Percy Bysshe Shelley – “Adonais” (ctd.)

We’ve come to a turning point in the poem – after all the mourning Shelley now encourages his readers to be more cheerful and think that Adonais is in a better place (a bit like a New Orleans funeral). He now flies high over those carrion kites of reviewers and his pure spirit joined the neoplatonic Absolute, while the critic’s “cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame” (whoa!). Adonais is not actually dead – “he hath awakened from the dream of life”, and it is us, the living, who are still asleep, fighting with phantoms and stabbing the air with our spirit’s knife. It is us who decay, consumed by fear and grief. Adonais is now past all that, as well as past all the illusory pleasures, and now can never grow old in body and spirit, and his death is not going to be like the death of those people who “with sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn”. There is a certain callousness of a young person about these lines and yet isn’t it true, we don’t feel as keenly about the death of old people as about the death of the young (let it be remembered for future visitors, I’m writing these words in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. How aggressively would we be willing to react if the disease killed mostly young people and children?) “Death is dead, not he”, writes Shelley paradoxically, so all the elements of nature which mourned Adonais – Dawn, forests, caves and air – should stop. He is now a part of the Power which suffuses the whole nature and thus he can be felt in all nature (this stanza is really Wordsworthian). This Spirit is the force which permeates all matter, and tortures “th’unwilling dross” in order to turn it into all the beautiful shapes.

The stars keep on shining, even if they are temporarily hidden by a mist. Similarly, when a young heart is torn apart by the conflict between the elevating love and the mundane life, the illustrious dead “live there/And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air”, not letting the young man sink. Now Keats is about to join the poetic equivalent of the 27 Club, with the famous poets who died before they could fulfil their potential. He mentions Chatterton (of course), Sidney and Lucan. He didn’t realize that Keats has just started the series of what would become the most famous group of poets who died tragically young, and he himself would follow soon. There are many other poets there, he says, who are now forgotten, but their influence is lasting, like the fire which outlasts the igniting spark. Now they invite Keats to become the king of a constellation which was waiting for him.

Percy Bysshe Shelley – “Adonais” (ctd.)

The following stanzas contain the customary element in pastoral elegies – the procession of mourning shepherds, here representing other English poets. Shelley mentions (without actually using their names) Byron and Thomas Moore, which he does more for the sake of including those he considered the greatest living poets writing in English than for them actually mourning Keats – as Rossetti notices in his excellent notes, neither Byron nor Moore seemed particularly affected by his death. (It’s interesting he put Moore on a par with Byron, since he is today mostly remembered as the author of “The Last Rose of Summer” and Byron’s friend.)

Then Shelley describes himself modestly as the one in the crowd of those “of less note”. Phantom-like, he’s the one who gazed too long at Nature like Actaeon did at Diana and now is fleeing, pursued by his own thoughts instead of his hounds. He portrays himself as someone too sensitive for this world ‘ “a dying lamp, a falling shower, a breaking billow”. He wears a garland of pansies on his head (Shelley’s favourite flower), carries a thyrsis (the attribute of Dionisos, the staff decorated with vine leaves and topped with a cone) in his slightly shaking hand. He comes last and stands apart, like a wounded deer abandoned by its herd. As he begins to sing, the other shepherds smile through their tears because they realize that by mourning Adonais he mourns also himself (similarly subjected to unfair criticism and having the premonitions of his early death). Urania asks him who he is and he silently takes off his hat, exposing his branded and bloodied forehead “like Cain’s or Christ’s”, writes Shelley, apparently not fearing provocation.

The last mourner Shelley describes is identified with Leigh Hunt, and unlike with the previous poets, he was indeed a good friend of Keats and mourned his death (it was Hunt who introduced Shelley to Keats). Shelley then yet again attacks the anonymous reviewer (in 19th c. journalism practically all texts were unsigned), calling him a worm who alone could escape the magic of Keats’ poems. I am not going to name any names, but you know who you are, so I’m content to leave you be in your shame and venom, which you have to give vent to periodically (as in every issue of Quarterly Review). It’s just as well Shelley didn’t name him, because he thought the author of the virulent review was the editor of Quarterly William Gifford. This view was apparently unchallenged for a very long time, because William Michael Rossetti in his late-19th c. edition still shared it, and it was only later when the author of the scathing review of Endymion was identified as one John Wilson Croker.

Percy Bysshe Shelley – “Adonais” (ctd.)

Urania is woken up by Misery, who tells her to assuage with tears and sighs a wound in her heart, deeper than that of Keats. The saddened Urania moves swiftly from her Paradise, through cities and hard human hearts which wound her bare feet. In the room where Adonais’ body lies, Death is so taken aback by Urania’s presence that it blushes, thus stopping being Death for a moment. As a result, there seems to be a faint glimpse of life in Adonais yet. But when Urania starts to cry, don’t leave me, Death comes back to its senses, so to say.

Urania mourns Adonais more like a lover than a mother, begging him for one last kiss. She’d gladly die instead of him, but she’s a goddess and “chained to Time”, forced to live until the end of time. She describes Adonais as fighting the dragons (critics) without the proper preparation of the shield of wisdom or the spear of scorn. If he had lived to a maturer age, he would have been better prepared to cope with them. Byron could tame critics with his satirical poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, which Urania describes allegorically as Apollo “the Pythian” beating wolves and vultures into submission by shooting one arrow. Keats’ genius was like the sun: while it shone, it drowned out stars, or the poets who preceded him; now the sun is set and one can see the stars again.

Percy Bysshe Shelley – “Adonais” (ctd.)

Other allegorical beings such as Desires, Sorrow, and Pleasure, come to mourn Adonais. All the things he loved and described in his poetry now mourn him. Morning let down her hair, wet with tears, and Echo stopped answering the calls of herdsmen. Spring threw down her buds and thinks there is no point in wakening the nature. The nightingale and the eagle both mourn Adonais, as well as Albion itself, and Shelley again throws “the curse of Cain” on the critic whose unkind review, in his opinion, killed Keats. Now spring is coming (Keats died in late February) and nature springs back to life. Life springs back from the earth the way it did after the creation, and it is the new season of love and breeding. Shockingly, after this hymn to life, Shelley writes about a decaying “leprous corpse” – but even such a disgusting thing can feed flowers. The flowers are like the incarnations of stars, except they produce fragrance instead of light, and thus “mock the very worm”. (“The appropriateness of the term ‘merry worm’ seems very disputable”, wrote shocked William Rossetti.) “Nought we know, dies”, write Shelley paradoxically, meaning that matter doesn’t die, but just changes its forms. So does it mean that the the body is the only thing which dies, like the sword struck by a lightning, which melts the sword but leaves the sheath (the body) intact? We didn’t love Keats for his body, but for his mind, and this is now gone forever and remembered only by the mourners, and with the death of the mourners themselves even that will be gone. At this point the elegy for Adonais becomes the elegy for us all, because we all must die.

Percy Bysshe Shelley – “Adonais” (ctd.)

I was writing the previous post half-asleep, but in the meantime I’ve read another article on Adonais, so now I am better informed on its links with Milton. Milton described in Lycidas Calliope as unable to save her son and in Paradise Lost he turned to Urania as a muse of poetry. Now Shelley describes Urania as unable to save her son as well, and Shelley asks this “most musical of mourners” to weep for him. He places Adonais/Keats among other poets, some of them still living and struggling, while others like Keats died in their prime. He describes Keats as the dead youngest son of the widow (Urania), a pale flower nipped in the bud. Keats came to die at Rome, the city of Death and he died in the Eternal City. The poet encourages us to look at Keats when the decay has not set in yet, and he seems to be asleep. In the fashion of the pastoral elegy he depicts Keats’ dreams as his flock which he fed with his talent, and now they are going to die with him. They are now like winged funeral attendants: one of them imagines she has seen a tear on Keats’ eyelashes and says he’s not dead yet, but of course she is wrong – it’s her own tear and now she is vanishing. Others wash his body, cut his hair, and break their bows as a sign of grief. His lips, through which Keats drew breath to recite his poetry, are now occupied by “the damp death” which stopped his breath and flashed through his limbs like a falling star.

Percy Bysshe Shelley – “Adonais”

Today I’m starting a long read – Shelley’s elegy on the death of John Keats Adonais. It’s a pastoral elegy, an old genre which Shelley knew very well, because, as the Helpful Introduction tells us, he himself translated several ancient pastoral elegies from Greek. Closer to his times, Milton’s Lycidas is an example and Milton is going to be mentioned several times. The poem is written in the elaborate Spenserian stanza and it begins with the call to weep for Adonais (Keats’s mythological stand-in) directed to the hour in which he died. This hour then should teach all the other, less significant hours, to weep with it, but Keats’s fame as a poet is going to be eternal. Shelley plays a bit with mythology here, making Venus the mother rather than a lover of Adonais. But he calls her also one of her ancient nicknames Urania and thus conflates her with the muse as portrayed by Milton, not of astronomy but of poetry. Where was Urania when Adonais died, killed by an arrow which flies in darkness (a reference to Shelley’s belief that Keats was killed by an anonymous review)? She was sitting in her paradise, listening to the echo of his song. Shelley wishes for Urania to wake up and cry for Keats, but immediately realizes grief is now useless. Suddenly in stanza 4 Shelley starts calling for Urania to weep for John Milton, the pattern of moral rectitude and loyalty to this principles in the dissolute Restoration era, but I can’t see for the life of me the link here, apart from the fact that both Milton and Keats were poets.

Percy Bysshe Shelley – “Chorus” from “Hellas”

Today’s post is rather short, because tomorrow I’m starting to read Adonais. Hellas was a closet drama by Shelley about the Greek struggle for independence, and the NAEL reprints its final chorus, sung by the enslaved Greek women, as well as Shelley’s footnotes. Shelley pre-empts the charge of being naive and utopian in depicting the future golden age by invoking the examples of other poets/prophets: Isaiah and Vergil. It’s safe to make prophecies of wars, he writes (judging by the history of the world, a war will come sooner or later), but it’s really an act of artistic daring, not stupidity, to hope for better times. In keeping with this, the singers foresee the end of the long winter of history, when the earth is going to shed its weeds (referring both to widow’s weeds and to plants) like a snake shedding its skin. The new river Peneus is going to run through the new valley of Tempe, and the new heroes – Jason, Ulysses, Orpheus – are going to appear. But the next stanza seems to indicate that it’s more of a hope, not a prospect – the speakers implore people not to be overcome with rage anymore, alluding to Oedipus’ murder of his father, but they also say that there may come another, “subtler Sphinx”, so I guess they know history can go both ways. There will be another Athens, and even if it should not last, it is going to leave a great heritage. Saturn (here seen as the benevolent ruler of the Golden Age, not the child-eating monster) and Love are going to be new gods, better than pagan or Christian gods (the poem is not explicit here, but Shelley makes it clear in his footnote). But the final stanza makes it clear it is not going to be some kind of miraculous transformation – people themselves should cease to kill and hate.

Percy Bysshe Shelley – “To Night”, “To —” (“Music, when soft voices die”), “O World, o Life, o Time”

Today’s post is about the poems which Shelley wrote in the last two years of his life and which were published posthumously by his wife. All of these poems have an ominous shadow of the premonition of death lingering about them, although it’s maybe just me reading it with the benefit of the hindsight, while in fact it was just Shelley feeling a bit sorry for himself (although he was then in his late twenties, but some people remain emotional adolescents a bit longer).

“To Night” is written in septets, about 7-9 syllables long, with lines 2 and 7 much shorter. The poet calls upon the personified Night to arrive quickly and to cover with its hair “the eyes of day”, kissing her (the day is here, atypically, a feminine figure) until she is tired and then putting everyone to sleep. The poet sighed when he woke up and saw the dawn. Then through the day he couldn’t wait for the day to end. Sleep and Death came to him, asking him whether he would like any of them instead. But no, Death will come anyway, and too soon, and Sleep will come when the Night is gone. The poem is ambiguous about what the poet wants from the Night – at first I thought it was forgetfulness, but since he doesn’t wish for either Sleep or Death, it would suggest he had in mind other things done under the cover of night, especially illicit sex, which brings us to…

…the next poem titled simply “To —” and usually interpreted as addressed to Jane Williams, the common-law wife of Edward Williams, a friend of Shelley (they were introduced to each other by Thomas Medwin, Shelley’s cousin who was Williams’ friend from the army). Jane in fact was not Williams, but Johnson – she left her abusive husband for Williams and in public they went by Mr and Mrs Williams. The Williamses shared the villa at Lerici with the Shelleys and it was Edward Williams who sailed with Shelley on his last fateful trip. Shelley had a crush on Jane, although whether it was ever reciprocated or consummated is debatable; Mary and Jane seemed to be good friends in later years (being perhaps brought together by the shared tragedy), Mary even becoming godmother to Jane’s daughter.*

Back to the poem: it is very simple in comparison with the previous one, eight lines in rhyming couplets. There are two different versions in which lines 5-8 become 1-4 in the other one. I think the version printed in the NAEL makes more sense, because it’s a series of three metaphors, with their explanation in the last two lines. The first two images are about the sensory memory: music lingers on even when “soft voices die”, which could be read more benignly as simply “they stopped singing” or in the darker, literal way – when the singers are dead (Jane apparently had a beautiful singing voice, played the guitar, and Shelley had a bit of a thing for singing women). When violets die, the memory of their smell still lives with us. The leaves of the dead rose are used for the bed of the beloved (which the Puzzling Footnote interprets decisively as “the bed of the dead rose”, but I am not so sure). And the speaker’s love for the nameless beloved will sleep on his thoughts about her, like on the bed of the rose petals. It’s a melancholy poem about the transience of relationships, but also hopeful, indicating that our memories of them stay with us.

Nothing hopeful in “O World, o Life, o Time”, an unfinished sketch of a poem, consisting of two quintains. It’s a lament of the poet who apparently feels past his prime, and feels he is nearing his end. The change of seasons (Shelley left a gap there, apparently being unable to work in “autumn” in the way that would fit the verse rhythmically) brings him only grief, but not delight and at this current point, he feels it never will.

*I find it fascinating to read about the lives of the minor figures in the biographies of the famous Romantics, especially those who died young. Most of their friends and hangers-on had long (sometimes very long) lives and they are left on stage like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Stoppard’s play. Mary Shelley of course went on being a very creative writer, while the rest had more or less regular lives, sometimes still remaining friends, sometimes bickering, especially when any of them tried to cash in on their acquaintance with the famous dead by publishing memoirs or biographies. Clare Clairmont of course had a moment of fame when late in her life she was interviewed by a biographer of Shelley and she became a model for one of the protagonists in Henry James’s The Aspern Papers. Jane “Williams” got together with Thomas Jefferson Hogg, another friend of Shelley, and she lived with him like with her earlier partner, in what was ostensibly a marriage and going by “Mrs Hogg”. Hogg seems to have a thing for Shelley’s romantic partners – he hit both on Harriet and Mary, and finally got one that was available. Jane outlived all of the members of the Shelley-Byron circle, dying (if the ever-cheerful Findagrave.com is to be believed) in 1884, at the age of eighty-six. Just imagine, the young Yeats could have visited her if he had known about her.

Percy Bysshe Shelley – “To a Skylark”

Like many poems of Shelley, this poem also experiments with form, using the rather rare in English (apart from limericks) quintain stanza, with the first four lines very short lines (5 – 7 syllables, mostly trochaic), and then a very long iambic hexameter, with the rhyme pattern ababb. These sudden shifts between meter and length convey, I think, the impression that the bird song has on our ears, of pleasing melody but little or no rhythmic pattern.

The poet addresses the bird saying paradoxically at the beginning of the poem that it was never a bird, but a spirit. He pictures the skylark untypically in the evening (it sent me to a Google search and yes, apparently skylarks in the breeding season sing from dawn till dusk, or even later), flying around among the clouds like “an unbodied joy”. Like with stars or Venus during daytime, the poet cannot see the bird, but he can hear and feel it. He describes him in a series of similes: it’s like a poet “hidden/in the light of thought” and changing the world through his poetry. It’s like a maiden in a tower, singing about her secret love. It’s like a glow-worm which you can’t actually see, only the light it produces. It’s like a rose hidden among green leaves and known only by its scent. The poet never heard such rapture or such a perfect song, and no human song can rival it. He asks the skylark to tell him its secret: what kind of love or ignorance of pain is its inspiration? It must know something more about death than us mortals, or it couldn’t sing so beautifully. We humans never live in the present, but always look to the past or to the future, and consequently we never experience such pure joy. He wishes the skylark could teach him “half the gladness” it must feel and then he would produce such poetry that the world would be listening as raptly as he is now. (Shelley was largely unrecognized in his lifeime, so there is a certain melancholy in this statement.)

Percy Bysshe Shelley – “The Cloud”

It’s one of the poems which are normally a part of my syllabi, so I’ve become a bit inured to it. It’s written in the long flowing anapest line (dah-dah-DUM), befitting its subject which is the constant transformation. Fun facts: Shelley had an excellent science teacher, one Adam Walker, and he and Mary read Luke Howard’s On the Modification of Clouds (1802), the work which laid the foundations of the modern classification of the clouds (if you ever heard about a cumulonimbus or stratus, you can thank Luke Howard for it).

The speaker in the poem is the titular cloud, describing its life cycle. It can be gentle, when it brings rain and dew to flowers, or it can be destructive, when it brings hail and snow. It is guided by the lightning, which sometimes discharges its current when it is attracted by the opposite charge of the purple sea. The next stanza describes in a poetic way cirruses (the feather clouds) accompanying sunrise and sunset. At night the role of the Sun is taken by the maiden Moon, whose feet sometimes break the cloud open, so that the stars may peep through. The cloud then laughs (the word “laugh” is a refrain throughout the poem) and opens its gap wide, so that the stars can be reflected in the waters beneath. It can also be a sunbeam-proof roof (a stratus) or create a rainbow. The cloud can change, but it can never die. When it is dissolved in the rain and the blue sky has apparently built a grave for it, “I sliently laugh at my own cenotaph” (cenotaph is a symbolic grave monument, containing no dead body) and it is reborn again, which is described in a rather finr line: “Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb”.