alas, this is not what I thought life was’
• 175 ‘One sung of thee who left the tale untold’
• 176 ‘And the fierce beasts of the world’s wildernesses’
• 177 Ό Mary dear, that you were here’
• 178 ‘I am drunk with the honey-wine’
• 179 ‘Flourishing vine, whose kindling clusters glow’
• 180 ‘And where is truth? On tombs? for such to thee’
• 181 ‘Behold, sweet Sister mine, once more descend’
• 182 The Two Spirits. An Allegory
• 183 Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October, 1818
• 184 ‘And who feels discord now or sorrow?’
• 185 Ό mighty mind, in whose deep stream this age’
• 186 Song for Tasso
• 187 Stanzas written in dejection – December 1818, near Naples
• 188 ‘There was a little lawny islet’
• 189 ‘In the cave which wild weeds cover’
• 190 ‘Rome has fallen, ye see it lying’
• 191 ‘Follow to the deep wood, sweetest’
• 192 ‘How sweet it is to sit and read the tales’
• 193 ‘Wake the serpent not – lest he’
• 194 ‘Hold – divine image’
• 195 Prometheus Unbound
• 195 Appendix Fragments connected with Prometheus Unbound
• 196 ‘the weeping willows’
• 197 ‘The cotton poplar’s down’
• 198 Julian and Maddalo
• 199 ‘How pale and cold thou art in thy despair’
• 200 Retribution: from Moschus
• 201 Translation of part of Bion’s Lament for Adonis
• 202 Misery. – A Fragment
• 202 Appendix Unused stanzas for ‘Misery. – A Fragment’
• 203 ‘The world is dreary’
• 204 ‘What dost thou here Spirit of glowing life’
• 205 ‘My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone’
• 206 ‘Wilt thou forget the happy hours’
• 207 ‘The babe is at peace within the womb’
• 208 ‘There is a warm and gentle atmosphere’
• Appendix A The Contents of Shelley's Collections Of 1819 and 1820
• Appendix B An Historical Note on the Cenci Story and the Sources of Shelley's Knowledge of it
• Index of Titles
• Index of First Lines