Jon Kerr, Tuesday Verse, Shelley's Poetry
Graham Henderson
PB Shelley, “To S and C” (1819-20)

In 1820, Shelley began toying with the idea of publishing (as he put it) “a little volume of popular songs wholly political & destined to awaken & direct the imagination of the reformers.” As with other poems to be included in this collection, “To S. and C.” confronts some of the major events of the day with a bouncy, catchy rhythm, and it offers instruction through a collection of straightforward but powerful similes. Such a style of writing seems to affirm the view that England’s common people, and not just educated elites, have a part to play in the country’s reform movements.

PB Shelley, “To S and C” (1819-20)
Tuesday Verse, Shelley's Poetry, Shelley
Graham Henderson
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Men of England”

In Europe’s revolutionary era, the contest over hearts and minds was fought across many cultural arenas. We get a sense of this in “Men of England,” a poem written in the style of the popular songs that, in the England of Shelley’s day, would have been the stuff of riotous sing-alongs in pubs, fairs, and other centres of public life.

Tuesday Verse, Love's Philosophy, Jon Kerr
Graham Henderson
Percy Shelley, “Love’s Philosophy”

A cheeky seduction poem, “Love’s Philosophy” gives us a speaker who attempts to use his arts to capture the heart (and perhaps more) of a love interest: “look around at the world,” he says to his unnamed lover. “Everywhere, you see things coming together, unifying in matter and spirit. Isn’t it a crime against our nature not to do the same?” 
However, the poem doesn’t just showcase Shelley’s playful side. It demonstrates the immense influence that all things natural had on many writers of this time.

Percy Shelley, “Love’s Philosophy”
Jon Kerr, Tuesday Verse, Frankenstein
Graham Henderson
PB Shelley, Preface to Frankenstein

The Preface to Frankenstein—written by Percy, oddly enough—brings us back to the now legendary moment of inspiration that gave us Mary Shelley’s famous novel: vacationing at Lake Geneva with a circle of friends and fellow writers, the Shelleys are confined indoors due to inclement weather. Reading German horror stories by candlelight, the crew eventually settles on a competition proposed by Lord Byron. The competition is simple: who can write the best horror story? In the months and years ahead, Byron and Percy—the two literary heavyweights of the party—lose interest and take up other projects; Mary, meanwhile, sets to work on what will become Frankenstein, one of the most celebrated English novels of all time.

PB Shelley, Preface to Frankenstein
Jon Kerr, Tuesday Verse, Shelley's Poetry
Graham Henderson
P.B. Shelley, “To the Lord Chancellor”

As American’s go to the polls today in a series of epochal mid-term elections, Shelley’s To the Lord Chancellor seems a more than appropriate choice for our Tuesday Verse selection. As Timothy Webb once noted, politics was perhaps the consuming passion of Shelley’s life. On the 6 November 1819, right around the time he might have been writing this poem, Shelley wrote to his friends the Gisbornes saying, “I have deserted the odorous gardens of literature to journey across the great sandy desert of Politics; not, you may imagine, without the hope of finding some enchanted paradise.” Shelley was what was known as a perfectibilist, someone who believed in the perfectibility of humans. He even developed a sophisticated political and social theory to compliment this belief. This does NOT mean Shelley was a utopian - he emphatically was not. But he did believe in the gradual evolution of the human species toward something like perfection.

P.B. Shelley, “To the Lord Chancellor”

Liberty

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

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Nanine Vallain, Liberty (1793)

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. 

 

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