Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley Poetry

Contents: - Percy Bysshe Shelley’s biography - Poetry -- Hymn to Intellectual Beauty -- Ozymandias -- England in 1819 -- To a Skylark

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s biography Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on August 4, 1792 at Field Place, near Horsham in Sussex, to Sir Timothy Shelley and Elizabeth Pilfold following their marriage in October of 1791. Percy was the eldest of six children; John, Mary, Elizabeth, Hellen, Margaret. Being of a wealthy family, Percy became heir to the 2nd baronet of Castle Goring in 1815 and received much of his early education by tutor, Reverend Thomas Edwards of Horsham. In 1802, Shelley entered the Sion House Academy of Brentford before heading to Eton College in 1804 and on April 10, 1810 to the University of Oxford. While at Oxford, Shelley was published for the first time; Gothic novel, Zastrozzi (1810). The same year, Shelley and his sister Elizabeth Co-published Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire. At Oxford, Shelley and another, possibly Thomas Jefferson Hogg, published a collection of verse, Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson. And in 1811 Shelley published a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, which led to his expulsion from Oxford on March 25, 1811 along with Hogg. Shelley however, could have been reinstated if he recanted his views, but refused. This led to a breakdown between himself and his father's relationship. At the young age of 19, just four months after his expulsion, Shelley eloped to Scotland with a 16-year-old schoolgirl, Harriet Westbrook. Shelley invited his friend Hogg along with his wife to share their household and engage in open marriage activities. However, Harriet refused to be apart of such actions, so the couple left to live in the Lake District.

Being distracted by political events, Shelley left to Ireland and began spreading his radical ideas, giving him much attention, however unfavorable, of the British government. The following years, Shelley wrote and published Queen Mab. At this point the Shelleys marriage was an unhappy one. Often Shelley would leave his wife and two children while visiting William Godwin's home and bookshop in London. While there, he met and fell in love with his daughter, Mary. In July 1814, Shelley eloped once again with a 16-year-old, Mary. The two brought along Mary's step-sister Jane, later named Claire, Clairmont, who was also 16. The three crossed much of Europe travelling through France and later settling in Switzerland. The Shelleys later published a journal accounting the adventure. After just six weeks, Shelley, Mary and Jane returned to England and found Godwin refusing to speak with Mary or Shelley due to their practice of free love. In the fall of 1815, Shelley produced Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude, a verse allegory. The poem held little attention at the time, but later became recognized as one of Shelley's most powerful works. Around this time, much of Shelley's works were influenced by Wordsworth's poetry.

During the summer of 1816, Shelley and his wife Mary made a second trip to Switzerland. The couple visited there only because of Mary's sister, Claire, had commenced with Lord Byron and entered exile in mainland Europe. Around this time, Byron had lost much of his interest in Claire, but she used the opportunity of meeting the Shelley's as bait to head to Geneva. The Shelleys and Byron rented neighbouring houses on the shores of Lake Geneva, holding regular conversations and influencing much of each others poetry. On a boating trip Shelley was inspired to write Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, his most significant work since Alastor and while at the French Alps wrote Mont Blanc. The same time, Mary was inspired to begin writing Frankenstein. By the end of the summer, the Shelleys and Claire returned to England with Claire being pregnant. After their returned, Shelly's life was tragic. Mary's half-sister Fanny Imlay, committed suicide in late Autumn and in December of 1816, Shelley's wife, estranged and pregnant, Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine River in Hyde Park. Shelley and Mary then married, intending to secure Shelley's custody, but the marriage was found in vain and the children were handed over to foster parents. The Shelleys moved to the village of Marlow, Buckinghamshire surrounding themselves with a literary circle, including Leigh Hunt and John Keats. Shelley's major work during this time was Laon and Cythna, a long narrative poem attacking religion and featured a pair of incestuous lovers. The poem was later edited and republished as The Revolt of Islam in 1818.

In early 1818, the Shelleys and Claire left again to deliver Byron and Claire's daughter to Byron where they took up residence in Venice. However, in 1818 and 1819 tragedy struck the Shelleys again as his son Will died of fever in Rome and his infant daughter died during another move. Over the years the Shelleys travelled throughout much of Italy. Shelley completed Prometheus Unbound in Rome and spent the rest of his summer of 1819 writing tragedy; including The Masque of Anarchy, Men of England and The Witch of Atlas. In 1821, Shelley wrote the elegy Adonais which was inspired by the death of Keats. Shelley and Byron arranged for James Henry Leigh Hunt to accompany them in Italy to create a journal named The Liberal, which would disseminate their writings and act as a counter to conservative periodicals in 1822. The same year, tragedy struck the Shelleys once again, this time to Shelley himself. Percy Bysshe Shelley died on July 8, 1822 by drowning during a sudden storm while sailing back from Pisa and Livorno to Lerici in his schooner, the Don Juan. Shelley's body washed ashore and was later cremated and interred in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. His heart however, was taken by Edward Trelawny and given to Mary Shelley, who kept it until her dying day.

Poetry The central thematic concerns of Shelley's poetry are largely the same themes that defined Romanticism, especially among the younger English poets of Shelley's era: beauty, the passions, nature, political liberty, creativity, and the sanctity of the imagination. What makes Shelley's treatment of these themes unique is his philosophical relationship to his subject matter—which was better developed and articulated than that of any other Romantic poet with the possible exception of Wordsworth—and his temperament, which was extraordinarily sensitive and responsive even for a Romantic poet, and which possessed an extraordinary capacity for joy, love, and hope. Shelley fervently believed in the possibility of realizing an ideal of human happiness as based on beauty, and his moments of darkness and despair (he had many, particularly in book-length poems such as the monumental Queen Mab) almost always stem from his disappointment at seeing that ideal sacrificed to human weakness. Shelley's intense feelings about beauty and expression are documented in poems such as "Ode to the West Wind" and "To a Skylark," in which he invokes metaphors from nature to characterize his relationship to his art. The centre of his aesthetic philosophy can be found in his important essay A Defence of Poetry, in which he argues that poetry brings about moral good. Poetry, Shelley argues, exercises and expands the imagination, and the imagination is the source of sympathy, compassion, and love, which rest on the ability to project oneself into the position of another person. He writes,

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others. The pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. No other English poet of the early nineteenth century so emphasized the connection between beauty and goodness, or believed so avidly in the power of art's sensual pleasures to improve society

Hymn to Intellectual Beauty Summary The speaker says that the shadow of an invisible Power floats among human beings, occasionally visiting human hearts--manifested in summer winds, or moonbeams, or the memory of music, or anything that is precious for its mysterious grace. Addressing this Spirit of Beauty, the speaker asks where it has gone, and why it leaves the world so desolate when it goes--why human hearts can feel such hope and love when it is present, and such despair and hatred when it is gone. He asserts that religious and superstitious notions--"Demon, Ghost, and Heaven"--are nothing more than the attempts of mortal poets and wise men to explain and express their responses to the Spirit of Beauty, which alone, the speaker says, can give "grace and truth to life's unquiet dream."

Love, Hope, and Self-Esteem come and go at the whim of the Spirit, and if it would only stay in the human heart forever, instead of coming and going unpredictably, man would be "immortal and omnipotent." The Spirit inspires lovers and nourishes thought; and the speaker implores the spirit to remain even after his life has ended, fearing that without it death will be "a dark reality." The speaker recalls that when he was a boy, he "sought for ghosts," and travelled through caves and forests looking for "the departed dead"; but only when the Spirit's shadow fell across him--as he mused "deeply on the lot / Of life" outdoors in the spring--did he experience transcendence. At that moment, he says, "I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!" He then vowed that he would dedicate his life to the Spirit of Beauty; now he asserts that he has kept his vow--every joy he has ever had has been linked to the hope that the "awful Loveliness" would free the world from slavery, and complete the articulation of his words. The speaker observes that after noon the day becomes "more solemn and serene," and in autumn there is a "lustre in the sky" which cannot be found in summer. The speaker asks the Spirit, whose power descended upon his youth like that truth of nature, to supply "calm" to his "onward life"--the life of a man who worships the Spirit and every form that contains it, and who is bound by the spells of the Spirit to "fear himself, and love all humankind."

Commentary This lyric hymn, written in 1816, is Shelley's earliest focused attempt to incorporate the Romantic ideal of communion with nature into his own aesthetic philosophy. The "Intellectual Beauty" of the poem's title does not refer to the beauty of the mind or of the working intellect, but rather to the intellectual idea of beauty, abstracted in this poem to the "Spirit of Beauty," whose shadow comes and goes over human hearts. The poem is the poet's exploration both of the qualities of beauty (here it always resides in nature, for example), and of the qualities of the human being's response to it ("Love, Hope, and Self-esteem"). The poem's process is doubly figurative or associative, in that, once the poet abstracts the metaphor of the Spirit from the particulars of natural beauty, he then explains the workings of this Spirit by comparing it back to the very particulars of natural beauty from which it was abstracted in the first place: "Thy light alone, like mist o'er mountains driven"; "Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart..." This is an inspired technique, for it enables Shelley to illustrate the stunning experience of natural beauty time and again as the poem progresses, but to push the particulars into the background, so that the focus of the poem is always on the Spirit, the abstract intellectual ideal that the speaker claims to serve. Of course Shelley's atheism is a famous part of his philosophical stance, so it may seem strange that he has written a hymn of any kind. He addresses that strangeness in the third stanza, when he declares that names such as "Demon, Ghost, and Heaven" are merely the record of attempts by sages to explain the effect of the Spirit of Beauty--but that the effect has never been explained by any "voice from some sublimer world." The Spirit of Beauty that the poet worships is not supernatural, it is a part of the world. It is not an independent entity; it is a responsive capability within the poet's own mind. If the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" is not among Shelley's very greatest poems, it is only because its project falls short of the poet's extraordinary powers; simply drawing the abstract ideal of his own experience of beauty and declaring his fidelity to that ideal seems too simple a task for Shelley. His most important statements on natural beauty and on aesthetics will take into account a more complicated idea of his own connection to nature as an expressive artist and a poet, as we shall see in "To a Skylark“. Nevertheless, the "Hymn" remains an important poem from the early period of Shelley's maturity. It shows him working to incorporate Wordsworthian ideas of nature, in some ways the most important theme of early Romanticism, into his own poetic project, and, by connecting his idea of beauty to his idea of human religion, making that theme explicitly his own.

Ozymandias Summary The speaker recalls having met a traveller "from an antique land," who told him a story about the ruins of a statue in the desert of his native country. Two vast legs of stone stand without a body, and near them a massive, crumbling stone head lies "half sunk" in the sand. The traveller told the speaker that the frown and "sneer of cold command" on the statue's face indicate that the sculptor understood well the passions of the statue's subject, a man who sneered with contempt for those weaker than himself, yet fed his people because of something in his heart ("The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed"). On the pedestal of the statue appear the words: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" But around the decaying ruin of the statue, nothing remains, only the "lone and level sands," which stretch out around it, far away.

Commentary This sonnet from 1817 is probably Shelley's most famous and most anthologized poem--which is somewhat strange, considering that it is in many ways an atypical poem for Shelley, and that it touches little upon the most important themes in his oeuvre at large (beauty, expression, love, imagination). Still, "Ozymandias" is a masterful sonnet. Essentially it is devoted to a single metaphor: the shattered, ruined statue in the desert wasteland, with its arrogant, passionate face and monomaniacal inscription ("Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"). The once-great king's proud boast has been ironically disproved; Ozymandias's works have crumbled and disappeared, his civilization is gone, all has been turned to dust by the impersonal, indiscriminate, destructive power of history. The ruined statue is now merely a monument to one man's hubris, and a powerful statement about the insignificance of human beings to the passage of time. Ozymandias is first and foremost a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of political power, and in that sense the poem is Shelley's most outstanding political sonnet, trading the specific rage of a poem like "England in 1819" for the crushing impersonal metaphor of the statue. But Ozymandias symbolizes not only political power--the statue can be a metaphor for the pride and hubris of all of humanity, in any of its manifestations. It is significant that all that remains of Ozymandias is a work of art and a group of words; as Shakespeare does in the sonnets, Shelley demonstrates that art and language long outlast the other legacies of power. Of course, it is Shelley's brilliant poetic rendering of the story, and not the subject of the story itself, which makes the poem so memorable. Framing the sonnet as a story told to the speaker by "a traveller from an antique land" enables Shelley to add another level of obscurity to Ozymandias's position with regard to the reader--rather than seeing the statue with our own eyes, so to speak, we hear about it from someone who heard about it from someone who has seen it. Thus the ancient king is rendered even less commanding; the distancing of the narrative serves to undermine his power over us just as completely as has the passage of time. Shelley's description of the statue works to reconstruct, gradually, the figure of the "king of kings": first we see merely the "shattered visage," then the face itself, with its "frown / And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command"; then we are introduced to the figure of the sculptor, and are able to imagine the living man sculpting the living king, whose face wore the expression of the passions now inferable; then we are introduced to the king's people in the line, "the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed." The kingdom is now imaginatively complete, and we are introduced to the extraordinary, prideful boast of the king: "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" With that, the poet demolishes our imaginary picture of the king, and interposes centuries of ruin between it and us: "'Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away."

England in 1819 Summary The speaker describes the state of England in 1819. The king is "old, mad, blind, despised, and dying." The princes are "the dregs of their dull race," and flow through public scorn like mud, unable to see, feel for, or know their people, clinging like leeches to their country until they "drop, blind in blood, without a blow." The English populace are "starved and stabbed" in untilled fields; the army is corrupted by "liberticide and prey"; the laws "tempt and slay"; religion is Christless and Godless, "a book sealed"; and the English Senate is like "Time's worst statute unrepealed." Each of these things, the speaker says, is like a grave from which "a glorious Phantom" may burst to illuminate "our tempestuous day."

Commentary For all his commitment to romantic ideals of love and beauty, Shelley was also concerned with the real world: he was a fierce denouncer of political power and a passionate advocate for liberty. The result of his political commitment was a series of angry political poems condemning the arrogance of power, including "Ozymandias" and "England in 1819." Like Wordsworth's "London, 1802," "England in 1819" bitterly lists the flaws in England's social fabric: in order, King George is "old, mad, blind, despised, and dying"; the nobility ("princes") are insensible leeches draining their country dry; the people are oppressed, hungry, and hopeless, their fields untilled; the army is corrupt and dangerous to its own people; the laws are useless, religion has become morally degenerate, and Parliament ("A Senate") is "Time's worst statute unrepealed." The furious, violent metaphors Shelley employs throughout this list (nobles as leeches in muddy water, the army as a two-edged sword, religion as a sealed book, Parliament as an unjust law) leave no doubt about his feelings on the state of his nation. Then, surprisingly, the final couplet concludes with a note of passionate Shelleyean optimism: from these "graves" a "glorious Phantom" may "burst to illumine our tempestuous day." What this Phantom might be is not specified in the poem, but it seems to hint simultaneously at the Spirit of the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and at the possibility of liberty won through revolution, as it was won in France. (It also recalls Wordsworth's invocation of the spirit of John Milton to save England in the older poet's poem, though that connection may be unintentional on Shelley's part; both Wordsworth and Shelley long for an apocalyptic deus ex machina to save their country, but Shelley is certainly not summoning John Milton.)

To a Skylark Summary The speaker, addressing a skylark, says that it is a "blithe Spirit" rather than a bird, for its song comes from Heaven, and from its full heart pours "profuse strains of unpremeditated art." The skylark flies higher and higher, "like a cloud of fire" in the blue sky, singing as it flies. In the "golden lightning" of the sun, it floats and runs, like "an unbodied joy." As the skylark flies higher and higher, the speaker loses sight of it, but is still able to hear its "shrill delight," which comes down as keenly as moonbeams in the "white dawn," which can be felt even when they are not seen. The earth and air ring with the skylark's voice, just as Heaven overflows with moonbeams when the moon shines out from behind "a lonely cloud."

The speaker says that no one knows what the skylark is, for it is unique: even "rainbow clouds" do not rain as brightly as the shower of melody that pours from the skylark. The bird is "like a poet hidden / In the light of thought," able to make the world experience "sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not." It is like a lonely maiden in a palace tower, who uses her song to soothe her lovelorn soul. It is like a golden glow-worm, scattering light among the flowers and grass in which it is hidden. It is like a rose embowered in its own green leaves, whose scent is blown by the wind until the bees are faint with "too much sweet." The skylark's song surpasses "all that ever was, / Joyous and clear and fresh," whether the rain falling on the "twinkling grass" or the flowers the rain awakens. Calling the skylark "Sprite or Bird," the speaker asks it to tell him its "sweet thoughts," for he has never heard anyone or anything call up "a flood of rapture so divine." Compared to the skylark's, any music would seem lacking. What objects, the speaker asks, are "the fountains of thy happy strain?" Is it fields, waves, mountains, the sky, the plain, or "love of thine own kind" or "ignorance or pain"? Pain and languor, the speaker says, "never came near" the skylark: it loves, but has never known "love's sad satiety." Of death, the skylark must know "things more true and deep" than mortals could dream; otherwise, the speaker asks, "how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?" For mortals, the experience of happiness is bound inextricably with the experience of sadness: dwelling upon memories and hopes for the future, mortal men "pine for what is not"; their laughter is "fraught" with "some pain"; their "sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." But, the speaker says, even if men could "scorn / Hate and pride and fear," and were born without the capacity to weep, he still does not know how they could ever approximate the joy expressed by the skylark. Calling the bird a "scorner of the ground," he says that its music is better than all music and all poetry. He asks the bird to teach him "half the gladness / That thy brain must know," for then he would overflow with "harmonious madness," and his song would be so beautiful that the world would listen to him, even as he is now listening to the skylark.

Commentary If the West Wind was Shelley's first convincing attempt to articulate an aesthetic philosophy through metaphors of nature, the skylark is his greatest natural metaphor for pure poetic expression, the "harmonious madness" of pure inspiration. The skylark's song issues from a state of purified existence, a Wordsworthian notion of complete unity with Heaven through nature; its song is motivated by the joy of that uncomplicated purity of being, and is unmixed with any hint of melancholy or of the bittersweet, as human joy so often is. The skylark's unimpeded song rains down upon the world, surpassing every other beauty, inspiring metaphor and making the speaker believe that the bird is not a mortal bird at all, but a "Spirit," a "sprite," a "poet hidden / In the light of thought." In that sense, the skylark is almost an exact twin of the bird in Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale"; both represent pure expression through their songs, and like the skylark, the nightingale "wast not born for death." But while the nightingale is a bird of darkness, invisible in the shadowy forest glades, the skylark is a bird of daylight, invisible in the deep bright blue of the sky. The nightingale inspires Keats to feel "a drowsy numbness" of happiness that is also like pain, and that makes him think of death; the skylark inspires Shelley to feel a frantic, rapturous joy that has no part of pain. To Keats, human joy and sadness are inextricably linked, as he explains at length in the final stanza of the "Ode on Melancholy." But the skylark sings free of all human error and complexity, and while listening to his song, the poet feels free of those things, too.

Structurally and linguistically, this poem is almost unique among Shelley's works; its strange form of stanza, with four compact lines and one very long line, and its lilting, songlike diction ("profuse strains of unpremeditated art") work to create the effect of spontaneous poetic expression flowing musically and naturally from the poet's mind. Structurally, each stanza tends to make a single, quick point about the skylark, or to look at it in a sudden, brief new light; still, the poem does flow, and gradually advances the mini-narrative of the speaker watching the skylark flying higher and higher into the sky, and envying its untrammeled inspiration--which, if he were to capture it in words, would cause the world to listen.

Percy Bysshe Shelley