1.15.1: Percy Bysshe Shelley Biography and works Part I

Percy Bysshe Shelley was probably the most intellectual of all the Romantic poets; he was certainly one of the most well-educated. He was a non-conformist thinker, a philosopher, and a rebel. All of these characteristics join in his theory of poetry and poetic output, with their commitment to radical politics and their visionary idealism influenced by Platonism. Like Byron, Shelley was born into an aristocratic family, was in line to inherit a large estate, and was secured of a seat in the House of Lords in Parliament. Instead, Shelley became the river that made its own banks.

This independence of both thought and action appeared when Shelley wrote a pamphlet On the Necessity of Atheism while at Oxford. Rather than leading to intellectual debate as he expected, this pamphlet led to his being expelled. At the age of nineteen, Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a stable hand. He pursued his intellectual and political interests by befriending the socialist philosopher William Godwin (1756-1836) and publishing Queen Mab, a utopian poem. At the grave of Godwin’s deceased wife Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley also wooed their daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. The two eloped to Europe, Shelley’s wife Harriet having refused to join them. In 1816, Harriet Shelley committed suicide by drowning herself in the shallow end of the Serpentine River; she was apparently pregnant with another man’s child. Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe had lost two children of their own before they married upon Harriet’s death. Percy Bysshe lost custody of his and Harriet’s two children due to his reputation.

Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley traveled throughout Italy where Percy Bysshe wrote the bulk of his most famous works. In 1822, he drowned while sailing his schooner Don Juan (named after a poem by Byron) from Livorno to Lerici. He may have desired this death, disappointed and disaffected with the “triumph of life” over vision. He certainly seems to have predicted this mode of death in Adonais, an elegy he wrote for John Keats: “My spirit’s bark is driven,/ Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng/ Whose sails were never to the tempest given” (489-91).

It is important to consider the breadth and height of Shelley’s demands on poetry. He had great expectations from poetry and from poets, whom he described as power figures; for poets channel the power of the source itself (rather than the dominion). He therefore presents poets as the channels of power for change, for freedom, for humanity. His The Defense of Poetry takes the challenge Plato made when ejecting poets from his Republic. In it, Shelley describes poets as the best men with the best thoughts who see the seeds of the future cast upon the present. As such, they are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

“Ode to the West Wind”

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,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

 

The winged 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

(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, oh hear!

 

II

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion,

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 aëry surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

 

Of some fierce Maenad, 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,

Vaulted with all thy congregated might

 

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear!

 

III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

Lull’d by the coil of his crystalline streams,

 

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,

 

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

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

 

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: oh 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

 

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

Scarce seem’d a vision; I would ne’er have striven

 

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh, 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

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,

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,

 

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?