Public vs Private: Shelley’s Poems of Love and Redress – an essay by Anthony Costello
- 3 mai
- 12 min de lecture
‘Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful.’
Percy Bysshe Shelley (‘A Defence of Poetry’)
After the publication of ‘The Necessity of Atheism’ while an undergraduate at Oxford, Percy Bysshe Shelley is identified as a political radical, anti-establishment, a republican, and an advocate of ‘free love’ and liberty. These beliefs, or ideologies, elicit abuse and ridicule. Shelley gains notoriety, which angers his family, especially his father, Timothy Shelley, a member of Parliament. Over the next few years his fame, or infamy, grows. His personal life, estrangement from his family, and his first wife Harriet Westbrook, financial problems, scandalous elopements, and spied upon and shot at for anti-authoritarian views, means his life is unorthodox and unstable, often one of intense suffering and tragedy. And yet, Shelley’s poems, pamphlets and letters address the political events of his day if he perceives signs of social injustice. Hence, he earns a reputation as a public poet with a passionate and enlightened interest in politics, past and present.
On learning of the massacre of peaceful demonstrators in Manchester, who are calling for reform of Parliament laws in 1819, Shelley’s immediate response is his poem ‘The Mask of Anarchy’:
I met murder on the way—
He had a mask like Castlereagh,
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven bloodhounds followed him:
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admiral plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew,
Which from his wide cloak he drew.[1]
Although not published during his lifetime (Leigh Hunt thinks it too incendiary to publish it in The Examiner in 1818), this poem attacks the leading establishment figures of his day, like Castlereagh (foreign secretary in Lord Liverpool’s Tory Government) and King George III and the Prince Regent. People or institutions — Church, Monarchy, Parliament — are taken to task overtly, or with poetic subtlety, if people are denied freedom. Shelley argues for the rights of the individual, fights against injustice, and attempts to change the established order of things. From his time in Ireland as a 19-year-old fledgling poet writing, printing and hand-delivering doctrines supporting Catholic emancipation, to his last [unfinished] poem ‘The Triumph of Life’:
Is not so much more glorious than it was
That I desire to worship those who drew
New figures on its false and fragile glass’[2]
Shelley is fighting for the oppressed, the poor, the wronged, and living a life of sexual freedom concomitant with his personal belief in free love. He does not find these standpoints or values incompatible.
‘The Mask of Anarchy’ and ‘Ode to Liberty’ and ‘Adonais’ are signature poems examining political issues and social mores; 'The Mask of Anarchy’ and its trenchant call for justice and suffrage, ‘Ode to Liberty’ with its pan-historical litany of tyrants and emancipated peoples in a dialectical struggle, nineteen stanzas detailing the suppression of people, and past violations of human rights. Both poems honour the importance of the individual. Shelley describes the oppressed as ‘glorious people’ in ‘Ode to Liberty’ and as ‘Heroes’ in ‘The Mask of Anarchy’. Of Keats he writes in ‘Adonais’ that ‘The One remains, the many change and pass’. Shelley identifies with each person’s right to freedom, and self-identifies with those ‘who drew new figures’ on the ‘fragile glass’ [of the world] in ‘The Triumph of Life’. Individualism is a triumph of life. Shelley’s poetical works and prose are an attempt at making his own mark on the world; the lines that Shelley and Keats draw intersecting in poetry and life, the Romantic period notable for its series of criss-crossing figures in science, art, poetry and politics, and the indelible marks left behind.
If Shelley isn’t writing political and social poems about England (‘To the Lord Chancellor’, ‘To the Men of England’, etc), he’s writing verse dramas of historical significance (The Cenci), an epic poem about the French Revolution transposed to an oriental setting (The Revolt of Islam), the prophetic and philosophical poem (Queen Mab), or tackling mythical themes in the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound, all with a topical significance, whether personal, symbolic or metaphoric.
Shelley’s love poems, written as verse-letters to friends, family, his wife (sometimes lovers and would-be lovers), the majority unpublished in his lifetime, contain thoughts and feelings less well known. Short and incidental, written in repose, often at home, they show a different side to the poet denounced in the early part of the nineteenth century as an heretic and rabble-rouser. These love poems, not all of the romantic kind, are free of public agency and reprisal and serve two purposes: they allow his circle of friends and family to experience the private Shelley, the loving and love-sick and sometimes depressed man unseen in his political poems, and to provide relief from the strife and stress caused by public opinion and reproach.
Aspects of Shelley’s less combative side do feature in his published work at the time: ‘To a Sky-Lark’ (‘From rainbow clouds there flow not/Drops so bright to see,/As from thy presence showers a rain of melody’), ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ (‘When musing deeply on the lot/Of life, at that sweet time when the winds are wooing/All vital things that wake to bring/News of buds and blossoming’), and ‘Verses Written on Receiving a Celandine in a Letter from England’ (‘Lovely thou wert in thine own glen/Ere thou didst well in song or story/Ere the moonlight of a Poet’s mind/Had arrayed thee with the glory/Whose fountains are the hearts of men’) are poems rich in natural images and pastoral beauty; but the private poems contain an emotional want and need, an unguarded honesty that the political poems lack.
These poems-as-letters, a form used widely by the Romantic poets, address people in his circle, the name of the person standing as the title: To…Willam Shelley, Harriet Westbrook, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, Emilia Vivania, Jane Williams, Leigh Hunt, and so on. The poems are declarations of love, admiration and respect, or poems that take delight in art, pleasure, and beauty: a piano being played, a friend singing, a guitar strummed. The tone is intimate and loving and helps to create an extended group of friends that might replace his own fractured blood family. The poems can express misery and distress, as in ‘Dejected in Naples’, and also grief in the poems addressed to his son (and deceased son) William, after the boy’s tragic and untimely death in Italy. Had these poems been published in his lifetime, they could have changed the public’s opinion of Shelley, or softened the response to his eventful and intriguing life. He puts into his personal or private verse the truth about himself. The poems are full of hope, humility, and grace, Keatsian in their willingness and need to express feelings. If Keats had read these poems Shelley would have been more accessible to him as a friend.
The critical response to Shelley focuses on his politically-charged poems and the exigencies of his private life. Shelley’s detractors demonise him, accusing him of dark moods and monster behaviour, living a life of immoral plenty in the manner of his friend, Byron. But whereas Byron leads a dissolute and selfish life without remorse for his actions (‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’), Shelley adopts a kind-to-strangers-in-need approach to life. He thinks deeply about right and wrong, abhors prostitution and is a supporter of the rights of women, but believes in free love as a positive good (and can’t feign being-in-love), and this core value is as important to him as his political radicalism. A reason for existence. In his verse-letters there are no signs of a Frankenstein or dark Prometheus that some people observe in Shelley’s character, and who revile him because of his relationships with, and attitude to, women: Harriet Westbrook, Fanny Imlay? Claire Clairmont, Mary [Godwin] Shelley, and so on.
Shelley’s perfunctory treatment of Harriet Westbrook, leaving her and their children, and eloping with his [soon-to-be] second wife, Mary Godwin [Shelley], indubitable evidence of his bad, perhaps evil, character. The ensuing tragic suicide of Harriet creating more antipathy toward him; a disdain strong enough to overlook Shelley’s life-long fight for human rights, a dislike, perhaps hatred, strong enough to supersede any empathy for his personal loss — ‘I wept, I thought it was a dream, I weep’ (‘Epipsychidion’) — not forgetting the subsequent refusal to offer him custody of his children, Ianthe and Charles, due to his social radicalism and professed atheism. However, the private poems of love transmit healing and conciliatory light and offer his detractors pause for thought; a chance to see another side to Shelley, the altruistic tone in his poetry, and a sensitivity which is the source of the socially-conscious public poems, and central to his personality as expressed at home. It’s impossible to detect a purposely cruel man in these poems. They are free of the masochism of struggle that dominate his public life, free of defensive strategies, and function as a form of redressal with regard to his reputation. They display an emotional honesty, perhaps naivety, that if explored more fully could have led to him writing about his childhood and creating his own songs of innocence and experience.
The private uncollected poems and letters published by Mary Shelley are numerous, illustrative and instructive. Any selection or sample from them leads to the same conclusion: that Shelley is a love poet, and a man with humility and emotional honesty at his core.
In ‘To Constantia Singing’ Shelley imparts the delectable, stirring and physical effect of a woman singing:
Her voice is hovering o’er my soul — it lingers
It lingers o’ershadowing it with soft and lulling
and …
My heart is a quivering like a flame;
As morning dew, that in the sunbeam dies,
I am dissolved in these consuming ecstasies
In ‘To Emilia Viviani’ Shelley is direct, unguarded and emotional:
For never rain or dew such fragrance drew
from plant or flower — the very doubt endears
My sadness ever new, The sighs I breathe,
The tears I shed for thee
In ‘To Harriet’ Shelley expresses his feelings as if he is composing a mournful song:
This look of love has power to calm
The stormiest passion of thy soul;
Thy gentle words are drops of balm
In life’s too bitter bowl;
No grief is mine, but that alone
These choicest blessings I have known
In the poems addressed ‘To William Shelley’, his son, the poet exists in a suspended state of love and longing, the poems in the key of a grief-struck lament:
Thy Little footsteps on the sand
Of a remote and lonely shore
The wrinkles of thine infant hands
Where now the warm will fall no more
The mingled look of love and glee
When we returned to gaze on thee
‘To William Shelley’ (2)
Where art thou, my gentle child?
Let me think my spirit feeds,
With its life intense and mild,
Let me think that through low seeds
Of sweet flowers and sunny grass
Into their hues and scents may pass
A portion—
‘To William Shelley’ (3)
Come thou, beloved as thou art;
Another sleepeth still
Near thy sweet Mother’s anxious heart
Which though with joy shall fill
In ‘To Mary’ he addresses his wife in a tone of love and desire, the simplicity of which is disarming:
Oh Mary dear, that you were here
with your brown eyes bright and clear
And your sweet voice, like a bird
Singing love to its love mate
In his ‘Dedication addressed To Mary’, in the preface to The Revolt of Islam, Shelley shows his need and love and dutiful respect; Mary the bedrock for his poetical life and work:
So now my summer task is ended, Mary
And I return to thee, mine own heart’s home
And…
The toil which stole from thee so many an hour
Is ended, — and the fruit is at thy feet
And…
Waterfalls leap among wild islands green,
Which framed for my lone boat a lone retreat
Of moss-grown trees and weeds, shall I be seen:
But beside thee, where still my heart has ever been[3]
The poems in Shelley’s journals extend to poets and supportive friends: Thomas Love Peacock, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Maria Gisborne, Byron, and Edward Williams, et al, and the content is one of friendly, kind fellowship. In his circle of friends Shelley is the selfless man he is at heart. Given that his personal life and views on free love and liberty have become public, and his actions and words used to ridicule him, these serene and sweet poems are a grounding, re-energising force. The poems remind him, and those dear to him, who he is beyond his public image in which he is, at times, subsumed, an image that he often feels compelled to live up to.
Perhaps the political poems are the result of Shelley’s childhood experience of abandonment and alienation, the political rebel and love-at-all-cost philosopher aspects of a persona Shelley inhabits for his revolutionary purpose, a public poet who protects the wounded boy traumatised by beatings at Syon House Academy and Eton; bullied for being different to the group, the majority, terrorised for being who he is: poet, original thinker, prose writer, reader, revolutionary, libertarian, republican, moral atheist, a unique individual.
Edmund Blunden notes how Shelley’s so-called ‘minor’ poems act as valve, or outlet, a relief from the politically charged poems he was known for. He quotes a section of ‘The Recollection’ as an example of a pastoral poem that exudes tranquillity and provides a welcome release for Shelley:
In which the lovely forests grew
As in the upper air
More perfect both in shape and hue
Than any spreading there.
There lay the glade and neighbouring lawn,
And through the dark green wood
The white sun twinkling like the dawn
Out of a speckled cloud.[4]
But Shelley’s love poems are more than a diversion or pastoral valve; they provide an insight into his soul and reveal a man his friends call Percy, or Bysshe. The poems published posthumously in The Complete Poetical Works, compiled by Mary Shelley, which include unpublished poems, fragments, ephemera, reveal a man the reading public in the early 19th Century were not privy to. Shelley’s personal poems are declarations from the heart when he is relaxed, off guard, or too ill to care. There is no sign of the sturm und drang and sublime Romanticism of his peers, no sign of ego or poetic posturing. There is a quietude in these poems which is largely undetected in his firm public opinions on issues of the day.
In the introduction to Shelley’s poetical works, Mary Shelley writes of ‘the comparative solitude in which Mr Shelley lived … only known to a few…’. She contrasts the ‘hatred and calumny’ experienced by the public poet, to the private man dedicated to ‘making those around him happy’. This mission of Mary’s — to highlight the good in Shelley despite his adherence to the notion of free love during their marriage — is an act of love. She publishes his private correspondence, irrespective of poetic quality, to rescue him from his [bad] public reputation.
The truth in Mary’s homage is reinforced by Shelley’s love poems, which are Keatsian in lyricism and sentiment and truthful about feelings. He thinks Keats is the greater poet, and honours what he means to him in ‘Adonais’. He writes that Keats is ‘a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely’ and sees ‘the soul of Adonais, like a star’.[5] Shelley’s elegy for Keats is a poem that combines a wider public, moral instruction with a personal cry of loss and pain.
What Keats encounters during his meeting with Shelley at Leigh Hunt’s house in The Vale of Health, Hampstead, is the public poet who can’t hide his neo-aristocratic bearing, his encyclopaedic knowledge, and classical learning. When, in fact, Shelley is also a romantic poet with a lower case ‘r’, influenced as much by the emotional life as Keats, a ‘child in feeling’ Hazlitt observed of Shelley during a gathering at Leigh Hunt’s cottage. In his ‘To…’ poems — the odes and sonnets and fragments — there are no signs of the atypical Romantic tenets present in, say, the picaresque, transcendent poem Alastor, no sign of the energy that drives Prometheus Unbound, no sign of the fire that some say Shelley himself, like Prometheus, gave to humanity, no sign of the classical education and Greek myths that drive and shape many of his longer poems.
The poems of love are a pool of lambent light in which the public face of the poet disappears. The private Shelley — often naive, needful, child-like — emerges in poems addressed to those he loves; poetry he locates in domestic settings and where loveliness is at one with the ordinary: ‘moss-grown trees’, ‘sunny grass’, a human voice, a bird singing, a love-thought expressed. Love in Shelley’s private mode of being is all-encompassing, a trance-like ecstasy. When he’s able to separate himself from the self-alienating aspects of ‘the public poet’, he becomes happy in his own happiness. Whereas Keats finds vicarious happiness in a nightingale’s song [of happiness], Shelley is happy in himself when he feels, and expresses, love in all its manifestations. In this state of relaxed bliss he can say: this is how I feel, this is who I am. What is most beautiful is love, particularly when love is aligned with ‘the individual life’, an exalted state of being true to oneself that Shelley wants each person to realise and experience.
Ann Wroe in Being Shelley identifies the four elements of Earth, Air, Fire, Water, as central to an appreciation of Shelley’s work and life. In the poems of love and redress he is earth and water. He’s mainly water. A serene lake, a calm pond, at times a mist of tears.
Notes
[1] ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, Shelley, Selected Poems, edited by Timothy Webb, J.M.Dent, 1988, p. 65.
[2] ‘The Triumph of Life’, Shelley, Selected Poems, edited by Timothy Webb, J.M. Dent, 1988. p. 179.
[3] Quotations from ‘To Constantia Singing’ and ending with ‘Dedication to Mary’, from Shelley, Poetical Works, edited by Thomas Hutchinson, revised by G.M. Mathews, Oxford Paperbacks, 1971.
[4] Shelley, Edmund Blunden, Readers Union, Collins, 1948, p. 282.
[5] ‘Adonais’, Shelley, Selected Poems, edited by Timothy Webb, J.M. Dent, p. 155.
Sources
Shelley, Poetical Works, Oxford Paperbacks, 1971
Shelley, Selected Poems, J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1977
Shelley, The Pursuit, Richard Holmes, Penguin Books, 1987
Being Shelley, Ann Wroe, Vintage Books, 2007
Shelley and His World, Claire Tomalin, Thames & Hudson, 1980
Shelley, Edmund Blunden, Collins, 1946
‘A Defence of Poetry’, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5428
Anthony Costello’s publications include: The Mask (Lapwing Publications), Angles & Visions (The High Window), I Freeze, Turn to Stone: The Poems of Vincent van Gogh (Poetry Salzburg), Picture, Mirror, World (Calder Valley Poetry) ; he has also translated Alain Fournier, Poems (Carcanet), and edited Four American Poets (The High Window). He co-founded and co-edited The High Window from 2016-2018. Some of his essays can be read at The Fortnightly Review.
