vated, as the next stanzas indicate, by conscience, poverty, and illness.

PEACOCK: THERE IS A FEVER

"I think it necessary to make a stand against the encroachments of the black bile," wrote the robust Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) to his friend. Shelley, while engaged on "Nightmare Abbey," a delightful satiric novel burlesquing the romantic melancholy of the day. In the climactic chapter, "Mr. Cypress," representing Byron, sings this song to a drawingroom audience that includes the caricatured figures of Coleridge and Shelley. Peacock advocated "the cheerful and solid wisdom of antiquity." In style, his lyrics have the clear-cut quality of Byron's best

stanzas.

(173.) 1. There is a fever of the spirit: Cf. "Childe Harold," Canto Third, stanza xlii (page 106).

2. Cain's unresting doom: This prophetic allusion preceded by three years Byron's drama "Cain," into the hero of which he put much of his own spirit.

4. the lamp in Tullia's tomb: Doubtless Peacock had in mind the desolate grief of Cicero for his daughter Tullia, though no record exists of the tomb he planned for her.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822)

At Field Place, an eighteenth-century mansion in Sussex, Shelley was born about five months before the execution of Louis XVI by the French revolutionists. At the age of ten he left the sheltered freedom of his childhood and the companionship of a troop of younger sisters, exchanging them for the confinement of a school at Brentford and the enmity of high-spirited and athletic English school-boys. Gentle and shy, sensitive and excitable, he held aloof from his fellows so far as possible, seeking the consolation of tales of mystery and magic and of wonder-working natural science. At Eton, the great school to which he proceeded in 1804, his life was

much the same. "I have seen him," wrote a schoolmate, "surrounded, hooted, baited like a maddened bull, and at this distance of time I seem to hear ringing in my ears the cry which Shelley was wont to utter > in his paroxysm of revengeful anger." Though unhappy, he had some friends, enjoyed rambles in the lovely countryside, read many books (including Godwin's Political Justice), conducted perilous experiments in physics and chemistry, and wrote romantic tales in prose and verse.

Entering University College, Oxford, in 1810, he was free once more- free to live very much as he chose, to read what he pleased, to conduct his experiments without fear of interruption, to wander in the country with his new friend Hogg; but his college life was darkened by disappointment in love and by the culminating disaster of expulsion. He wrote and circulated a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism, basing his argument on the eighteenth-century premiss that the senses are the sole source of knowledge.

Exiled from the University and from the favor of his well-meaning but unsympathetic and rather pompous father, Shelley proceeded, the following year, at the age of nineteen, to elope with a school-girl of sixteen, Harriet Westbrook, daughter of a retired innkeeper — not for love of her, but out of a desire to shelter her from persecution. His income shut off by his father, young Shelley wandered with his wife for several years from one place to another in Britain and Ireland, seeking to promote the cause of tolerance and freedom, reading irregularly, and writing his Godwinian poem "Queen Mab." From Godwin he derived nearly all of the ideas that prevail in this poem and, indeed, in his work as a whole; such ideas as the perfectibility of man, non-resistance, anarchism, the sovereignty of reason, universal benevolence, and the dependence of immorality upon human institutions. In 1811 he began a correspondence with his master Godwin, in 1812 met him; and two years later, having separated from Harriet and having fallen in love with Godwin's daughter Mary, he eloped with her. In two more years, Harriet drowned herself and he formally married Mary Godwin. To

her he dedicated his ambitious revolutionary poem "The Revolt of Islam" (page 176).

In 1818 he left England never to return. It was during his residence in Italy, in the four years that remained to him, that Shelley produced most of his greatest poetry: "Prometheus Unbound" (page 182), "The Cenci," "Adonais" (page 218), and a succession of lyrics that includes "Stanzas Written in Dejection" (page 179), "Ode to the West Wind" (page 181), "The Cloud" (page 199), and “To a Skylark" (page 201). At the age of thirty he met an untimely end by drowning in the Bay of Lerici, a volume of Sophocles in one pocket and in another a volume of Keats. He lies buried in Rome.

In one of his last poems, "A Dirge" (page 231), Shelley calls upon the rough wind and the bare woods, the deep caves and dreary ocean, to "Wail, for the world's wrong!" This is the negative note of his poetry from beginning to end. To Coleridge and Wordsworth, maturing in the full flush of the Revolution, the world was wrong and might soon be reshaped nearer to the heart's desire; eagerly they heralded the new age until events belied their hopes. To Shelley, maturing long after these events, the world seemed even more wrong, and the chance to right it more remote. Yet he never ceased to believe that ultimately humanity—the suffering, loving hero Prometheus - would be unbound and that the millenium would come. What might be yes, what would be this was the positive side of all his poetry: what would be when the Spirit of Beauty permeated the whole of man's life. While still a boy,

"I vowed that I would dedicate my powers To thee and thine - have I not kept the vow?"

He kept it all his days, with fervid aspiration; and by the incantation of his verse he has served as a source of inspiration to countless idealistic readers of his poems ever since. The "Spring" toward which he looks in the "Ode to the West Wind" (page 181) may never come through such means as this disciple of Godwin provided

his ideas may seem inadequate, or distorted, even false - but the flaming spirit of the poet passes into us as we read, and makes the world fluent for us. He sought to change chaos into harmony. If his harmony is premature, wanting essential elements of experience, he gives us, nevertheless, a poetic vision of the world expressed with a pure rapture perhaps unequalled in literature.

TO WORDSWORTH

(173.) 1-4. "Poet of Nature --- leaving thee to mourn:" He is thinking of the "Ode on Immortality," particularly. But he attributes a Shelleyan cast of feeling to Wordsworth.

From ALASTOR

Observe, in several phrases, the echoes of Wordsworth's treatment of nature.

HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL

BEAUTY

By intellectual beauty Shelley means spiritual beauty, the "Spirit of Beauty" (line 13) that fitfully visits the human mind, in contrast with the beauty of material things. He believes that if this divine spirit of beauty dominated humanity, it would transform life — “free This world from its dark slavery" (line 71) and unite all men by love (line 84). Shelley's conception of an abstract or spiritual beauty, almost synonymous with divinity, is akin to Plato's (consult the note, page 681, to line 1691 of "Don Juan," beginning Platonic, universal); the humanitarianism with which he modifies it, however, is modern and un-Greek.

I

(177.) 46-50. Alas that love moved alone: The allusion is to his relation with Harriet, with whom he was for a time, as he said to Hogg, "the happiest of the happy," and to whom he had dedicated "Queen Mab" as a pledge of his love (see page 173).

(178.) 86-87. Anarch Custom's reign

Truth's own sway: See the note, page 663, to line 127 of Wordsworth's ode on Immortality. See a line 115, below ("And Faith and Custom" etc.).

88. Holier than was Amphion's: According to Greek myth, Amphion received a lyre from Hermes, upon which he played so magically that stones moved in

The "painted veil" is the merely conventional life. Its "shapes" and "colors" are a faint imitation of the great truths and ideals we should like to believe in (line 3). But an idealist (line 7), looking beyond that veil for something to satisfy his capacity for love, could find nothing but alternate fear and hope. Nor in the actual world (line 10), could he find any truth (line 14). Thus, his "lost heart" (line 8) had no stay either in the ideal or in the actual.

14. the Preacher: "All is vanity, saith the Preacher" (Eccles. I, 2).

ENGLAND IN 1819

See note to Wordsworth's "Protest Against the Ballot" (page 666, above). For the condition of England at this time see the opening lines of Byron's rollicking satire, "The Vision of Judgment," concerning the death of George the Third. 1. king: George the Third.

12. Time's worst statute: the laws excluding Catholics from office. A motion to consider the repeal of these laws was defeated in Parliament by a narrow margin.

13. a glorious Phantom: Liberty.

ODE TO THE WEST WIND

The poem expresses Shelley's love of swift, impulsive motion in nature, merged with his yearning for a radical regeneration in human society - for a swift, strong motion of the spirit, like that of nature's forces, bringing in its train a new era of liberty and justice, peace and brotherhood. This new life is the "Spring" that he prophesies at the very end of the poem.

In basic structure, this ode is simple. In the first three stanzas Shelley addresses the autumn wind as a power driving the leaves (stanza 1), the clouds (11), the waves (III). Then, with a summarizing transition, he turns to his own plight - his weakness, his sense of defeat and subjection, contrasting with the tameless, swift, proud wind (iv). Rising to a passionate climax (v) he aspires to an identification with the fierce Spirit of this force of nature, bidding it drive his ineffectual thoughts over the universe to be a prophecy of the rebirth of humanity.

(181.) 9. Thine azure sister of the Spring: the spring wind bringing blue skies.

18. Angels: in Greek, "messengers," and so used here.

chus.

21. Maenad: a priestess of Bac

32. Baiae's bay: near Naples; a famous resort of the ancient Romans.

PROMETHEUS UNBOUND

For an account of the Greek myth that forms the ultimate basis for this lyrical drama, see the note to Byron's "Prometheus," page 678, above. Return also to Byron's poem (page 127) and compare his conception of the myth with Shelley's.

In his preface to the drama, Shelley remarks that he was averse from a conclusion "so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind. The moral interest of the fable, which is so powerfully sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high language and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary. . . . Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends." To his sufferings and endurance Prometheus is conceived as adding love, the highest of moral qualities, by virtue of which he is released by Hercules and merged with Asia, the generative principle in nature. Instead of keeping distinct the characters of Prometheus

and Asia, and representing their union as a marriage of divergent ideals, Shelley prefers to render them as fundamentally_the same, as two embodiments of an exalted love, the one in man, the other in nature. Love assumes its place as the supreme power in man and nature, and tyrannical oppression, symbolized by Jupiter in the divine order and by human institutions in society, falls away like a "loathesome mask.' Ardently, rhapsodically, Shelley pictures that day of liberty and of love, of total regeneration, for which he had yearned in the "Ode to the West Wind” (page 181) and other poems.

ACT FIRST

(182.) 10. to thy scorn: to my scorn of thee. 18. Almighty, had I deigned, etc.: almighty thou wouldst have been, if I had deigned, etc. Prometheus, refusing to reveal to Jupiter the secret of his doom, is not an accomplice in his tyranny. (183.) 57. hate no more: Cf. "Lines to a Critic" (page 179).

72. let them

now: let not my words lose their power (line 69), though hate is gone.

(185.) 152. I am the Earth: Here the Earth begins to speak in her immortal voice, so that Prometheus, the immortal, can understand. Previously she has spoken in her mortal voice. The idea is that the Earth (or Nature) is related both to immortal and to mortal things.- Compare the poet's own relation to Nature in "Alastor" (page 174) with that of Prometheus to Earth, given in ensuing speeches.

(186.) 215. revenge of the Supreme: i.e., of Jupiter.

218-221. Mother, let not aught appear: To prevent curses, a form of evil, from again passing the lips of Prometheus, Shelley transfers them to the phantom of evil Jupiter. Prometheus had said, "I hate no more" (line 57, above), and he must not now be represented as guilty of hate; yet Shelley wished to avail himself of the force of the repeated curse. Hence this expedient, rather artificially introduced (see lines 254-261, below).

subtle tyrant: After showing, above, the natural causes of human ills (e.g., lines 542-545), the poet now returns to Jupiter as the ultimate cause of all.

(194.) 675-682. And we breathe, etc.: This sentence develops the theme of line 659; the next sentence, the theme of lines 660-663.

741. aërial kisses: See "Alastor," line 35 and context (page 174). (195.) 790-800. In the atmosphere etc.: For the dual relationship of these spirits,

see

to nature and to human nature, note to lines 675-682, above. Their prophecy of social regeneration is here associated with the revival of nature in spring; cf. the "Ode to the West Wind" (page 181).

809. Asia: For her nature, see the introductory note on this poem, above; and read Act Second (here omitted) which revolves about her. In Act Third, after the fall of Jupiter, she is reunited with the "unbound" Prometheus. Before their cave in a forest, they listen while an account of the great change that has come over mankind is given by the "Spirit of the Hour." From his speech is taken the next selection in the text, "The Day of Liberty.”

ACT FOURTH: THE DAY OF LOVE

As a drama, "Prometheus Unbound" properly ends with Act Third. The fourth act is a finely sustained lyric passage, or series of related lyrics, culminating in the measured rapture of the final words of Demogorgon, who represents necessity or fate. In this act, which came to Shelley as an after-thought, the main purpose is to set forth, with a glowing impressiveness, a millenial vision of love and joy. Shelley's vision can fruitfully be compared with Wordsworth's in the selection from "The Recluse" (page 17 ff.), which was published in the preface to "The Excursion" some five years before the present poem was composed.

(198.) 412-423. All things confess etc.: The first of these two stanzas deals with the fine arts-sculpture, architecture, painting, poetry; the second with natural science. Through the arts and sciences the human spirit controls all things, giving them form and meaning.

415. orphic song: enchanting song, like that of Orpheus, who could charm wild animals and trees and rocks.

416. daedal harmony: a harmony intricately and cunningly contrived. (199.) 555. the Earth-born's spell: the spell of Prometheus.