Percy B. Shelley (1792-1822)

Presentation on Percy B. Shelley

About this poet

            Percy Bysshe Shelley was born August 4, 1792, at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, England. The eldest son of Timothy and Elizabeth Shelley, with one brother and four sisters, he stood in line to inherit not only his grandfather’s considerable estate but also a seat in Parliament. He attended Eton College for six years beginning in 1804, and then went on to Oxford University. He began writing poetry while at Eton, but his first publication was a Gothic novel, Zastrozzi (1810), in which he voiced his own heretical and atheistic opinions through the villain Zastrozzi. That same year, Shelley and another student, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, published a pamphlet of burlesque verse, “Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson," and with his sister Elizabeth, Shelley published Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire. In 1811, Shelley continued this prolific outpouring with more publications, including another pamphlet that he wrote and circulated with Hogg titled “The Necessity of Atheism," which got him expelled from Oxford after less than a year’s enrollment.  Shelley could have been reinstated if his father had intervened, but this would have required his disavowing the pamphlet and declaring himself Christian. Shelley refused, which led to a complete break between Shelley and his father. This left him in dire financial straits for the next two years, until he came of age.

            That same year, at age nineteen, Shelley eloped to Scotland with sixteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook. Once married, Shelley moved to the Lake District of England to study and write. Two years later he published his first long serious work, Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem. The poem emerged from Shelley’s friendship with the British philosopher William Godwin, and it expressed Godwin’s freethinking Socialist philosophy. Shelley also became enamored of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary, and in 1814 they eloped to Europe. After six weeks, out of money, they returned to England. In November 1814 Harriet Shelley bore a son, and in February 1815 Mary Godwin gave birth prematurely to a child who died two weeks later. The following January, Mary bore another son, named William after her father. In May the couple went to Lake Geneva, where Shelley spent a great deal of time with George Gordon, Lord Byron, sailing on Lake Geneva and discussing poetry and other topics, including ghosts and spirits, into the night. During one of these ghostly “seances," Byron proposed that each person present should write a ghost story. Mary’s contribution to the contest became the novel Frankenstein. That same year, Shelley produced the verse allegory Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude. In December 1816 Harriet Shelley apparently committed suicide. Three weeks after her body was recovered from a lake in a London park, Shelley and Mary Godwin officially were married. Shelley lost custody of his two children by Harriet because of his adherence to the notion of free love.

            In 1817, Shelley produced Laon and Cythna, a long narrative poem that, because it contained references to incest as well as attacks on religion, was withdrawn after only a few copies were published. It was later edited and reissued as The Revolt of Islam (1818). At this time, he also wrote revolutionary political tracts signed “The Hermit of Marlow.” Then, early in 1818, he and his new wife left England for the last time. During the remaining four years of his life, Shelley produced all his major works, including Prometheus Unbound (1820). Traveling and living in various Italian cities, the Shelleys were friendly with the British poet Leigh Hunt and his family as well as with Byron.

            On July 8, 1822, shortly before his thirtieth birthday, Shelley was drowned in a storm while attempting to sail from Leghorn to La Spezia, Italy, in his schooner, the Don Juan.

Ode to the West Wind

About the poem:

-          It shows a structural complexity.

-          The author recovers Middle English and Late Middle English forms in order to give a poetical effect.

Lexical fields in Ode to the West Wind

a) Autumn  and Winter vs b)Spring

c) Sickness and death; sleep vs. d) life and rebirth;  wakefulness

e) Imagines related to the four elements of nature

f) Sound images

g) Kinetic images

h) References to religion and myth

i) Language productions

                                                                     I

O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being
Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou	5
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill	10
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill;
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!
II Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,	15
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning! there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head	20
Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,	25
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst: O hear!
III Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,	30
Lull'd by the coil of his crystàlline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss, and flowers	35
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know	40
Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!
IV If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share	45
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! if even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed	50
Scarce seem'd a vision—I would ne'er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
O! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd	55
One too like thee—tameless, and swift, and proud.
V Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own?
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,	60
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like wither'd leaves, to quicken a new birth
And, by the incantation of this verse,	65
Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth
The trumpet of a prophecy*! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? *Also connected to religion and myth.	70

About each canto:

1^st canto

-          It is an invocation to the West Wind. In this case, the power of the Wind is presented through its influence upon the element earth.

-          There is a complementary opposition between Autumn/Winter and Spring/Summer. Both need to exist so that a natural balance is kept. That the Wind is presented as a “destroyer and preserver” illustrates this clearly.

-          This opposition is kept throughout the poem. It is also replicated by oppositions such as sleep vs. wakefulness or death vs. life/rebirth.

2^nd canto

-          Another invocation to the West Wind, this time by referring to the element of air.

-          A sense of claustrophobia is introduced here: imagines of sealed places, like a sepulchre or a vault, accompany those of death.

-          Alliteration imitating the sound of the wind can be easily perceived in this canto, especially in its first verses. Note that both the /s/ and the /z/ are present.

3^rd canto

-          Third and last canto devoted to invocating the Wind. Here, the element that responds to the Wind’s will is water.

-          Although some human creations had been mentioned before, they acted strictly as metaphors, so no human presence was evocated strongly. It is in this canto that the human figure irrupts: the “palaces and towers” on Baiae’s bay have a tangible and historical reference in the Roman ruins that remain in this Mediterranean natural landscape.

4^th canto

·         Turning point: the poet starts speaking in the first person, he’s talking about himself. Previous lexical fields grow scarcer in favour of a confessional tone.

·         However, he still praises the wind by summarizing the first three cantos in the first stanza.

·         Nostalgia for his early years: “If even I were… seem’d a vision”, meaning “If I could be now the way I was as a child, I wouldn’t have the need to invoke you [the Wind]”. His invocation is explained. He’s not a leaf nor young “as then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed / Scarce seem'd a vision”. Contrast between childhood and young age.

·         “Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!”: he wishes to be any of those things and be moved by the wind; for his words to be spread by the wind.

·         Couplet: he wishes that he was still young. Age is weighing on him unpleasantly. He expresses the effects of the passing of time.

5^th canto

·         First person again: focus on the speaker.

·         “Music” words (lyre, tumult, harmonies, tone): the wind makes music as it blows through the trees in the forest.

·         Leaves on the trees can be thought of as leaves on books, which are the pages.

·         “New birth” refers to spring (nature), but also to human consciousness, imagination, liberty, or morality.

·         “Missing” element (fire) can be spotted in this canto: he may be the wind as well as the fire that needs to be grown.

-          expressions related to fire: ashes, sparks, unextinguish’d hearth (also means passion).

·         “Incantation”: use of words as a magic spell.

·         The wind is a metaphor for his own art: the “dead thoughts” are his poetry.

·         “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”: winter as death, spring as rebirth.

·         "Unawaken'd earth" refers to the minds, to the people.

The Poem's Form

Ode to the West Wind is, of course, an ode, which is a type of lyric poem that addresses a subject. An ode can be written about any topic. John Keats, another Romantic poet, was very famous for writing this sort of poems. 'Ode to the West Wind' is Shelley's most notable contribution to the ode form.

This poem consists of five cantos, each divided into five stanzas of 14 lines. These stanzas are, at the same time, divided into four tercets and a couplet. A tercet is a group of three lines, and a couplet is a couple of lines.

It is written in a modified form of terza rima, which is Dante Alighieri’s famous rhyme scheme; this device was very much employed in his Divine Comedy.
The way the 14-line blocks in this ode rhymes is A-B-A, the next tercet B-C-B, where the B word is from the second rhyme of the first tercet, the following ones C-D-C, D-E-D, and the final cuplet E-E. In this way, Shelley is propelling the poem along by interlocking the tercets and the couplet, so that it is always linked to the next tercet rhyme scheme, but with the poem moving forward at the same time.

This ode is written in iambic pentameter. 'Iambic' means that each line starts with an unstressed syllable, which is followed by a stressed syllable. To make it a pentameter, this pattern has to be repeated five more times, so as to form five sets of iambs.