Shelley, Percy Bysshe

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LIFE

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792 at Field Place, near Horsham in Sussex, and he

was the eldest son of Sir Timothy and Elizabeth Shelley. His grandfather received a

baronetcy in 1806 and his father, Timothy Shelley, was a member of Parliament and a

country gentleman. He was brought up in privileged circumstances, attending Syon House

Academy in 1802 and Eton in 1804, where he discovered the works of William Godwin, a

philosopher, in which he became a fervent believer; the young man embraced the ideals of

liberty and equality espoused by the French Revolution, and devoted his considerable

passion and persuasive power to convincing others of the rightness of his beliefs. In the

autumn of 1810, Shelley matriculated at University College, Oxford, but the next year he

The Necessity of Atheism

was expelled over the publication of pamphlet entitled because

atheism was an outrageous idea in religiously conservative nineteenth-century England.

In August 1811 he eloped with Harriet Westbrook, whom he married despite his father’s

opinion. As years wore on, relations between Harriet and Shelley deteriorated seriously,

even if they had a daughter and not long after, he fell in love with another woman, Mary

Wollstonecraft, whom he was eventually able to marry, and who is now remembered

Frankenstein.

primarily as the author of In 1816, the Shelleys traveled to Switzerland to

meet Lord Byron and the two men became close friends. Here Shelley composed the

“Hymn to intellectual beauty” and “Mont Balnc”.

In 1818 tehy moved to Italy, tehy stayed in Rome and in Pisa, where they also formed a

circle of English expatriates in, traveling throughout Italy; during this time Shelley wrote

most of his finest lyric poetry, including the immortal "Ode to the West Wind" , "To a

Skylark" and “Adonais”, an elegy for Keats. Shelley’s works from this period includes “The

Cenci” and “The mask of anarchy”, a political protest written after the Peterloo massacre.

Shelley drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in 1822. After his body washed ashore near

Viareggio, it was cremated according to the dictates of Italian law.

Shelley belongs to the younger generation of English Romantic poets. Where the

older generation was marked by simple ideals and a reverence for nature, the poets of the

younger generation (which also included John Keats and Lord Byron) came to be known

for their sensuous aestheticism, their explorations of intense passions, their political

radicalism, and their tragically short lives. They looked at nature primarily as a realm of

overwhelming beauty and aesthetic pleasure. Shelley tends to invoke nature as a sort of

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supreme metaphor for beauty, creativity, and expression. This means that most of Shelley's

poems about art rely on metaphors of nature as their means of expression: the West Wind

in "Ode to the West Wind" becomes a symbol of the poetic faculty spreading Shelley's

words like leaves among mankind, and the skylark in "To a Skylark" becomes a symbol of

the purest, most joyful, and most inspired creative impulse. The skylark is not a bird, it is a

"poet hidden." To Shelley himself, “Nature’s vast frame” and “the web of human things”

were a problem of which he was assured that he had the key.Both the Shelleyan and the

Keatsian vision of beauty are mirrored, finally, in the poetic instrument of expression itself,

in their speech and verse. Image and personification, condemned by Wordsworth,

reappear in unsurpassed subtlety and splendour. But both are masters, also, of a noble and

passionate simplicity. And, in both, the inner rhythm of thought is accompanied and borne

out by new and exquisite rhythms of musical verse. Shelley believes that “nothing exists

but as it is perceived,” and reduces mind to a merely perceiving power; but, in another

context, he can assert that man has “a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and

dissolution”. The author was clearly ripe for Plato, and the ardent Greek studies of the

following winter with Hogg and Peacock brought his later Platonism perceptibly nearer.

To an extent, the intensity of feeling emphasized by Romanticism meant that the

movement was always associated with youth, and because Byron, Keats, and Shelley died

young (and never had the opportunity to sink into conservatism and complacency), they

have attained iconic status as the representative tragic Romantic artists. Shelley's joy, his

magnanimity, his faith in humanity, and his optimism are unique among the Romantics;

his expression of those feelings makes him one of the early nineteenth century's most

significant writers in English.

MAIN WORKS

The Necessity of Atheism: a pamphlet where he explain that there isn’t rational

• proof on the existence of God. (1811)

The Cenci: a drama inspired by the story of Beatrice Cenci; this is above all a hymn

• to heroic resistance to tyranny. (1820)

Ode to the West Wind To a Skylark

and (1820)

• A defence of Poetry: a long essay on the important of poetry. (1821)

• Adonais: an elegy on the death of Keats. (1821)

•

A Defence of Poetry,

In he explains that he believes that poetry expands and nurtures the

imagination, and that the imagination enables sympathy, and that sympathy is the basis of

moral behavior. His belief that poetry can contribute to the moral and social improvement

of mankind impacts his poems in several ways.

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TO A SKYLARK

AIL to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert,

That from Heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher

From the earth thou springest

Like a cloud of fire;

The blue deep thou wingest,

And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightning

Of the sunken sun,

O'er which clouds are bright'ning,

Thou dost float and run;

Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

The pale purple even

Melts around thy flight;

Like a star of Heaven,

In the broad daylight

Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,

Keen as are the arrows

Of that silver sphere

Whose intense lamp narrows

In the white dawn clear

Until we hardly see -- we feel, that it is there.

All the earth and air

With thy voice is loud,

As, when night is bare,

From one lonely cloud

The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed.

What thou art we know not;

What is most like thee?

From rainbow clouds there flow not

Drops so bright to see

As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

Like a poet hidden

In the light of thought,

Singing hymns unbidden,

Till the world is wrought

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

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Like a high-born maiden

In a palace tower,

Soothing her love-laden

Soul in secret hour

With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:

Like a glow-worm golden

In a dell of dew,

Scattering unbeholden

Its aërial hue

Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view:

Like a rose embowered

In its own green leaves,

By warm winds deflowered,

Till the scent it gives

Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-wingèd thieves.

Sound of vernal showers

On the twinkling grass,

Rain-awakened flowers,

All that ever was,

Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass:

Teach us, Sprite or Bird,

What sweet thoughts are thine:

I have never heard

Praise of love or wine

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus Hymeneal,

Or triumphal chant,

Matched with thine would be all

But an empty vaunt,

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What objects are the fountains

Of thy happy strain?

What fields, or waves, or mountains?

What shapes of sky or plain?

What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

With thy clear keen joyance,

Languor cannot be:

Shadow of annoyance

Never came near thee:

Thou lovest -- but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

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Waking or asleep,

Thou of death must deem

Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream,

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet, if we could scorn

Hate, and pride, and fear;

If we were things born

Not to shed a tear,

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures

Of delightful sound,

Better than all treasures

That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,

Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow

The world should listen then -- as I am listening now.

Form

The eccentric, songlike, five-line stanzas of "To a Skylark"--all twenty-one of them--

follow the same pattern: the first four lines are metered in trochaic trimeter, the fifth in

iambic hexameter (a line which can also be called an Alexandrine). The rhyme scheme of

each stanza is extremely simple: ABABB.

Summary

The speaker, addressing a skylark, says that it is a "blithe Spirit" rather than a bird,

for its song comes from Heaven, and from its full heart pours "profuse strains of

unpremeditated art." The skylark flies higher and higher, "like a cloud of fire" in the blue

sky, singing as it flies. In the "golden lightning" of the sun, it floats and runs, like "an

unbodied joy." As the skylark flies higher and higher, the speaker loses sight of it, but is

still able to hear its "shrill delight," which comes down as keenly as moonbeams in the

"white dawn," which can be felt even when they are not seen. The earth and air ring with

the skylark's voice, just as Heaven overflows with moonbeams when the moon shines out

from behind "a lonely cloud."

The speaker says that no one knows what the skylark is, for it is unique: even

"rainbow clouds" do not rain as brightly as the shower of melody that pours from the

skylark. The bird is "like a poet hidden / In the light of thought," able to make the world

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