Williams, a retired lieutenant of a cavalry regiment serving in India, and his charming common-law wife, Jane, with whom Shelley became infatuated and to whom he addressed some of his best lyrics and verse letters. The end came suddenly, and in a way prefigured uncannily in the last stanza of Adonais, in which he had described his spirit as a ship driven by a violent storm out into the dark unknown. On July 8, 1822, Shelley and Edward Williams were sailing their open boat, the Don Juan, on the Gulf of Spezia. A violent squall swamped the boat. When several days later the bodies were washed ashore, they were cremated, and Shelley's ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome, near the graves of John Keats and William Shelley, the poet's young son.
Both Shelley's character and his poetry have been the subject of violently contradictory, and often partisan, estimates. His actions according to his deep convictions often led to disastrous consequences for himself and those near to him; and even recent scholars, while repudiating the vicious attacks by Shelley's contemporaries, attribute some of those actions to a self-assured egotism that masked itself as idealism. Yet Byron, who knew Shelley intimately and did not pay moral compliments lightly, wrote to his publisher John Murray, in response to attacks on Shelley at the time of his death: 'You are all brutally mistaken about Shelley, who was, without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew.' Shelley's politics, vilified during his lifetime, made him a literary hero to later political radicals: the Chartists in the middle of the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels at the end, and for much of the twentieth century, many of the guiding lights of the British Labour Party. As a poet Shelley was
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74 4 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
greatly admired by Robert Browning, Swinburne, and other Victorians; but in the mid-twentieth century he was repeatedly charged with intellectual and emotional immaturity, shoddy workmanship, and incoherent imagery by influential writers such as F. R. Leavis and his followers in Britain and the New Critics in America. More recently, however, many sympathetic studies have revealed the coherent intellectual understructure of his poems and have confirmed Wordsworth's early recognition that 'Shelley is one of the best artists of Us all: I mean in workmanship of style.' Shelley, it has become clear, greatly expanded the metrical and stanzaic resources of English versification. His poems exhibit a broad range of voices, from the high but ordered passion of 'Ode to the West Wind,' through the heroic dignity of the utterances of Prometheus, to the approximation of what is inexpressible in the description of Asia's transfiguration and in the visionary conclusion of Adonais. Most surprising, for a poet who almost entirely lacked an audience, is the urbanity, the assured command of the tone and language of a cultivated man of the world, exemplified in passages that Shelley wrote all through his mature career and especially in the lyrics and verse letters that he composed during the last year of his life.
The texts printed here are those prepared by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat for Shelley's Poetry and Prose, a Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed. (2001); Reiman has also edited for this anthology a few poems not included in that edition.
Mutability We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon; How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver, Streaking the darkness radiantly!?yet soon Night closes round, and they are lost for ever: 5 Or like forgotten lyres,0 whose dissonant stringsGive various response to each varying blast, To whose frail frame no second motion brings One mood or modulation like the last. wind harps ioWe rest.?A dream has power to poison sleep; We rise.?One wandering thought pollutes the day; We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep; Embrace fond woe, or cast Our cares away: 15It is the same!?For, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free: Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability. ca. 1814-15 1816
To Wordsworth1
Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
1. Shelley's grieved comment on the poet of nature and of social radicalism after his views had become conservative.
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ALASTO R / 75 1 5Childhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow, Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn. These common woes I feel. One loss is mine 10Which thou too feel'st, yet I alone deplore. Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine On some frail bark? in winter's midnight roar: Thou hast like to a rock- built refuge stood Above the blind and battling multitude: In honoured poverty thy voice did weave Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,2 ? Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve, Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be. small ship ca. 1814-15 1816
Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude Shelley wrote Alastor in the fall and early winter of 1815 and published it in March 1816. According to his friend Thomas Love Peacock, the poet was 'at a loss for a title, and I proposed that which he adopted: Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude. The Greek word Alastor is an evil genius. ... I mention the true meaning of the word because many have supposed Alastor to be the name of the hero' [Memoirs of Shelley). Peacock's definition of an alastor as 'an evil genius' has compounded the problems in interpreting this work: the term evil does not seem to fit the attitude expressed within the poem toward the protagonist's solitary quest, the poem seems to clash with statements in Shelley's preface, and the first and second paragraphs of the preface seem inconsistent with each other. These problems, however, may be largely resolved if we recognize that, in this early achievement (he was only twenty-three when he wrote Alastor), Shelley established his characteristic procedure of working with multiple perspectives. Both preface and poem explore alternative and conflicting possibilities in what Shelley calls 'doubtful knowledge'? matters that are humanly essential but in which no certainty is humanly possible.
By the term allegorical in the opening sentence of his preface, Shelley seems to mean that his poem, like medieval and Renaissance allegories such as Dante's Divine Comedy and Spenser's Faerie Queene, represents an aspiration in the spiritual realm by the allegorical vehicle of a journey and quest in the material world. As Shelley's first paragraph outlines, the poem's protagonist, for whom objects in the natural world 'cease to suffice,' commits himself to the search for a female Other who will fulfill his intellectual, imaginative, and sensuous needs. The second paragraph of the preface, by contrast, passes judgment on the visionary protagonist in terms of the values of 'actual men'?that is, the requirements of human and social life in this world. From this point of view, the visionary has been 'avenged' (punished) for turning away from community in pursuit of his individual psychic needs. The diversity of attitudes expressed within the poem becomes easier to understand if, on the basis of the many echoes of Wordsworth in the opening invocation, we identify the narrator of the story as a Wordsworthian poet for whom the natural world is sufficient to satisfy both the demands of his imagination and his need for community. This narrative poet, it can be assumed, undertakes to tell compassionately, but from his own perspective, the history of a nameless visionary who has surrendered everything in the quest for a goal beyond possibility.
In this early poem Shelley establishes a form, a conceptual frame, and the imagery
2. Perhaps an allusion to 'Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty,' the title that Wordsworth gave to the section of sonnets such as 'London, 1802' when he republished them in his Poenis of 1807.
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