7. Earthly life colors ('stains') the pure white light the fountain and fire (the 'burning fountain,' line of the One, which is the source of all light (see 339) that are its source. lines 339-40, n. 5). The azure sky, flowers, etc., of 1. Two years earlier Shelley had 'invoked' (prayed lines 466-6 8 exemplify earthly colors that, how-to, and also asked for) 'the breath of Autumn's ever beautiful, fall far short of the 'glory' of the being' in his 'Ode to the West Wind' (p. 772). pure Light that they transmit but also refract 2. In her 1839 edition of her husband's works, ('transfuse'). Mary Shelley asked: 'who but will regard as a 8. I.e., according to the degree that each reflects. prophecy the last stanza of the 'Adonais'?' 9. The 'thirst' of the human spirit is to return to
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83 6 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
When the lamp is shattered
When the lamp is shattered The light in the dust lies dead? When the cloud is scattered
The rainbow's glory is shed? When the lute is broken Sweet tones are remembered not? When the lips have spoken Loved accents are soon forgot.
As music and splendour 10 Survive not the lamp and the lute, The heart's echoes render No song when the spirit is mute? No song?but sad dirges Like the wind through a ruined cell is Or the mournful surges That ring the dead seaman's knell.
When hearts have once mingled Love first leaves the well-built nest? The weak one is singled 20 To endure what it once possest. O Love! who bewailest The frailty of all things here, Why choose you the frailest For your cradle, your home and your bier?
25 Its passions will rock thee As the storms rock the ravens on high? Bright Reason will mock thee Like the Sun from a wintry sky? From thy nest every rafter 30 Will rot, and thine eagle home Leave thee naked to laughter When leaves fall and cold winds come.
1822 1824
To Jane1 (The keen stars were twinkling)
The keen stars were twinkling And the fair moon was rising among them, Dear Jane. The guitar was tinkling But the notes were not sweet 'till you sung them Again.?
1. Jane Williams, the common-law wife of Shelley's close friend Edward Williams.
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A DEFENCE OF POETRY / 83 7
As the moon's soft splendour O'er the faint cold starlight of Heaven Is thrown? 10 So your voice most tender To the strings without soul had then given Its own.
The stars will awaken, Though the moon sleep a full hour later, 15 Tonight; No leaf will be shaken While the dews of your melody scatter Delight. Though the sound overpowers 20 Sing again, with your dear voice revealing A tone Of some world far from ours, Where music and moonlight and feeling Are one.
1822 1832
A Defenc e of Poetr y In 1820 Shelley's good friend Thomas Love Peacock published an ironic essay, 'The Four Ages of Poetry,' implicitly directed against the towering claims for poetry and the poetic imagination made by his Romantic contemporaries. In this essay, which is available at Norton Literature Online, Peacock adopted the premise of Wordsworth and some other Romantic critics?that poetry in its origin was a primitive use of language and mind?but from this premise he proceeded to draw the conclusion that poetry had become a useless anachronism in his own Age of Bronze, a time defined by new sciences (including economics and political theory) and technologies that had the potential to improve the world. Peacock was a poet as well as an excellent prose satirist, and Shelley saw the joke; but he also recognized that the view that Peacock, as a satirist, had assumed was very close to that actually held in his day by Utilitarian philosophers and the material- minded public, which either attacked or contemptuously ignored the imaginative faculty and its achievements. He therefore undertook, as he good-humoredly wrote to Peacock, 'to break a lance with you .. . in honor of my mistress Urania' (giving the cause for which he battled the name that Milton had used for the muse inspiring Paradise Lost), even though he was only 'the knight of the shield of shadow and the lance of gossamere.' The result was 'A Defence of Poetry,' planned to consist of three parts. The last two parts were never written, and even the existing section, written in 1821, remained unpublished until 1840, eighteen years after Shelley's death.
Shelley's emphasis in this essay is not on the particularity of individual poems but on the universal and permanent qualities and values that, he believes, all great poems, as products of imagination, have in common. Shelley in addition extends the term poet to include all creative minds that break out of the conditions of their historical time and place in order to envision such values. This category includes not only writers in prose as well as verse but also artists, legislators, prophets, and the founders of new social and religious institutions.
The 'Defence' is an eloquent and enduring claim for the indispensability of the visionary and creative imagination in all the great human concerns. Few later social
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83 8 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
critics have equaled the cogency of Shelley's attack on our acquisitive society and its narrowly material concepts of utility and progress. Such a bias has opened the way to enormous advances in the physical sciences and our material well-being, but without a proportionate development of our 'poetic faculty,' the moral imagination. The result, Shelley says, is that 'man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.'
From A Defence of Poetry
or Remarks Suggested by an Essay Entitled 'The Four Ages of Poetry'
According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action, which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity. The one1 is the to -poiein,2 or the principle of synthesis, and has for its objects those forms which are common to universal nature and existence itself; the other is the to logizein,3 or principle of analysis, and its action regards the relations of things, simply as relations; considering thoughts, not in their integral unity, but as the algebraical representations which conduct to certain general results. Beason is the enumeration of quantities
