SONG LYRICS AND NOTES
Many a Green Isle
Sources: Lines written in the Euganean Hills Stanzas written in dejection, near Naples, Hellas
In the deep wide sea of misery Or the mariner worn, and wan Never thus could voyage on Day and night, and night and day Drifting on his dreary way
Nor peace within, nor calm around Nor that content surpassing wealth The sage in meditation found And walked with inward glory crowned
Hope lay coffined with despair Yet were truth a sacred lie Love were lust, if liberty Lent not life its soul of light Hope its iris of delight Truth its prophets robe to wear Love its power to give and bear
In the deep wide sea of misery Or the mariner worn, and wan Never thus could voyage on.
Shelley’s years in Italy were marked by personal tragedy, and the main chorus of this song was written in Este near Venice, some months after his arrival in March 1818. The death of his young daughter Clara in Venice had left him and Mary shattered. The Euganean hills (depicted - with its 'green isles' - above) would suggest a metaphor of consolation.
The lines written in Naples were also written at a time of some personal difficulty, which scholars have not been able to fathom although it may be connected with his mysterious `Neapolitan charge’. But the final lines from Hellas reveal Shelley’s recourse to secular redemptive ideals based on liberty; he would not agree that a decline in orthodox religious beliefs would necessarily lead to social or moral decline.Rise like Lions
Sources: Song to the Men of England, The Mask of Anarchy
People of England wherefore plough For the Lords who lay ye low ? Wherefore weave with toil and care The rich robes your tyrants wear?
The seeds ye sow another reaps The wealth ye find, another heaps The robes ye weave another wears The arms ye forge another bears
Wherefore feed and clothe and save From the cradle to the grave These ungrateful drones who would Drain your sweat, nay drink your blood Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you Ye are many they are few. Ye are many they are few.
The political situation in Shelley's time was one of deadlock, with the landowning classes monopolising political power and fearful that the slightest reform would usher in violent revolution on the French model. Changing social patterns, with Britain moving from a predominantly agricultural society to an urban industrialising order, meant that there was a new and increasingly literate – but entirely disenfranchised – urban population.
Shelley's lyrics, written in 1819, see him using a popular ballad form to reach this new audience.
In his 'Song to the Men of England' he brilliantly critiques the economic injustices of the time while the final verse from 'The Mask of Anarchy' sees him trying to bond popular energies into a united force.
As the Chartist Circular of 19th October 1839 put it: 'He wrote to teach his injured countrymen the great laws of union, and the strength of the passive resistance'. Shelley sent The Mask of Anarchy to his editor friend Leigh Hunt but he did not publish it until after the Great Reform Bill in 1832. Shelley's other post-Peterloo lyrics, which included his 'Song to the Men of England', were not published during his lifetime. They had to wait till 1839, when Mary published an (almost) complete edition of his work. Wild Spirit(A storm gathers over Florence)
Source: the Ode to the West Wind
Wild spirit, which art moving everywhere Destroyer and Preserver, hear O hear! A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee: tameless and swift and proud.
O wild West Wind, thou breath of autumn's being The leaves are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing Scatter as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words amongst mankind!
Wild spirit, which art moving everywhere Destroyer and Preserver, hear O hear! Scatter as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words amongst mankind! After completing the Mask of Anarchy and the Song to the Men of England in Livorno
Shelley and Mary moved to Florence, where he wrote the Ode to the West Wind.
Now childless following their eldest son William's death earlier in the year,
Shelley found himself burdened by a range if other troubles:
the Peterloo massacre and its implications, a savage attack on him in a magazine review,
and Mary Shelley's natural depression at the loss of both Clara and William.
The fragments he wrote in the days leading up his composition of his Ode see him
wrestling with the personal issues that these had raised; the Ode showed him
rising above a purely personal perspective and incorporating such concerns
into a broader and forward-looking narrative that included
the future of humanity and the role of his own work in bringing about social change.
On the way from his apartment to the park where he wrote his poem
he would have passed the medieval slum dwellings that surrounded the Duomo;
the plight of the poor found its way into the work when he conflated the sight of the autumn leaves
being driven across the forest floor with the conditions they had to endure.
He gave the leaves the colours of humanity
- 'yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red/ Pestilence stricken multitudes',
and showed that he had a global vision for humanity and its welfare
when he wrote in his Ode to Liberty
'What if earth can clothe and feed/Amplest millions at their need?'
The World's Great Age
Sources: Hellas Prometheus Unbound, Act III; The Question Prose: Lines written among the Euganean Hills
The world's great age begins anew The golden years return; The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn.
Heaven smiles, and faiths and Empires gleam; Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
The loathsome mask has fallen; The man remains King over himself Free from guilt and pain.
Women frank and beautiful and kind; Looking emotions once they feared to feel Speaking the wisdom once they dared not speak Changed to all which once they dared not be.
I dreamed that as I wandered by the way Bare winter suddenly was changed to spring.
Let the tyrant rule The desert he has made Let the free possess The paradise they claim Where all shall live As equals and as friends; And the world grow young again.
The world's great age begins anew The golden years return; The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn.
This song gathers together Shelley's utopian verses from a variety of sources. Matthew Arnold derided Shelley as an ‘ineffectual angel’ but modern historians have shown how his visionary verses made a significant contribution to the attainment of universal suffrage in Britain through their influence on key groups like the Chartists and the Suffragettes.
Part of his response to Peterloo was to offer an utopian and forward-looking agenda, particularly in the last Act of Prometheus Unbound which he also completed in Florence. He understood the value of a vision, but saw its achievement as subject to 'the difficult and unbending realities of actual life'. As he put it to Leigh Hunt in the dark days after the Peterloo massacre: 'You know my principles incite me to take all the good I can get in politics, for ever aspiring to something more. I am one of those whom nothing will fully satisfy, but who is ready to be partially satisfied by all that is practicable'.
Spirit of Delight
Source: From an (untitled) Song
Rarely, rarely comest thou Spirit of Delight! Wherefore hast thou left me now Many a day and night? Spirit false thou hast forgot All but those who need thee not.
I love all thou lovest Spirit of delight ! The fresh earth in new leaves dressed And the starry night Autumn evening and the morn When the golden mists are born.
I love Love - though he has wings And like light can flee, But above all other things Spirit I love thee – Thou art love and life ! oh come Make once more my heart thy home. This lyric is about being in what Shelley called being in an 'interval of inspiration'. Yet it reminds you of the existence of a 'spirit of delight' and its importance, and so achieves a positive emotional effect. 'Spirit of Delight' adds in the introspective side of Shelley's work and shows how he examined emotional states. It's edited down from eight verses to three, with verse one finishing with two lines from verse two. Heart of HeartsSources: Dante's sonnet for Guido Cavalcanti (translated by PBS), Epipsychidion, Lines for Emilia Viviani
Ah, my song; I fear but few Fitly shall conceive thy reasoning Of such hard matter doth thou entertain...
Amongst enchanted islands of sunlit lawn In the clear golden prime of my youth's dawn There was a being who my spirit oft Met on its visioned wanderings far aloft
As one sandalled with plumes of fire I sprang towards the lodestar of my desire In many mortal forms I rashly sought The shadow of that idol of my thought
I never was attached to that great sect Whose doctrine is that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend And all the rest to oblivion commend
There was a being who my spirit oft Met on its visioned wanderings far aloft Amongst enchanted islands of sunlit lawn In the clear golden prime of my youth's dawn
The clear brow, the amorous lips The eyes where past time reposes These are images, images of her The fragrance, yet still I seek the roses
Henry Salt, author of Shelley: poet and pioneer, called Epipsychidion 'the despair of the critics' and it doesn't have the cohesion of Shelley's greatest work: it blends courtly love, autobiography, sexual and platonic passion and a philosophy of love. I would defend Epipsychidion though on the grounds that it fulfils the old maxim: 'Know yourself'. Shelley wrote to a friend shortly before his death that he could not now bring himself to look at it, but that 'it will tell you something' about 'what I am and have been'. 'I think one is always in love with something or another', he added; 'the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal'. In the early 19th century divorce was virtually impossible and Shelley was expected to 'marry well' for the sake of the family fortunes; his father told him he would provide for as many illegitimate children as he cared to father but would never forgive a 'misalliance'. Husbands had complete control over any financial assets the wife brought to the marriage, and women who had sexual relationships before or outside marriage were written off as fallen women. At a dance in Horsham Shelley had deliberately danced with a girl so regarded. Shelley's championing of free love was really a plea that people should be free to realise themselves in this life with who they loved, rather than be stifled by law and convention. Virginia Woolf wrote: 'Shelley, both as son and as husband, fought for reason and freedom in private life, and his experiments, disastrous as they were in many ways, have helped us to greater sincerity and happiness in our own conflicts'. Immortal DeitySources: Queen Mab (adapted from notes) The Defence of Poetry; Immortal Deity.
There is no God; Or rather, there is no creative God. The hypothesis of a pervading spirit, Co-eternal with the universe Remains unshaken.
This power arises from within: Poetry redeems from decay The visitations of the divinity in man.
Oh thou immortal deity Whose throne is in the depth of human thought I do adjure thy power and thee; By all that man may be, by all that he is not By all that he has been and yet must be !
An important part of Shelley's life, work and career is the challenge he threw out to conventional religious orthodoxy. up a gauntlet, in defiance of injustice' he told Trelawny. Though he respected Jesus of Nazareth as a teacher and moralist, he rejected the mythological element and the Pauline superstructure of orthodox Christianity. Nor did he believe in what he calls here a 'creative god', i.e. a protective, caring/angry paternal god; he was consistent in attacking this Judeo-Christian model. The result was that he looked elsewhere for sources of morality - substituting what he regarded as innate qualities of benevolence and love of justice and liberty that were inherent in people.
This song with lyrics from Queen Mab, A Defence of Poetry and a fragment from his later years in Ialy, expresses a tentative sense of a spirituality bound up with human potential – 'what men call God' being a kind of spirit of wisdom/justice/liberty/creativity/poetry that can visit anyone.The line referring to 'the hypothesis of a pervading spirit, co-eternal with the universe' may have been a reference to Sir William Jones's description of Indian Vedantic philosophy. His earlier poem 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty' ploughs the same furrow as this. Shelley took the phrase 'Intellectual Beauty' from Mary Wollstonecraft who had written that women were primarily valued for their 'soft bewitching beauty' – actually, she wrote, there is something called 'intellectual beauty' as well. The 'Hymn to Intellectual beauty' refers to a time in boyhood when, as Shelley put it, 'thy shadow fell on me'; he added: 'I vowed that I would dedicate my powers To thee and thine – have I not kept the vow?'
Paradise of Exiles
Sources: The Boat on the Serchio, Julian and Maddalo Prose: Fragment on Beauty, Hellas, Prometheus Unbound ms. fragment, Adonais
Day has awakened all things that be; The lark and the thrush and the swallow free; The stars burn out in the clear blue air The thin white moon lies withering there.
Thou paradise of exiles, Italy ! A heron comes sailing over me
Worlds on worlds are rolling ever From creation to decay; Like the bubbles on a river Sparkling, bursting, borne away
Green and azure wanderer Happy globe of land and air
The One remains, the many change and pass Life, like a dome of many coloured glass Stains the white radiance of eternity
This song consists of lines from Shelley's final years in Italy, almost all composed in or around Pisa. One of his boating expeditions during the summer of 1821 is described in 'The Boat on the Serchio'. The famous 'paradise of exiles' line comes from Julian and Maddalo, written two years previously in Venice; the line about the heron comes from a piece of prose written during another of Shelley's boat trips. The lines on the earth – 'green and azure wanderer' – owe something to his fluency in Greek: the Greeks called the planets 'wanderers' – the vagabonds of the solar system.. The Pine ForestSources: The Indian Serenade; The Pine Forest of the Cascine near Pisa; When the lamp is shattered; To Jane: The Recollection
I arise from dreams of thee In the first sweet sleep of night; When the winds are breathing low And the stars are shining bright; I arise from dreams of thee And a spirit in my feet Has led me who knows how ? To thy chamber window, Sweet!
We wandered to the pine forest That skirts the ocean's foam The lightest wind was in its nest The tempest in its home How calm it was, the silence there By such a chain was bound That even the busy woodpecker Made (it) stiller by its sound.
Love's passions will rock thee Like the storms rock the ravens on high Bright reason will mock thee Like the sun from a wintry sky; Though thou art ever fair and kind The forests ever green, Less oft is peace in Shelley's mind Than calm in waters seen
The final two verses belong to the last months of Shelley's life; Verse 1 was written in Florence in 1819. The pine forest on the coast about 12 miles from Pisa - visible from the air when flying into Pisa - was one of Shelley's writing haunts: verse two commemorates a still day in February 1822 when Shelley, Mary and Jane went walking there. The sea has receded a mile or two since Shelley's time. The final verse begins with four lines from 'When the lamp is shattered'. That late lyric begins unseen with a shining lamp, perhaps the radiance of a love relationship. It indicates how sorrowful Shelley had become about love that the lamp is shattered at the outset of the poem. Maybe this reflected the emotional distance that had entered his marriage to Mary, largely due to the loss of their children; he seemed to be trying to recreate that emotional bond with other women like Emilia Viviani or Jane Williams. This is what drives his final love lyrics in Pisa and Lerici; the tone of regret in the final four lines hints at the difficulties. The Triumph of LifeShelley's last house, the Casa Magni in San Terenzo, Lerici and the view from its balcony
From The Triumph of Life
Swift as a spirit Hastening to his task Of glory and of good; The sun sprang forth Rejoicing in his splendour.
Before me fled the night Behind me rose the day, The deep was at my feet And heaven above my head When a strange trance over my fancy grew Which was not slumber And then a vision on my brain was rolled ...
Methought I sate beside a public way Thick strewn with summer dust And a great stream of people there Was hurrying to and fro Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam Yet none seemed to know Whither he went Or whence he came Or why he made one of the multitude
Struck to the heart by this sad pageantry Then what is life I cried ......
This song amounts to a bit of creative editing – a poem of 544 lines being edited down to about 14 ! It examines the difficulties of living an ethically ideal existence, or achieving self knowledge, with the poem maintaining that most, even Shelley's admired Plato, fall by the wayside – betrayed by 'the mutiny within'. In the poem Shelley meets the figure of Rousseau who undertakes to explain the vision to him: it's interesting to compare this with World War One poet Wilfred Owen's poem 'Strange Meeting' which uses the same device and has much the same tone as The Triumph of Life. Owen was highly influenced by Shelley's view of the role of the poet; he was reading 'plenty of Shelley' just before his death.
To Jane
The keen stars were twinkling,
From the very last weeks of Shelley's life, a recollection of an evening on the balcony of the Casa Magni. From the same notebook that contained Shelley's draft of The Triumph of Life, its mood has been described as 'the desire for an impoossible indefinite prolongation of fleeting intervals of beauty and joy or regret for their passing'. (Nora Crook, The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume 7) The Funeral
Lyrics by John Webster
The quarantine officers stopped me And sent me back to the quay; Nonetheless Shelley and Williams Kept heading out to sea
I watched till they disappeared into the haze Then went down to my cabin to sleep; I was woken by thunder and lightning Coming crashing down over the deep.
And when the storm had cleared away I looked where their boat had last been Then I scanned the entire horizon But they were nowhere to be seen.
(Mary Shelley: 'With us it was stormy all day and we did not at all suppose that they could put to sea …. Next day it rained and was calm – the sky wept on their graves…')
Two weeks on I was cantering over The Mediterranean sands; Despair in the pit of my stomach And sweat in the palms of my hands. I was riding along for miles and for miles I was brought up short when I saw; The lifeless body of Shelley Lying there on the shore.
I rode back to Lerici And there told Mary and Jane That Shelley and Ned had been taken from them By the sea and the wind and the rain Then I built an iron furnace And carried it down to the shore Prepared the cremation of Shelley As a crowd gathered silent in awe.
The air seemed to quiver and glisten Twixt the sea and the Apennine; Over his burning body I poured Frankincense, salt and wine. 'My dear Trelawny' said Byron Breaking the funeral's spell; 'I knew that you were a pagan But you're a pagan priest as well !'
But not till the evening was on us Was his body consumed on the pyre All was consumed, except for his heart Which I snatched from out of the fire. And Mary is left with his papers, And a question; she wonders how long It will take for the world to realise What it lost in this bright child of song.
This song, sung by guest vocalist Keith Parker, is a precis in song of Edward Trelawny's account of Shelley's death and his funeral on the beach near Viareggio in his book 'Records of Shelley, Byron and the author'. The Mary Shelley spoken piece over the instrumental is taken from a letter she wrote to her friend Maria Gisborne from Pisa as the funeral was taking place. ADONAISSources: To Stella (adapted from Plato's epigram translated by Shelley); Adonais; the Ode to the West Wind
He was a morning star amongst the living; Now that his spirit is fled; He shines in the heavens like the evening star He gives new splendour to the dead.
He hath awakened from the dream of life He hath outsoared the shadow of our night; The soul of Adonais, burning like a star Beacons from the abode where the eternal are.
(The spring does not rebel against the winter - it succeeds it; The dawn does not rebel against the night - it disperses it.)
The One remains, the many change and pass Life, like a dome of many coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity.
O wind if winter comes can spring be far behind? Can Spring be far behind? O wind if winter comes can spring be far behind? Can Spring be far behind? O wind if winter comes can spring be far behind? Can Spring be far behind?
This song may be the first time that Plato (in verse 1) has ever been put to a backbeat! It's sung by Ruth Murray, representing Mary Shelley paying tribute to her lost husband. Two epigrams of Plato survive, evidence perhaps of an early desire to be a poet/playwright. His evident failure to succeed may have been why, in book 10 of The Republic, he proposed banishing poets from his ideal state ! His epigram is a soulful tribute to a lost friend, Stella, who 'gives new splendour to the dead'.
The second verse, from Adonais, plays on the old philosophical notion that perhaps this life is nothing but a dream. The opening lines of Stanza 40 of Adonais are followed by the two final lines of the poem. Adonais often comes to mind when the young and gifted suffer an untimely death; examples could include Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones (Mick Jagger read pieces from Adonais at the concert in Hyde Park), River Phoenix, Kirsty MacColl, Stephen Lawrence, or John Lennon. You could see Lennon in Shelleyan terms as an 'unacknowledged legislator' who now 'shines in the heavens like the evening star'.
In his poem A Terre (Being the Philosophy of many soldiers) Wilfred Owen referred to Adonais (see stanza 42): 'I shall be one with nature, herb and stone', Shelley would tell me. Shelley would be stunned: The dullest Tommy hugs that fancy now. 'Pushing up the daisies is their creed, you know'.
So Shelley's lyrics on death match today's largely agnostic attitudes on the existence of the afterlife. What can continue after death though is inspiration and strength for those who remain. The spoken fragment comes from Shelley's notebook from Lerici, and is significant in that it repeats the central idea from the Ode to the West Wind. In other words the grim vision from The Triumph of Life, written at the same time as the fragment, is not (as some say) a final descent into pessimism on Shelley's part, but part of a longer work in which sources for hope in a secular world would - if he had lived - been explored.
The third verse is a reprise of the platonic verse from Paradise of exiles, and the final chorus is from the last line of the Ode to the West Wind. It brings out the link between the Ode to the West Wind and Adonais: at the beginning of the final stanza Shelley wrote 'The breath whose might I have invoked in song/ Descends on me ….' – a reference back to the west wind in Florence. Shelley called death 'the great mystery' and once apparently, suggested to Jane Williams, when they were in a little dinghy off the beach in Lerici, that they 'solve the great mystery together'. She replied 'no thank you I'd like my dinner first'! LYRICS AND NOTES
FOR 'THE FIRST FAB FOUR'.
Fourteen tracks sampling Romantics lyrics
. JENNY KISSED ME
Hunt: Jenny kissed me when we met, Jumping from the chair she sat in; Time you thief, who love to get Sweets into your list, put that in ! Say I’m weary, say I’m sad, Say that health and wealth have missed me, Say I’m growing old, but add Jenny kissed me. Byron: She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes. One shade the more, one ray the less, Had half impaired the nameless grace; Which waves in every raven tress Or softly lightens o’er her face
Full beautiful, a faery’s child; Her hair was long, her foot was light And her eyes were wild And honey wild and manna dew; And sure in language strange she said ‘I love thee true’. And there she wept and sighed full sore And there I shut her wild wild eyes With kisses four And there she lulled me asleep And there I dreamed – Ah woe betide! The latest dream I ever dreamed On the cold hillside Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried – ‘La Belle Dame sans merci Has thee in thrall!’ And this is why I sojourn here Alone and palely loitering Though the sedge has withered from the lake And no birds sing Shelley: The fountains mingle with the river And the river with the ocean; The winds of heaven mix forever With a sweet emotion, And the sunlight clasps the earth And the moonbeams kiss the sea.... What is all this sweet work worth If thou kiss not me? A medley of lyrics on the subject of love by all four poets. Beginning with Leigh Hunt’s ‘Rondeau’, which as Hunt wrote 'was written on a real occasion' and recalls a meeting with a lady who 'was a great lover of books and impulsive writers', it moves to Byron’s famous verse inspired by a lady in a black spangled dress on the dance floor (whose attire reminds him of of the night skies he enountered on his 1810 journeys through Albania, Greece and Turkey), and then on to extracts from Keats’s story-poem ‘La Belle Dame sans merci’ which could be thought of as conveying the eternal truth that matters of the heart are not necessarily straightforward. But the song ends with the final verse from Shelley’s poem ‘Love’s Philosophy’, a charming way of asking for a kiss from a pretty girl. 2. LORD B. IN MOTION
In the late October sun; ‘Lock up your daughters ‘Don’t even look at him darling’ At the head of five coachloads His accountant was coiled like a snake ‘I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all governments’ ‘Gin and water is the source of all my inspiration’ ‘God will not always be a Tory’ He thought that the poet laureate ‘Lock up your daughters When Byron’s poem Childe Harold was published in March 1812 it triggered a response that can be compared to Beatlemania. ‘I awoke and found myself famous’ Byron recorded, also remembering many years later that ‘the number of anonymous love letters and portraits I received, and all from English ladies, would have been enough to fill a large volume’. Byron rode the wave of his fame in Britain (also developing an international reputation) until 1816, when London high society turned against him, scandalised by the implosion of his marriage and suspicions that he had conducted an incestuous affair with his half sister Augusta. After his exile public interest in him remained strong, and ‘Lord B. in motion’ tries to convey the extent of his celebrity. The ‘don’t even look at him’ line were addressed by an English mother to her daughter in Florence as Byron was passing through on his way to Pisa and gives an idea of how he was regarded by polite society. The final verse refers to his ongoing literary warfare with Robert Southey the poet laureate (part of the no-holds-barred literary battle of the time). Southey, who had supported liberal causes in his youth, had dubbed Shelley and Byron’s impending collaboration on a journal in Pisa ‘The Satanic School’, and had called for legal action against them. 3. MARATHON (BYRON) (Two views of Marathon, Greece, which Byron visited in 1810)
Yet freedom ! yet thy banner torn but flying Streams like the thunderstorm against the wind; Yet freedom ! yet thy banner torn but flying Streams like the thunderstorm against the wind. The dead have been awakened – shall I sleep ? The world’s at war with tyrants – shall I crouch ? The harvest’s ripe - and shall I pause to reap ? I slumber not – the thorn is in my couch .... Each day a trumpet soundeth Its echo in my heart .... The mountains look on Marathon ‘I would do anything for the land which gave Europe its science and its art’ said Byron in Pisa. In Genoa he assisted two German volunteers returning from Greece which rekindled his interest in supporting the Greek insurrection. When two emissaries from the London Greek Committee visited him and asked for help his mind was made up. The lines from his notebook ‘The dead have been awakened ...’ written a month before departure at the same time he was have Churchillian ring to them, conveying his mental preparation for what lay ahead. 4. RISE LIKE LIONS (SHELLEY)Sources: Song to the Men of England, The Mask of Anarchy 19th century political slogan kept by Shelley in Italy (at a time when there was no true democracy in Europe) People of England wherefore plough The seeds ye sow another reaps The robes ye weave another wears Wherefore feed and clothe and save
Rise like lions after slumber Ye are many they are few. The political situation in Shelley's time was one of deadlock, with the landowning classes monopolising political power and fearful that the slightest reform would usher in violent revolution on the French model. Changing social patterns, with Britain moving from a predominantly agricultural society to an urban industrialising order, meant that there was a new and increasingly literate – but entirely disenfranchised – urban population. The Peterloo massacre led to the beginning of the organised labour movement in Britain. Shelley's lyrics see him trying to bond popular energies into a united force. As the Chartist Circular of 19th October 1839 put it: 'He wrote to teach his injured countrymen the great laws of union, and the strength of the passive resistance'. Shelley sent The Mask of Anarchy to his editor friend Leigh Hunt but he did not publish it until after the Great Reform Bill in 1832. Shelley's other post-Peterloo lyrics, which included his 'Song to the Men of England', were not published during his lifetime. They had to wait till 1839, when Mary published an (almost) complete edition of his work. In Tiananmen Square, before the crushing of the student/worker demonstration for democratic rights in China, a radio reporter talked to a student who was telling of her admiration for Shelley and Byron. These Shelley lyrics provide a template for situations where oligarchies assume power without popular mandate, and demonstrate how Shelley is a poet of global freedom. 5. WILD SPIRITSource: The Ode to the West Wind Clouds - 'the locks of the approaching storm' - gather over Florence where Shelley wrote the Ode to the West Wind Wild spirit, which art moving everywhere O wild West Wind, thou breath of autumn's being Wild spirit, which art moving everywhere Conventionally regarded as a nature lyric, Shelley's Ode to the West Wind again has a political edge to it. There's a theme of personal renewal in it too, a refusal to be downed by the forces ranged against him. So at the end his work will 'quicken a new birth'. Elsewhere he wrote: 'the most unfailing herald, companion and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry'. 6. TO AUTUMNSource: Keats’s letters, To Autumn
'Among the river sallows, borne aloft'... Keats Walk, Winchester, at the time of year To Autumn was composed(How beautiful the season is now, a temperate sharpness in the air... Somehow a stubble plain looks warm, this struck me so much on my walk that I composed upon it....) |
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