The Poems of Shelley: Volume One

1804-1817

Geoffrey Matthews, Kelvin Everest, Geoffrey Matthews, Kelvin Everest

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780582484481
• eBook ISBN: 9781317872924
• 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 first 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 supply the personal, literary, historical and scientific information necessary to an informed reading of Shelley's varied and allusive verse.

The present volume includes the 'Esdaile' poems, which only entered the public domain in the 1950s, printed in chronological order and integrated with the rest of Shelley's early output, and Queen Mab, the first of Shelley's major poems, together with its extensive prose notes. The seminal Alastor volume is placed in the detailed context of Shelley's overall poetic development. The 'Scrope Davies' notebook, only discovered in 1976, furnishes two otherwise unknown sonnets as well as alternative versions of 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty' and 'Mont Blanc', which significantly influence our understanding of these important poems.

This first volume contains new datings, and makes numerous corrections to long-established errors and misunderstandings in the transmission of Shelley's work. Its annotations and headnotes provide new perspectives on Shelley's literary, philosophical and political development The volumes of The Poems of Shelley form the most comprehensive edition of Shelley's poetry available to students and scholars.

1 ‘A Cat in distress'

DOI: 10.4324/9781315837123-2

S.’s first recorded poem; date of composition 1802–05, probably about 1804 (for arguments that the poem dates from 1811 see Nora Crook, ‘Shelley’s earliest poem?’, N&Q ccxxxii (1987) 486–90). S.’s sister Hellen called it ‘a very early effusion of Bysshe’s, with a cat painted on the top of the sheet… but there is no promise of future excellence in the lines, the versification is defective’ Hogg i 14). She added that it ‘evidendy had a story, but it must have been before I can remember. It is in Elizabeth’s hand-writing, copied probably later than the composition of the lines [the watermark is 1809], though the hand-writing is unformed’ (i 21). The phrase ‘hold their jaw’ (line 30), mentioned by Hellen S. as ‘classical at boys’ schools and … a favourite one of Bysshe’s’ (ibid.), could date from S.’s entry to Sion House Academy in 1802, but rather suggests Eton in 1804–05. At Christmas 1804 S. was 12, Elizabeth S. 10, and Hellen S. 5. A note added in another hand to Elizabeth’s original watercolour sketch and transcript in CHPL, ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley written at 10 years of age to his Sister at School’ (SC iv 816), has no likely authority. Nothing is known of the tabby cat; and S.’s MS is lost.

Text from SC 346 (quoted by permission of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library). Published in Hogg i 21. The transcript is unpunctuated; Hogg’s text was from Hellen S.’s copy of Elizabeth’s copy, so its variants may be Hellen’s.

1

A Cat in distress

Nothing more or less,

Good folks I must faithfully tell ye,

As I am a sinner

It wants for some dinner

To stuff out its own little belly.

2

You mightn’t easily guess

All the modes of distress

Which torture the tenants of earth,

And the various evils

Which like many devils

Attend the poor dogs from their birth.

3

Some a living require,

And others desire

An old fellow out of the way,

And which is the best

I leave to be guessed

For I cannot pretend to say.

4

One wants society,

T’other variety,

Others a tranquil life,

Some want food,

Others as good

Only require a wife.

5

But this poor little Cat

Only wanted a Rat

To stuff out its own little maw,

And ‘twere as good

Had some people such food

To make them hold their jaw.

1. or] nor Hogg.
2. wants] waits Hogg.
3. mightn’t] would not Hogg.
4. Peck comments (Peck i 8) ‘Here is expressed that sympathy with suffering humanity… which… is heard as an undertone in almost all of his poetry’. But all the ‘evils’ enumerated (except ‘food’) are those of traditional comic drama.

1. like many] like so many Hogg. A pencilled so has been added in the transcript, apparendy in Elizabeth S.’s hand, but whether the correction is textual or stylistic is uncertain.
2. dogs] souls Hogg.
3. a living] an ecclesiastical benefice.
4. T’other] Another Hogg.
5. Only require] Only want Hogg.
6. ’twere] it were Hogg.
7. Had some people] Some people had Hogg.

2 Written in Very Early Youth

DOI: 10.4324/9781315837123-3

‘Very early youth’, unless intentionally misleading, must indicate 15–16 years of age, possibly April-May 1808. An Eton friend recalled of S. that ‘Another of his favourite rambles was Stoke Park, and the picturesque churchyard, where Gray is said to have written his Elegy, of which he was very fond’, and that ‘his speculations were then… of the world beyond the grave’ (Hogg i 43). Lines 1 and 7 suggest late spring; see also note on lines 3–4 below. Apart from its debts to Gray’s Elegy the content is guesswork, but perhaps concerns S.’s cousin Harriet Grove, whom he had first met probably at Easter 1805 and whose response may not have suited his boyish ardour before her presumed visit to Field Place in August 1808, after which they corresponded. See F. L. Jones’s Introduction to the Diary of Harriet G., SC i 475–506, and K. N. Cameron’s commentary on ‘To St Irvyne’, Esd Nbk 305–9.

Text from Esd f. 80^r–80^v (Esd No. 48: quoted by permission of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library).

Published in Esd Nbk 147; Esd Poems 95; SC iv 1038–9 (transcript of Esd).

I’ll lay me down by the church-yard tree

And resign me to my destiny;

I’ll bathe my brow with the poison dew

That falls from yonder deadly yew,

And if it steal my soul away

To bid it wake in realms of day,

Spring’s sweetest flowers shall never be

So dear to gratitude and me!

Earthborn glory cannot breathe

Within the damp recess of death;

Avarice, Envy, Lust, Revenge,

Suffer there a fearful change;

All that grandeur ever gave

Moulders in the silent grave;

Oh! that I slept near yonder yew,

That this tired frame might moulder too!

Yet Pleasure’s folly is not mine,

No votarist I at Glory’s shrine;

The sacred gift for which I sigh

Is not to live to feel alone,

I only ask to calmly die

That the tomb might melt this heart of stone

To love beyond the grave.

1. Traditionally associated with death (cp. Parnell, ‘A Night-Piece on Death’ 53–4: ‘yon black and funeral yew, / That bathes the charnel-house with dew’; Erasmus Darwin, Temple of Nature ii (1803) 189–90: ‘O’er gaping tombs where shed umbrageous Yews / On mouldering bones their cold unwholesome dews’), the yew in literature acquired further sinister powers after 1783 from the legendary Upas, ‘The baleful tree of Java, / Whose death-distilling boughs dropt poisonous dew’ (Coleridge, The Fall of Robespierre (Cambridge 1794) III 1–2. Act III was written by Southcy).
2. This stanza draws heavily on Gray’s Elegy, esp. 33–6.
3. shrine] shine Esd.
4. Unpunctuated in Esd. S. probably means The gift I seek is that of no longer existing merely to experience emotions in solitude’. Cameron (Esd Nbk 147) punctuates line 20: ‘Is not to live, to feel, alone;’; Rogers (Esd Poems 95): ‘Is not to live, to feel alone;’; but no pointing avoids ambiguities.
5. this heart of stone] Presumably Harriet Grove’s, i.e. ‘That this hard-hearted mistress of mine might be induced to love me when I am dead’. Cp. ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills’ 24–44; ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection at Naples’ 37–45.

3 Sadak the Wanderer. A Fragment

DOI: 10.4324/9781315837123-4

Date of composition unknown; first identified as S.’s by Davidson Cook (see TLS below) from the ascription in a file of MSS contributed to The Keepsake for 1828. Garnett knew of this ascript...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Note by the General Editor
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Chronological Table of Shelley’s Life and Publications
• The Poems
• Appendix A The Order of the Poems in the Esdaile Notebook
• Appendix B The Order of the Poems in Shelley's Collections, 1810–1816
• Appendix C ‘Thy dewy looks sink in my breast' and ‘Thy gentle face, Priscilla dear’
• Index