P.B. Shelley, “Ode to Liberty” (1820)

Jean-Pierre Houël, Prise de la Bastille (1789)

“Come thou [Liberty], but lead out of the inmost cave
Of man's deep spirit, as the morning-star
Beckons the Sun from the Eoan wave,
Wisdom. I hear the pennons of her car
Self-moving, like cloud charioted by flame;
Comes she not, and come ye not,
Rulers of eternal thought,
To judge, with solemn truth, life's ill-apportioned lot?
Blind Love, and equal Justice, and the Fame
Of what has been, the Hope of what will be?
O Liberty! if such could be thy name
Wert thou disjoined from these, or they from thee:
If thine or theirs were treasures to be bought
By blood or tears, have not the wise and free
Wept tears, and blood like tears?” (Lines 256-270)

Written in 1820, Shelley’s poem celebrates Liberty, a personified force that, after centuries of slumber, seems to be on the verge of reawakening at long last. While 1819 was a terrible year for reformers across Europe, 1820 brought new optimism: revolutions in Spain, Portugal, and Italy prompts Shelley to imagine the spread of Liberty further, across the world and into countries still under the yoke of tyranny. For Shelley, however, Liberty is not only a matter of representative government, fair pay, and impartial legal systems; it is also a state of mind. Beginning with a cave metaphor that might make us think of Plato’s famous allegory, Shelley imagines Liberty, leading the human spirit out of the shadows and into the light of wisdom, love, and hope—the qualities linked to human perseverance in the quest toward happiness.

But is the spread of freedom inevitable, according to Shelley’s poem? Think of how often Shelley gives us his picture of Liberty—what it is, when it appears—through questions: “Comes she not…?” While anticipated by Shelley, Liberty’s triumph is far from certain. After all, in the view of history presented in the poem, Liberty appears at several epochs—in classical Greece, the Roman Republic, and Saxon England—only to disappear once more. Written at a moment of tremendous upheaval in European history, Shelley’s poem captures the optimism that he and his fellow reformers experienced, but he never shies away from the vulnerability of it all. As his poem explores the struggle for freedom throughout history, it seems to be telling us that if the triumph of Liberty is not simply inevitable, the ongoing struggle to achieve and defend it becomes all the more important.

 

P.B. Shelley, “A New National Anthem” (1819 or 1820)

Nanine Vallain, Liberty (1793)

"God prosper, speed, and save,
God raise from England’s grave
Her murdered Queen!
Pave with swift victory
The steps of Liberty,
Whom Britons own to be
Immortal Queen…

[Bewilder] her enemies
In their own dark disguise,--
God save our Queen!
All earthly things that dare
Her sacred name to bear,
Strip them, as kings are, bare;
God save the Queen!

Be her eternal throne
Built in our hearts alone--
God save the Queen!
Let the oppressor hold
Canopied seats of gold;
She sits enthroned of old
O’er our hearts, Queen!”

Written in 1819 or early 1820, Shelley’s alternative national anthem marks a continuation of the strategies Shelley adopts in works like “Men of England: A Song” and “The Mask of Anarchy”: to write poetry in a “vernacular” style, adopting popular genres like the song to reach the kinds of lower-class readers who might not ordinarily read poetry. Far less dense and challenging than much of his other poetry, Shelley’s anthem is written in a shorter, bouncy metre and evokes the same patriotic emotions that most anthems stoke. But make no mistake: Shelley’s poem is no ordinary celebration of King and country!

The “monarch” celebrated here is not King George III, but “Liberty,” a personified presence that Shelley calls the only true ruler of Britain. Evoking the regicides recently experienced in England and France, Shelley claims that this “Queen” has lately been murdered at the hands of traitorous politicians attempting to curb the reform movement in Britain. But Liberty also lives in the hearts of freedom-loving Britons, which means that she cannot be stopped by shows of force. Thus, while Shelley reflects upon a recent turn for the worse in Britain’s state of political affairs, his poem also offers some consolation: if Liberty lives in the hearts and minds of British people, its reign is inevitable, at least in the long run. 

P.B. Shelley, “Sonnet: Political Greatness” (1820 or 1821)

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Antonio Joli, View of ... Benevento (1759)

“Nor happiness, nor majesty, nor fame,
Nor peace, nor strength, nor skill in arms or arts,
Shepherd those herds whom tyranny makes tame;
Verse echoes not one beating of their hearts,
History is but the shadow of their shame,
Art veils her glass, or from the pageant starts
As to oblivion their blind millions fleet,
Staining that Heaven with obscene imagery
Of their own likeness. What are numbers knit
By force or custom? Man who man would be,
Must rule the empire of himself; in it
Must be supreme, establishing his throne
On vanquished will, quelling the anarchy
Of hopes and fears, being himself alone.”

Shelley apparently wrote “Political Greatness” with Benevento in mind, an Italian city that briefly established itself as a republic between July 1820 and the spring of 1821. Whether Shelley wrote his poem before or after the fall of the republican city is an interesting conundrum, given the poem’s questioning attitude about the possibilities of political revolution. Do the people of Benevento embody Shelley’s portrait of successful revolutionaries, who must exercise self-awareness and mastery of their own will before they are able to create political change? Or does Benevento illustrate the failure that awaits spontaneous and disorganized mass uprisings?

Whatever the answer to this question, this sonnet certainly captures Shelley at a moment of political uncertainty. While 1820 was a fairly good year for progressives, witnessing successful reform movements in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Brazil, Shelley dedicates his poem to asking hard questions about the possibilities for achieving political change. Shelley doesn’t renounce the hope of revolution or reform; rather, he suggests that an inner revolution—a self-disciplining, whereby we are able to master our desires and better know ourselves—must take place before we are able to achieve widespread social change. Shelley seems to have understood a crucial lesson imparted by reformers from Socrates to William Godwin to Martin Luther King Jr.: that in a world in which power is deeply ingrained not only in social institutions but in the collective psyche, the effort to change minds is perhaps more important than the effort to change laws. 

P.B. Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind" (1819)

J.M.W. Turner, Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (1812)

“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!”

The opening stanza of Shelley’s poem “Ode to the West Wind” moves like a gust, pushing the reader through a rich assortment of images. We begin with the Wind itself, ushering in the Fall—the time of impending death in the natural world, where leaves fall from trees, black, red, and yellow, like the plague-stricken. The Wind puts to rest the forest’s seeds as well, although we learn that this death is only temporary: like the trumpets of the apocalypse described in Revelations, the wind, now returned in the Spring, blasts its “clarion” to usher in a second life. This is no Christian vision, however. As is so common in Shelley’s poetry, “Ode to the West Wind” introduces Christian symbolism only to subvert it: the supreme power to give and take life, to “destroy” and “preserve,” belongs solely to Nature and not to God. 

What else is going on in Shelley’s effort to make sense of the cyclical movement of the seasons and the elusive power of the Wind? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this Shelley classic!

P.B. Shelley, “Lines Written During the Castlereagh Administration” (1819-20)

Unknown Painter, “Lord Castlereagh, Marquess of Londonderry” (1809-10)

“Corpses are cold in the tomb; 
Stones on the pavement are dumb; 
Abortions are dead in the womb, 
And their mothers look pale—like the death-         white shore
Of Albion, free no more. 

Her sons are as stones in the way-- 
They are masses of senseless clay-- 
They are trodden, and move not away,-- 
The abortion with which SHE travaileth
Is Liberty, smitten to death. 

Then trample and dance, thou Oppressor! 
For thy victim is no redresser; 
Thou art sole lord and possessor
Of her corpses, and clods, and abortions—they     pave
Thy path to the grave. 

Hearest thou the festival din
Of Death, and Destruction, and Sin, 
And Wealth crying 'Havoc!' within? 
’Tis the bacchanal triumph that makes Truth dumb, 
Thine Epithalamium. 

Ay, marry thy ghastly wife! 
Let Fear and Disquiet and Strife
Spread thy couch in the chamber of Life! 
Marry Ruin, thou Tyrant! and Hell be thy guide
To the bed of the bride!”

Viscount Castlereagh, the British Secretary of State from 1812-22, casts a dark shadow in Shelley’s poetry. This is because Castlereagh lead some of the most pivotal—and controversial—foreign policy moves of Shelley’s era: in addition to breaking Irish independence movements and bringing the Celtic island under the dominion of the United Kingdom, Castlereagh spearheaded the work of restoration in the years following Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. Royal families reassumed positions of power, and with them came a new era in Europe, one committed to crushing the reform movements spurred by the French Revolution two decades earlier.

Shelley’s poem invokes a gristly image that captures this dispiriting moment in European history. Shelley describes “Albion” (that is, “England”) as a failed pregnancy, a symbol that evokes how optimism about a better life ahead can so swiftly transition toward despair about the future. England, a country formerly looked on as Europe’s most progressive country, now lies broken, her son, “Liberty,” dead in the womb. 

It’s worth comparing Shelley’s picture of England to William Blake’s “London” (1794), another poem that uses a “blasted” child and ailing mother to reflect on England’s uncertain future. Shelley was likely unfamiliar with Blake’s poem, but the similarities between their poetry is worth noting. Both poems reflect a fear experienced by many in this period: that decades of dearly-bought progress was on the brink of being dissolved by the kinds of backroom dealing that “makes Truth dumb” and spreads “Fear, Discomfort, and Strife.”

P.B. Shelley, from “A Defense of Poetry” (1821)

Alfred Clint, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1829)

“Poets… are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers… Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time.”

In his great essay “A Defense of Poetry,” Shelley gives us his famous definition of the poet: to be a poet is to represent a spirit of change, both within the world of letters and beyond it. Those who write verse are poets, of course, but poets also create in other ways: musicians, performers, sculptors, and painters all embody the force of poetry—that is to say, a kind of creativity that challenges and thereby inspires change.

Shelley returns to an ancient understanding of the poet as a prophet, one who, like the writer of Job or The Odyssey, was gifted with a rich and mysterious language from the gods. But Shelley’s prophet-poet is not literally given a glimpse into the future from on high, as a Biblical prophet would be. Rather, with his ear to the ground, the poet possesses a deep understanding of the world, and this gives him or her a sense of where their society is going. This, finally, is what makes the poet an ideal “legislator”: the poet’s deep knowledge both of human nature and the social conditions of his/her time means that their best gifts come in the form of social instruction and leadership. 

Shelley wrote at a time in which the value of what we now call “the arts” was questioned like never before. Up went the cries: what is the value of reading or writing something like poetry? Shouldn’t a young man like Shelley commit himself to something more socially beneficial and less self-indulgent? Shelley responds by claiming that in order for a society to function at its best, it requires the kind of creative voices that allows it to know itself, to be self-critical, and to change. 

P.B. Shelley, “One Word is Too Often Profaned” (1821)

George Clint, Jane Williams (c. 1822).

"One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it, 
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it; 
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother, 
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another. 

I can give not what men call love, 
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not,— 
The desire of the moth for the star, 
Of the night for the morrow, 
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?"

“One Word” was written for Jane Williams, a family friend with whom Shelley had become infatuated toward the end of his life. (Fun fact: Shelley’s boating companion on that ill-fated trip across the Gulf of Spezia was Edward Williams, Jane’s husband. He also drowned when their boat foundered in a storm.) The poem captures both the intensity and necessary secrecy of Shelley’s love: “love” is the “one word” Shelley refuses to use in the opening stanza both because it is often used too freely (and thus degraded) and because it might be dangerous: what if Jane “disdains” his avowal of love? What if there is something “profane” about how Shelley loves? We sense the claustrophobia of the poem, as Shelley struggles to give language to his feelings for a woman with whom he, Mary, and her husband Edward shared a home during the final period of his life.
The compromise, voiced in the poem’s second stanza, is platonic: “wilt thou accept,” Shelley asks Jane, “The worship the heart lifts above | And the Heavens reject not”? Jane becomes something like a muse, as Shelley voices his love in spiritual terms: it is now a form of devotion toward “something afar | From the sphere of our sorrow.”
This is part of our Tuesday Verse series. Commentary comes from Jonathan Kerr, who has recently completed his PhD in English at the University of Toronto with specialization in the Romantics.