Word Gems: Poetry: Shelley

(from Adonais, Shelley's elegy on the death of John Keats)

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep--
He hath awakened from the dream of life--
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings.--We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;
Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

He lives, he wakes--'tis Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais.--Thou young Dawn,
Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone;
Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan!
Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air,
Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown
O'er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare
Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!

He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

He is a portion of loveliness
Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear
His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there,
All new successions to the forms they wear;
Torturing the unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light.

The splendours of the firmament of time
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb,
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
And love and life contend in it, for what
Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.--Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!--Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?
Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here
They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!
A light is passed from the revolving year,
And man, and woman; and what still is dear
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.
The soft sky smiles,--the low wind whispers near:
'Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither,
No more let Life divide what Death can join together.

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

The breath whose might I have invoke in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

For all their being yoked together in the minds of the public, the two are quite different poets, and were critical of one another…

For all their being yoked together in the minds of the public, the two are quite different poets, and were critical of one another's work, writes MATTHEW SWEENEY

KEATS AND Shelley were not friends. Well, they saw a fair bit of each other in 1817, before Shelley left England, but as fellow poet Leigh Hunt said: "Keats did not take to Shelley as kindly as Shelley did to him." They were quite critical of each other's work, too, initially at least. Shelly wrote to Keats, after reading his first publication Endymion, admonishing him: "In poetry I have sought to avoid system and mannerism." Keats replied tartly: "You might curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore."

For all their being yoked together in the mind of the public, they are quite different poets. Shelley was an idealist, interested in politics and philosophy.

His wife, Mary Shelley, added a note to Shelley's mythical long poem Prometheus Unbound: "Shelley believed that mankind had only to will that there would be no evil, and there would be none."

There is often a great sweep to his poetry – Hymn to Intellectual Beauty begins like this: "The awful shadow of some unseen Power / Floats though unseen among us."

Indeed! His passionately indignant response to the Peterloo massacre of 1819, The Mask of Anarchy, included these lines very early on:

His last poem, published posthumously, the terza rima, Dante-influenced The Triumph of Life, earned these words in a review by the critic Hazlitt: "The poem entitled The Triumph of Life is in fact a new and terrific Dance of Death."

When Keats died a year before him, Shelley produced a pastoral elegy, Adonais, modelled on Greek poems of the second century BC. It includes some stunning writing, such as:

His famous sonnet, Ozymandias, is one of the most loved poems in the language – and, unbelievably, emerged from a writing game where Shelley, Keats and Leigh Hunt proposed a sonnet on a set subject, the Nile.

I cannot leave Shelley without mentioning his great affinity with the natural world – look at his swooping Ode to the West Wind and the wonderfully inventive yet exact The Cloud, where a cloud speaks:

KEATS WAS AFTER a more unobtrusive poetry that had no palpable design on the reader. His work is known for the startling accuracy of its imagery, and his talent for evoking atmosphere. The poem that propelled him to attention was the deft sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, with its terrific ending:

Despite the notice this poem attracted, Keats had a rocky ride at the beginning. Endymion got some harsh reviews. The Quarterly Review, for example, described it as:

"Cockney poetry; which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language."

Things improved, fortunately, and Keats went on to write in the spring of 1819 the dense, rich odes that made his name: Ode to Psyche, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, and the slightly later To Autumn:

It was another kind of poem, however, that released these – that shook him out of a melancholy that had left him listless the previous winter. I'm speaking of the spooky vampire ballad La Belle Dame sans Merci that begins with:

Note the telling adverb – and later on, when the knight has a vision of previous victims of the femme fatale, this is pointed out again:

Bram Stoker clearly drew on this to create the female vampires in Dracula. Keats has another vampire poem, Lamia, an exuberant narrative written in slinky rhyming couplets, where a young man falls in love with a supernatural woman, who at the beginning of the poem is in the form of a beautiful snake, and entreats the god Hermes to release her:

Hermes does, and it turns out bad, but the poem is a sizzling read. Check it out.