Shelley's Poetry

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Context

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792, into a wealthy Sussex family which eventuallyattained minor noble rank--the poet's grandfather, a wealthy businessman, received abaronetcy in 1806. Timothy Shelley, the poet's father, was a member of Parliament and acountry gentleman. The young Shelley entered Eton, a prestigious school for boys, at the ageof twelve. While he was there, he discovered the works of a philosopher named WilliamGodwin, which he consumed passionately and in which he became a fervent believer; theyoung man wholeheartedly embraced the ideals of liberty and equality espoused by theFrench Revolution, and devoted his considerable passion and persuasive power to convincingothers of the rightness of his beliefs. Entering Oxford in 1810, Shelley was expelled thefollowing spring for his part in authoring a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism  --atheism being an outrageous idea in religiously conservative nineteenth-century England.

At the age of nineteen, Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook, the sixteen-year-old daughterof a tavern keeper, whom he married despite his inherent dislike for the tavern. Not longafter, he made the personal acquaintance of William Godwin in London, and promptly fell inlove with Godwin's daughter Mary Wollstonecraft, whom he was eventually able to marry, andwho is now remembered primarily as the author of  Frankenstein. In 1816, the Shelleystraveled to Switzerland to meet Lord Byron, the most famous, celebrated, and controversialpoet of the era; the two men became close friends. After a time, they formed a circle of English expatriates in Pisa, traveling throughout Italy; during this time Shelley wrote most of his finest lyric poetry, including the immortal "Ode to the West Wind" and "To a Skylark." In1822, Shelley drowned while sailing in a storm off the Italian coast. He was not yet thirtyyears old.

Shelley belongs to the younger generation of English Romantic poets, the generation thatcame to prominence while William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were settling intomiddle age. Where the older generation was marked by simple ideals and a reverence fornature, the poets of the younger generation (which also included John Keats and theinfamous Lord Byron) came to be known for their sensuous aestheticism, their explorations of intense passions, their political radicalism, and their tragically short lives.

Shelley died when he was twenty-nine, Byron when he was thirty-six, and Keats when he wasonly twenty-six years old. To an extent, the intensity of feeling emphasized by Romanticismmeant that the movement was always associated with youth, and because Byron, Keats, andShelley died young (and never had the opportunity to sink into conservatism andcomplacency as Wordsworth did), they have attained iconic status as the representative tragicRomantic artists. Shelley's life and his poetry certainly support such an understanding, but itis important not to indulge in stereotypes to the extent that they obscure a poet's individualcharacter. Shelley's joy, his magnanimity, his faith in humanity, and his optimism are uniqueamong the Romantics; his expression of those feelings makes him one of the early nineteenthcentury's most significant writers in English.

 

Analysis

The central thematic concerns of Shelley's poetry are largely the same themes that definedRomanticism, especially among the younger English poets of Shelley's era: beauty, thepassions, nature, political liberty, creativity, and the sanctity of the imagination. What makesShelley's treatment of these themes unique is his philosophical relationship to his subjectmatter—which was better developed and articulated than that of any other Romantic poetwith the possible exception of Wordsworth—and his temperament, which was extraordinarilysensitive and responsive even for a Romantic poet, and which possessed an extraordinarycapacity for joy, love, and hope. Shelley fervently believed in the possibility of realizing anideal of human happiness as based on beauty, and his moments of darkness and despair (hehad many, particularly in book-length poems such as the monumental Queen Mab ) almostalways stem from his disappointment at seeing that ideal sacrificed to human weakness.

Shelley's intense feelings about beauty and expression are documented in poems such as"Ode to the West Wind" and "To a Skylark," in which he invokes metaphors from nature tocharacterize his relationship to his art. The center of his aesthetic philosophy can be found inhis important essay A Defence of Poetry, in which he argues that poetry brings about moralgood. Poetry, Shelley argues, exercises and expands the imagination, and the imagination isthe source of sympathy, compassion, and love, which rest on the ability to project oneself intothe position of another person. He writes,

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the p lace of another and of many others. The pains and pleasures of his species mustbecome his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetryadministers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of theimagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form newintervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the facultywhich is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens alimb.

No other English poet of the early nineteenth century so emphasized the connection betweenbeauty and goodness, or believed so avidly in the power of art's sensual pleasures to improvesociety. Byron's pose was one of amoral sensuousness, or of controversial rebelliousness;Keats believed in beauty and aesthetics for their own sake. But Shelley was able to believethat poetry makes people and society better  ; his poetry is suffused with this kind of inspiredmoral optimism, which he hoped would affect his readers sensuously, spiritually, and morally,all at the same time.

 

Ode to the West Wind

Summary

The speaker invokes the "wild West Wind" of autumn, which scatters the dead leaves andspreads seeds so that they may be nurtured by the spring, and asks that the wind, a"destroyer and preserver," hear him. The speaker calls the wind the "dirge / Of the dyingyear," and describes how it stirs up violent storms, and again implores it to hear him. Thespeaker says that the wind stirs the Mediterranean from "his summer dreams," and cleavesthe Atlantic into choppy chasms, making the "sapless foliage" of the ocean tremble, and asksfor a third time that it hear him.

The speaker says that if he were a dead leaf that the wind could bear, or a cloud it couldcarry, or a wave it could push, or even if he were, as a boy, "the comrade" of the wind's"wandering over heaven," then he would never have needed to pray to the wind and invokeits powers. He pleads with the wind to lift him "as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!"--for though he islike the wind at heart, untamable and proud--he is now chained and bowed with the weight of his hours upon the earth.

The speaker asks the wind to "make me thy lyre," to be his own Spirit, and to drive histhoughts across the universe, "like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth." He asks thewind, by the incantation of this verse, to scatter his words among mankind, to be the"trumpet of a prophecy." Speaking both in regard to the season and in regard to the effectupon mankind that he hopes his words to have, the speaker asks: "If winter comes, canspring be far behind?"

Form

Each of the seven parts of "Ode to the West Wind" contains five stanzas--four three-linestanzas and a two-line couplet, all metered in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme in eachpart follows a pattern known as terza rima, the three-line rhyme scheme employed by Dantein his Divine Comedy. In the three-line terza rima   stanza, the first and third lines rhyme, andthe middle line does not; then the end sound of that middle line is employed as the rhyme forthe first and third lines in the next stanza. The final couplet rhymes with the middle line of thelast three-line stanza. Thus each of the seven parts of "Ode to the West Wind" follows thisscheme: ABA BCB CDC DED EE.

Commentary

The wispy, fluid terza rima  of "Ode to the West Wind" finds Shelley taking a long thematic leap beyond the

scope of "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," and incorporating his own art into his meditation on beauty and the

natural world. Shelley invokes the wind magically, describing its power and its role as both "destroyer andpreserver," and asks the wind to sweep him out of his torpor "as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!" In the fifth section,

the poet then takes a remarkable turn, transforming the wind into a metaphor for his own art, the expressive

capacity that drives "dead thoughts" like "withered leaves" over the universe, to "quicken a new birth"--thatis, to quicken the coming of the spring. Here the spring season is a metaphor for a "spring" of human

consciousness, imagination, liberty, or morality--all the things Shelley hoped his art could help to bringabout in the human mind. Shelley asks the wind to be his spirit, and in the same movement he makes it his

metaphorical spirit, his poetic faculty, which will play him like a musical instrument, the way the wind strums

the leaves of the trees. The thematic implication is significant: whereas the older generation of Romanticpoets viewed nature as a source of truth and authentic experience, the younger generation largely viewed

nature as a source of beauty and aesthetic experience. In this poem, Shelley explicitly links nature with art

by finding powerful natural metaphors with which to express his ideas about the power, import, quality, andultimate effect of aesthetic expression.