Mithyl Banymandhub
Percy Bysshe Shelley “stands alone among the singers of all ages. He owned no master and left no disciple. The music which he ‘swept from the wild harp of time’ came with a new sound on the world’s ear, and no minstrel ever caught its melody again”.
Percy Bysshe Shelley ranks among the most prolific of all poets. He wrote some of the most surpassingly beautiful and philosophical works of the English Romantic movement.
Son of a Rich Aristocrat
He was born on August 4,1792, in Sussex, the firstborn of a rich Whig aristocrat, Timothy Shelley and Elizabeth Pilford. His was a life of permanent rebellion against parental and every other kind of authority. In his poetry, he expresses his visions of a reformed world where people would eat no flesh and thereby become healthier, gentler and more loving, where women would be freed from wedlock and where everyone would be liberated from the shackles imposed by authority.
For this stand, polite society avoided him. He had to bear the virulent barbs of literary critics and was ignored by the public.
Shelley was “beautiful as an angel and almost incongruous in ordinary society”. The sight of pain or sorrow gave rise to anger, pity coupled with a feeling of sickness.
Strange and Unearthly Youth
He was sent to school. Stephen Gwyn is of the opinion that it is “the appointed place of torment for any eccentric and sensitive lad”. At Eton he learnt the classics as if by instinct. He had a penchant for science and dabbled in literature. This prestigious institution was to him “a world of tyrant and foes”. He struck a penknife through a bully’s hand. He was referred to as “Mad Shelley”. And mad indeed he may be called “if mad is to be unlike the world”.
In due course he went to Oxford. There, Shelley formed a momentous friendship with Thomas Jefferson Hogg who has left us a wonderful picture “of the strange and unearthly youth who was so studious yet so irregular, and, above all, so impassioned in discussion”.
A touching faith in the power of the human mind to reach accurate conclusions, a noble readiness in his own case, to act on them, always marked Shelley.
When at the age of nineteen, he had convinced himself of The Necessity of Atheism, it appeared to him only proper to publish his views. He printed a pamphlet of two pages which he sent to professors and bishops to provoke a debate. The authorities without argument expelled him. However, some time later, the University set up his statue, and so claimed him, “with some irony”, among her cherished sons.
Regenerator of Mankind
Consequently, Shelley had to depend on the generosity of his sisters. He saw them constantly and, with them, one of their friends, Harriet Westbrook. He successfully managed to convert her to his doctrine and had to face the ire of her parents when she declared she could not live without him and they eloped. They were married at Edinburgh. Shelley waived his objections to the ceremony of marriage because, to defy convention in this matter, meant a greater sacrifice for the woman than the man. Harriet was sixteen years old while Shelley had not yet reached his twentieth year.
They settled with Hogg at York before moving to Keswick, where they met William Wordsworth and Robert Southey, neither of them was very sympathetic to his person. About this time began his correspondence with William Godwin, the author of Political Justice, whom Shelley henceforth accepted as a sort of mentor. Political reform now became the main preoccupation “of this young regenerator of mankind”. Early in 1912 with Harriet he travelled to Dublin in order to disseminate in person a pamphlet, his Address to the Irish People. In addition to placing copies with the booksellers, Harriet and he would stand on the balcony of their lodging and watched till they saw a man who “looked likely”, then a copy was thrown to him. Readers of The Revolt of Islam will find that the hero pursues methods of propaganda similar to those which Shelley adopted in Dublin. The pamphlet advocated Catholic emancipation, mutual self-help and many other good things. Some have materialised but all of which then seemed Utopian.
In 1813 he moved to London. His first volume of poems, including Queen Mab had been published privately in a small edition. There he met William Godwin and his wife, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
For one reason or another, he was not happy with his marriage. In the course of this tiring episode, he met Godwin’s daughter Mary, a beautiful girl of sixteen, and fell for the first time passionately in love. Mary Godwin had espoused her father’s ideas to regard the chains of matrimony as a social tyranny, destined to be swept away. She readily accepted the union the poet proposed. They left England together in the summer of 1814 abandoning Harriet who was the mother of Shelley’s daughter and soon to be the mother of his son.
Quest of Ideal Loveliness
In the course of 1815, his financial problems were solved when his father accepted to give him an income of £1000. Mary and he spent the year roaming through England. That year is remembered for the fine blank verse poem Alastor which was published in 1816. It was the first work by Shelley that “gave full proof of his genius”. “Alastor”, the unforgetting one, Nemesis or Fury, is the Greek name he gave to the haunting passion that sent a poet wandering through the world in quest of ideal loveliness somewhere incarnate. The motif recurs in The Revolt of Islam (1818) and Epipsychidion (1821). The latter two works are veiled autobiographical allegories of his relations with several women including the contessina Emilia Viviani, daughter of the governor of Pisa.
Unseen Power moving Through Nature
In 1816, the Shelleys met Byron. Shelley commemorated his friendship with him in the “splendid poem” Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation (1824).
Under the influence of the ancient Greek poets and philosophers, Shelley was growing more idealistic, and his poetry undertook higher aims. In Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and Mount Blanc, lyrics of finer grace and timbre, Shelley discerned the ultimate object of his mature work, an “unseen power” moving through Nature, an ideal form of truth available to the imagination in moments of awe and wonder. In Italy which he reached in 1818, he produced the works on which his reputation lies. In Ode to the West Wind, he manages to harness his creativity to the “unseen power” behind Nature.
It was during his stay at Byron’s Villa that he began, in 1818, the vast poetic drama, Prometheus Unbound – “a work that in sheer lyric power and splendour has no parallel in any language”. Aeschylus, after his play Prometheus Bound, left a sequel Prometheus Unbound, which is lost to the world. Shelley’s drama supplies its place, though it bears only a slight resemblance to a work of the Greek stage. As in Aeschylus, his Prometheus, as the friend of man, is chained by Zeus upon the mountain crag. But now he writhes in fiercer torment than the eagle’s beak. Swarms of black vampire-demons hang about him, bringing him visions of dire calamities which, throughout the ages, man is fated to endure.
However, when the furies leave him, missions of choral spirits, sea-nymphs, echoes, sing him songs of consolation, filling the air and the whole play with their enchanted music, or with continual syllables of dulcet speech. Prometheus Unbound is followed by three quite diverse dramas: Hellas (1822), a glorification of liberty inspired by the Greek insurrection; Oedipus Tyrannus: Or, Swellfoot the Tyrant (1820), a mockery of King George IV and The Cenci (1819) – a drama of real life.
There were several political outbursts as well, most notably The Masque of Anarchy (1832), expressing outrage at the massacre of workers at Manchester.
Greatest Pastoral Elegy in English
John Keats died in 1821. Shelly mourns the demise of the poet in Adonais. He thought of the elegy as “the best thing he had written”. “I confess,” he said, “I should be surprised if that poem were born to an eternity of oblivion”. It has been referred to as the “greatest Pastoral Elegy in English”.
The title is a form of Adonis, the handsome young man loved by Venus, killed by a wild boar and lamented by Bion. My favourite lines from the poem read,
Life, like a dome of
many- coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity
Until Death tramples it to
fragments.
The Witch of Atlas (1824) is an enchanted fairy-tale. Strange and wild are the adventures of the lovely witch, a kind of child of Ariel, who dwelt beside a fountain in a mountain cave. The years in Italy were as versatile as they were prolific.
His last, unfinished poem, The Triumph of Life (1824) depicts the gloomy spectacle of life vanquishing virtually all great individuals and artists.
New Combinations
of Thought
In A Defence of Poetry, which he wrote as a reply to Thomas Love Peacock’s The Four Ages of Poetry (1820), Shelley argued vehemently, inter alia, that poetry is humanity’s highest mental faculty, relevant to every age. He sees poetry as the power of understanding and imagining new combinations of thought. Thus, it is a source of all knowledge and progress.
Death came to Shelley unexpectedly. Early on July 8, 1822, he set sail in a small boat from Leghorn. The vessel sank in a sudden squall. He, who could never learn to swim, was drowned. Some days later, the body was identified and burnt in antique fashion, on the shore. The last rites were performed in the presence of Lord Byron, Trelawny and LeighHunt.
The heart alone was saved, conveyed to Rome and buried near the tomb of Keats. The stone bears the epitaph Cor Cordium – the heart of hearts – and is followed by the lines
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Taken from Ariel’s song in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He was to celebrate his thirtieth year within a month.
Percy Bysshe Shelley created a Romantic myth to compete with religions and philosophies that explain humanity’s relationship with the world. His agnostic faith was drawn to materialistic and idealistic viewpoints. Ultimately, he despaired of radically reforming the world in his life, but he maintained his faith in the power of the human imagination to glimpse ideal truth and beauty that lie beyond human experience.
Bibliography
- Gwynn, Stephen. The Masters of English Literature. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd, 1962
- The Outline of Literature. Edited by John Drinkwater and revised by Horace Shipp. London: George Newnes Limited,1950.
- Baker, Carlos H. Shelley’s Major Poetry, New York: Russel & Russel, 1961.
- MaGill’s Survey of World Literature. Edited by Franck N. MaGill, New York: Marshall Cavendish Corporation, 1993.
