6/21/07
Lecture notes on P. B. Shelley
by
E. Heroux
We’ve read some Shelley earlier in this semester, and you’ll recall his Queen Mab,
which we decided might be “juvenilia,” but at least it showed his apocalyptic
revolutionary side and his “millennial” dream of a better world. We also read his
short poem “To Wordsworth” in which we saw his disappointment with the older
man’s growing conservatism, where Shelley clearly preferred the younger more
revolutionary Wordsworth. Finally, you’ll remember that we looked at his “Mont
Blanc” to see how Shelley’s sublime differed remarkably from Wordsworth’s sublime.
“Mont Blanc” seems to struggle to attain something like the Wordsworthian pastoral
sublime, but cannot do so in the face of the awesome “flood of ruin” of the glaciers
(lines 100 – 108), and ends with the question about “vacancy”.
Perhaps the
awesome power he felt in nature is nothing but “remote” and “inaccessible” (line 97),
like an inhuman void that compels Shelley to drop in the words “gloom”, and
“unfathomable” and “awful doubt” and “the spirit fails” here and there throughout the
poem -- quite in tension with his more positive Wordsworthian appreciation of nature
in the same poem. Shelley’s mind was boggled.i That’s one key to the sublime.
To see for yourself why the Alps, and Mont Blanc especially, might be
perceived as more overwhelming than the calm, pastoral Lake District, here’s a
photo of it, that I stole from somewhere online:
Well… a photo is so tiny and two-dimensional compared with actually being there in
person. Also, the mountain is still very far away from the photographer’s position,
believe me. But if you look closely up at the right side, on top of the brown rocks you
can see little people sitting there, no doubt shouting “Wow!!” and hanging on for dear
life. Shelley said it so much better.ii
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Adonais
Now, catching up to today’s reading, we see the relatively more mature
Shelley, or as much as can be expected of a man who died at age 29, only a few
years older than Keats. Today you should have read a bit of Shelley’s tribute to
Keats, his elegyiii for the dead poet in “Adonais” (p. 822 in the 8th edition). Look
again at it now. The biographical context and the meaning of the title are explained
by the editor’s headnote (822), so I won’t repeat that here. I will say that Shelley
might have felt unconsciously guilty about the death of Keats – and for two reasons.
He had invited Keats to come to Italy as a gesture of friendship, but when Keats
arrived in Rome he was so sick with tuberculosis that the two never did actually get
together in Italy, where Keats died within a few months. Shelley no doubt felt regret
after learning that Keats had died in Italy after traveling so far from England, but
before they could meet there. To make him feel even worse, he had gradually come
to see Keats as a great poet, probably destined to be greater than himself. So his
mourning and melancholy was deep for a while. The most productive way out was
to write a great poem about Keats, and it is often said to be one of the best of
Shelley’s poems. For some people, “Adonais” is Shelley’s greatest achievement in
the realm of poetry. (But for others it is the dramatic visionary found in his
Prometheus Unbound; while yet for others it is the complex thought found in “Ode to
the West Wind”.)
“Adonais” is too long for a close reading analysis of the whole in the space of
this lecture, so as usual, I will point out some of the interesting bits. The opening
stanza (Spenserian stanzas in form too) wastes no time at all, and directly cries out
Shelley’s mournful tears. But then it also immediately introduces a fancy conceit (or
extended metaphor) of Time as personified, as having companions (more Hours or
future time), who or which will be taught this mournful sorrow for Keats. In other
words, his fame should last until “the Future dares / Forget the past . . .”
An interesting strategy in this poem is to make the mythological character
Adonis = Keats, as if this will in effect transfer the fame of the myth onto the
miserable anonymous death of the poet, raising him up to larger than life, to a stellar
constellation. Another interesting strategy is that Shelley chooses to write this in a
more traditional sounding form -- the Spenserian stanza, the Miltonic sounding lines,
the almost neoclassical diction, the many motifs from classical elegies that you can
see in the numerous Norton footnotes – as if he wants Keats to be honored in the
long line of English poetry by the masters.
Skipping to stanza 6, after line 50, we see another conceit or set of metaphors
which now have to do with insisting that he died too soon, before the petals bloomed,
and left only waste. Shelley will continue to do this shifting into different extended
metaphors throughout the poem, making it highly wrought. Much of this involves
personification of the abstract qualities of Keats’s own poetry, now passing by to cry
over his dead body. Stanza 13 is a fairly clear example, but it has been going on for
several stanzas before this. The way to read personification in stanza 13 is to look
at the Capitalized terms which are now taken as Subjects or Persons attending his
funeral. It is as if Romantic poetry itself is mourning the loss of its Author. This is
then confirmed directly in stanza 14 (lines 118 – 120). Shelley presents it not as the
loss of a poet’s future poems directly, but rather indirectly as those subjects of his
poetry now lamenting the death of the mind that would have sung them. This is an
interesting instance of how poetry imagines things that we know are literally
impossible, but that we find strangely effective. If you allow this the old “willing
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suspension of disbelief” then you can evoke a powerful image of in the reader’s
imagination (that is, in your imagination), one which partakes of the process of
mourning and poetry at once.
Again we’ll have skip and skim ahead in this poem – to stanza 36 where
Shelley accuses the anonymous reviewer or critic of Keats’ early publication. Two
anonymous reviews appeared in the top literary magazines, both were conservative
attacks and mean-spirited, e.g., calling him from the “Cockney School of poetry” –
which meant that he was from the lower class neighborhood of London and couldn’t
even speak standard English. While such attacks were not really true, their focus on
Keats’ class background instead of reading the poem did hurt. The rumor was that
Keats was so hurt by this that he got sick and died. That’s not true either – as we
know he went on to write even better poems the following year after the bad reviews.
But Shelley seems to believe it or at least he uses that rumor in this stanza and the
next to accuse the critics of “envy, hate, and wrong” (line 321) and to point to their
remorse and shame in stanza 37.
At stanza 39 a startling theme occurs: we change places with Keats! He is
now alive and we are dead. This is accomplished through the conceit of dreaming.
Recall that last week we noted that Keats concludes the “Ode to a Nightingale” by
wondering if his normal waking life were not really more like sleep, while his
heightened inspiration of poetry listening to the nightingale was more like awakening.
Or, is it the other way around? He asked this. Much the same in this stanza,
Shelley posits death as an awakening from the sleep of everyday boring life, which
means of course that we are more dead than is Keats, and in fact since we are
mortal “We decay” now, but Keats has attained immortal fame. Shelley strongly
suggests then that we are mourning for the wrong person, and he now uses the
elegy to raise your consciousness of your own mortal unconsciousness.
At stanzas 48 & 49, we’re told to visit Rome where Keats is buried (look for
his tomb in the Protestant Cemetery the next time you’re in Rome, and while you’re
there, look for P.B. Shelley’s tomb too). Prior to this passage Adonais – Keats had
mythically become one with nature. Now he seems intimately part of History. Rome
is filled with historic ruins from many centuries that “ages, empires, and religions
there / Lie buried in the ravage they have
wrought” (lines 426 – 427). Moreover here
Keats doesn’t so much join history but
transcends it -- read closely for how Rome is
filled with the forgotten ruins but that Keats is
“gathered to the kings of thought” (line 430)
and etc.
Around line 439 Shelley gives us a
fairly accurate description of the real
cemetery, leading you like a tour guide to find
the grave of Keats. Here’s another photo that
I stole from online of that tomb. At the
bottom, just above the cat, you might be able
to read, “Here lies one whose name was writ
in water” which Keats wrote for himself.
Now at stanza 53, oddly Shelley
seems to hear Adonais calling him through
the whispering wind (a bit of the Gothic motif
here!). And at the last line of this stanza,
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Shelley seems to want to join him in death.
In fact as you know, he did. But I still
wonder if Shelley realized while writing
these lines that he would soon be buried in
the very same cemetery. While we are
looking at tombs, here is Shelley’s own. If
you look closely you can read the
inscription at the bottom:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
These are lines from Shakespeare’s The
Tempest, chosen after Shelley drowned at
sea.
Death is of course the main problem
in every elegy. “Adonais” attempts to
overcome death in many twists and turns
of thought and poetic visions. Like any
great poem, it manages to lend its own
well-wrought beauty to the person it
praises. Keats was forgotten by a generation of readers and critics, and much of his
mature poetry wasn’t even published until long after his death. But in fact, it was
partly this very poem by Shelley which captured later critics’ attention to the unknown
poet it praises. This helped lead to the recovering and revival of Keats’ poetry. Later
scholars of course realized that Adonais = Keats, since it was not a secret, and when
the later unpublished masterpieces by Keats were finally published, his reputation
began to rise “like a star, / Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are” as
Shelley concludes this poem.
Finally, the last footnote in the Norton Anthology for this poem is traditionally
kind of eerie. The final stanza strongly suggests that Shelley is at sea in a little boat
(the “bark” at line 488) “Whose sails were never to the tempest given”. The terrible
storm is driving him “fearfully” through the waves. The chaotic storm is supposed to
be his own Muse or poetic inspiration, while Keats shines like a star far above this.
But one can’t help read this literally too, since Shelley would soon drown in exactly
the same way. His wife Mary saw it as a prophecy.
This same “breath” or windy storm that Shelley evoked above is an allusion to
his own “Ode to the West Wind” which you might have read today (p. 772). In part
two of this lecture, I will say a couple of things about that, and then also look to his A
Defence of Poetry.
[end of part 1 – download part 2 later]
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ENDNOTES:
“Boggle”: When something boggles your mind, you are confounded, astonished, overwhelmed,
boggled, and unable to think clearly. Current slang is more like this: “That blows my mind! I don’t
know whether to laugh or cry!” Burke’s definition of a kind of sublime experience involves this
boggling. Kant’s definition did too, only in a more complex, philosophical way. For Kant, the mind
overcomes an external object of perception like the imposing and awesome Mont Blanc precisely by
realizing that you can imagine something even greater than any perception; especially abstract things
such as infinity. You can never see infinity. Infinity is bigger than Mont Blanc. Thus your mind is
greater than the biggest thing you can see. “The Brain is Wider Than the Sky” wrote Emily Dickinson,
the American poet. Kant calls this the “mathematical sublime”. But more weirdly, the mind also then
boggles itself with this kind of realization of its own power, yet at the same time our inability to make a
representation of that idea of infinity. You cannot show anyone “infinity”. This too leaves the mind
boggled, paradoxically. How can we imagine what we can never see, how can we have ideas that we
can never show?
i
ii
Contrast this photo with the Lake District photo in The Norton Anthology. You can also see the
actual Lake District in the recent movie titled Miss Potter, about the woman who wrote and illustrated
children’s books, Beatrix Potter. It turns out that her parents bought a house there because it became
fashionable for the Victorian upper-middle class to do so. It was fashionable because the Romantic
poets made it fashionable a generation before. Miss Potter earned so much money from selling her
books, that she was able to preserve some of the Lake District property by buying it. Later she was
an important activist among those who pressured the British government to establish that area as a
national park. And so it remains to this day.
iii
An “elegy” is any poem in honor of a dead person. Adjective form “elegiac”. Mournful.