Loveliness; on this subject these poets can sing interminably with a sublimity that sometimes verges perilously on the ridiculous. 206-235. the brutal Celt. See note on Celtic Anarch, line 152. the sickle to the sword Lies unchanged. The imagery of lines 225230 seems to be suggested by Joel iii. 10-13. Hebrew poetry was a favorite study with Shelley. foison abundance; a fine old word, seldom used now except in poetry. 'Fusion' is a doublet of foison, and both are from the Latin 'fundere,' to pour. 236-284. Ezzelin. 'Ezzelino, a small, pale, wiry man, with terror in his face and enthusiasm for evil in his heart, lived a foe to luxury, cold to the pathos of children, dead to the enchantment of women. His one passion was the greed for power, heightened by the lust for blood. Originally a noble of the Veronese Marches, he founded his illegal authority upon the Captaincy of the Imperial party delegated to him by Frederick. Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Feltre and Belluno made him captain in the Ghibelline interest, conferring on him judicial as well as military supremacy. How he fearfully abused his power, how a crusade was preached against him, and how he died in silence, like a boar at bay, rending from his wounds the dressings that his foes had placed to keep him alive, are notorious matters of history .. by his absolute contempt of law, his inordinate cruelty, his prolonged massacres and his infliction of plagues upon whole peoples, Ezzelino established the ideal in Italy of a tyrant marching to his end by any means whatever.' — Symonds : Renaissance in Italy; i. 107-108. Padua. The University of Padua was a famous institution of learning as early as the thirteenth century. Galileo was Professor of Mathematics there from 1592– 1610. 6 285-319. an air-dissolvéd star, that mingles fragrance (with light) is certainly a false image; or is this one of those impressionist' lines that we are to-day so loudly called upon to admire? Lines 315-319 seem to express about as definite a religious belief as Shelley ever attained to. 320-334. that silent isle, must be the hopeful mood that came to the poet, this beautiful autumn morning among the hills. The remembered agonies of Shelley's life were neither few nor far between, but their causes lay chiefly in his own ill-regulated impulses. 335-374. This is certainly a lovely picture of the Ideal Life for humanity, but if we try to apply this Ideal to life on Earth we find at once it is applicable only to life in Cloud-Land. Matthew Arnold has summed up this failing of Shelley's in one telling sentence: 'The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing.' In her preface to the 1839 edition of her husband's poems, Mrs. Shelley wrote: 'There are others, such as the Ode to the Skylark and The Cloud, which, in the opinion of many critics, bear a purer poetical stamp than any other of his productions. They were written as his mind prompted: listening to the carolling of the bird, aloft in the azure sky of Italy, or marking the cloud as it sped across the heavens while he floated in his boat on the Thames.' There are few, perhaps, who will not agree with Mrs. Shelley in thinking that this poem, the Ode to a Skylark [and the Ode to the West Wind] 'bear a purer poetical stamp than any other of his productions.' Notice the exquisitely light effect of the anapæstic movement and how it fits the subject. For rack (33) in the sense of 'floating vapor,' compare Shakespeare's use of this word in The Tempest, iv. 1, 159. TO A SKYLARK. 'In the spring we spent a week or two near Leghorn, borrowing the house of some friends who were absent on a journey to England. - It was on a beautiful summer evening, while wandering among the lanes whose myrtle-hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the skylark which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems.'- Mrs. Shelley's Note on the Poems of 1820. 1-5. The lark, when addressed, is supposed to be already high in the heavens. 6-10. The punctuation in our text follows that of the first edition: Like a cloud of fire, then, refers to the ascending motion of the bird and not to its appearance. If, as some editors propose, we remove the semi-colon from the end of the eighth line to the end of the seventh, we get a meaning at variance with that of the third line. 11-60. In these lines we see illustrated Courthope's remark: 'If greatness in poetry consisted in a succession of dazzling images and a rapid flow of splendid verse, Shelley would be entitled to almost the first place in English literature.' When we read the Prometheus Unbound, we see the other side of the shield and understand what the critic means when he adds: But in all the higher qualities of epic and dramatic construction, his work is defective.' 61-90. Sprite (61), an archaism for 'spirit;' so used also in Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, 371. knew (80): ungrammatical. 91-105. This passage Bagehot' compares with the fifth and sixth stanzas of Keats' Ode to a Nightingale, to illustrate the difference between the Classical Imagination and the Romantic Fancy. 'When 1 See Shelley Bibliography, p. 116. we speak of this distinction, we seem almost to be speaking of the distinction between ancient and modern literature. The characteristic of the classical literature is the simplicity with which the imagination appears in it; that of modern literature is the profusion with which the most various adornments of the accessory fancy are thrown and lavished upon it. . . . With a single soaring effort imagination may reach her end; if she fail, no fancy can help her; if she succeed, there will be no petty accumulations of insensible circumstances in a region far above all things. Shelley's excellence in the abstract lyric is almost another phrase for the simplicity of his impulsive imagination.' For a further illustration, compare the concluding stanza of Shelley's poem with the concluding stanza of Coleridge's Kubla Khan. SONNET.—TO THE NILE. In February, 1818, Keats, Hunt and Shelley agreed each to write a Sonnet on the Nile. It was long supposed that the Ozymandias Sonnet was Shelley's contribution on this occasion, but in 1876 it was pretty well established that this Sonnet To the Nile-is the one in question (Forman, i. 410). - Keats' Sonnet is as follows: Son of the old moon-mountains African! Green rushes like our rivers, and dost taste The pleasant sun-rise. Green Isles hast thou too, And to the sea as happily dost haste. The thought in Shelley's concluding couplet is repeated from his Laon and Cynthia, vi. 41: love had nursed us in the haunts Where knowledge, from its secret source, enchants Ere yet its gathered flood feeds human wants As the great Nile feeds Egypt; ever flinging Light on the woven boughs which o'er its waves are swinging. SONNET-OZYMANDIAS. 'After all, it is something to have seen those red waters. It is only low green banks, mud-huts and palm-clumps, with the sun setting red hehind them, and the great, dull sinuous river flashing here and there in the light. But it is the Nile, the old Saturn of a stream —a divinity yet, though younger river gods have deposed him. Hail! O venerable father of crocodiles! At dawn in the morning we were on deck; the character had not altered of the scenery about the river. Vast flat stretches of land were on either side, recovering from the subsiding inundations; near the mud villages, a country ship or two was roosting under the date trees; the landscape everywhere stretching away level and lonely. In the sky the east was a long streak of greenish light, which widened and rose until it grew to be of an opal color, then orange; then, behold, the round red disc of the sun rose flaming up above the horizon. All the waters blushed as he got up; the deck was all red; the steersman gave his helm to another, and prostrated himself on the deck, and bowed his head eastward and praised the maker of the sun; it shone on his white turban as he was kneeling and gilt [?] up his bronze face and sent his blue shadow over the glowing deck. The distances, which had been gray, were now purple; and the broad stream was illuminated. As the sun rose higher, the morning blush faded away; the sky was cloudless and pale and the river and the surrounding landscape were dazzlingly clear. . . It is poor work, this landscape painting in print. Shelley's two Sonnets are the best views that I know of the Pyramids - better than the reality; for a man may lay down the book, and in quiet fancy conjure up a picture out of these magnificent words, which sha'n't be disturbed by any pettinesses or mean realities.' - Thackeray; Cornhill to Cairo, xv. Lines 6-8 are not clear. The meaning seems to be: The passions of Ozymandias (stamped on the broken statue) survive the hand of the sculptor that mocked (imitated) them and the heart of the vain-glorious king that nourished them. WORDSWORTH. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH was born in Cumberland in 1770, fifteen months before the death of Gray. His family was of that upper middle class, the backbone of English society, which has furnished the mother-country her greatest poets, statesmen, sailors and men of science (Shakespeare and Milton, Pitt and Gladstone, Nelson and Rodney, Newton and Darwin). The beauty of the lonely Cumberland hills sank deep into his boyish heart; deep sank also the spirit of reverence which men of medieval Cambridge lovingly expressed in That branching roof1 Self-poised and scooped into ten thousand cells, Where light and shade repose, where music dwells After taking his degree in 1791, he travelled in France, - sympathizing at first with the French Revolutionists, but soon recoiling in horror at their excesses. A small legacy enabled him to devote himself to literature; the result was the Lyrical Ballads,' published with Coleridge in 1798. From this time on, for nearly fifty years, Wordsworth made his home among the Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland; here it was he grew into closer and closer communion with Nature, interpreting her every mood and hearing oftentimes The still sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. to add sunshine Such a life brings with it the bliss of solitude, but he who lives it cannot touch the depths and heights of passion explored by those who live in the great world and are themselves a part of the great deeds they sing. Nor did Wordsworth mistake his calling; he states clearly that his office is to daylight by making the happy happier, to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous.' In 1813 Wordsworth settled at the home indissolubly associated with his name- - Rydal Mount. He was now forty-three years of age and nearly all his best work was done. After this there came to him, slowly but surely, the reverence and affection of all that was best in England · -but the fountains of poetic 1 King's College Chapel. Wordsworth was a student at St. John's. |