ODE TO THE WEST WIND.* 1. O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; II. Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's com- Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed, Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge Thou dirge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Vaulted with all thy congregated might Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere All overgrown with azure moss and flowers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear, IV. If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; The impulse of thy strength, only less free I were as in my boyhood, and could be The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven, As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. I fall upon the thorns of life I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst: Oh hear! And, by the incantation of this verse, III. Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams Beside a pumice isle in Baia's bay, *This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset, with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions. The phenomenon alluded to at the conclusion of the third stanza is well known to naturalists. The vegetation at the bottom of the sea, of rivers, and of lakes, sympathises with that of the land in the change of seasons, and is consequently influenced by the winds which announce it. Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind, AN EXHORTATION. CAMELEONS feed on light and air: Would they ever change their hue NOTE ON THE POEMS OF 1819. BY THE EDITOR. THOUGH Shelley's first eager desire to excite his countrymen to resist openly the oppressions existent during "the good old times" had faded with early youth, still his warmest sympathies were for the people. He was a republican, and loved a democracy. He looked on all human beings as inheriting an equal right to possess the dearest privileges of our nature, the necessaries of life, when fairly earned by labour, and intellectual instruction. His hatred of any despotism, that looked upon the people as not to be consulted or protected from want and ignorance, was intense. He was residing near Leghorn, at Villa Valsovano, writing The Cenci, when the news of the Manchester Massacre reached us; it roused in him violent emotions of indignation and compassion. The great truth that the many, if accordant and resolute, could control the few, as was shown some years after, made him long to teach his injured countrymen how to resist. Inspired by these feelings, he wrote the Masque of Anarchy, which he sent to his friend, Leigh Hunt, to be inserted in the Examiner, of which he was then the Editor. "I did not insert it," Leigh Hunt writes in his valuable and interesting preface to this poem, when he printed it in 1832, "because I thought that the public at large had not become sufficiently discerning to do justice to the sincerity and kindheartedness of his spirit, that walked in this flaming robe of verse." Days of outrage have passed away, and with them the exasperation that would cause such an appeal to the many to be injurious. Without being aware of them, they at one time acted on his suggestions, and gained the day; but they rose when human life was respected by the minister in power; such was not the case during the administration which excited Shelley's abhorrence. The poem was written for the people, and is therefore in a more popular tone than usual; portions strike as abrupt and unpolished, but many stanzas are all his own. I heard him repeat, and admired those beginning,― My Father Time is old and grey, before I knew to what poem they were to belong. But the most touching passage is that which describes the blessed effects of liberty; they might make a patriot of any man, whose heart was not wholly closed against his humbler fellow-crea tures. Shelley loved the people, and respected them as often more virtuous, as always more suffering, and, therefore, more deserving of sympathy, than the great. He believed that a clash between the two classes of society was inevitable, and he eagerly ranged himself on the people's side. He had an idea of publishing a series of poems adapted expressly to commemorate their circumstances prosecution for libel they could not be printed. and wrongs-he wrote a few, but in those days of They are not among the best of his productions, a writer being always shackled when he endeavours to write down to the comprehension of those who could not understand or feel a highly imaginative style; but they show his earnestness, and with what heartfelt compassion he went home to the direct point of injury-that oppression is detestable, as being the parent of starvation, nakedness, and ignorance. Besides these outpourings of compassion and indignation, he had meant to adorn the cause he loved with loftier poetry of glory and triumph-such is the scope of the Ode to the Assertors of Liberty. He sketched also a new version of our national anthem, as addressed to Liberty. God prosper, speed, and save, See, she comes throned on high, God save the Queen! Millions on millions wait God save the Queen! She is thine own pure soul God save the Queen! She is thine own deep love Rained down from heaven above, Wherever she rest or move, God save our Queen! Wilder her enemies In their own dark disguise, God save our Queen' All earthly things that dare Strip them, as kings are, bare; Be her eternal throne God save the Queen! Let the oppressor hold O'er our hearts Queen. Lips touched by seraphim God save the Queen! Sweet as if Angels sang, God save the Queen! Shelley had suffered severely from the death of our son during this summer. His heart, attuned to every kindly affection, was full of burning love for his offspring. No words can express the anguish he felt when his elder children were torn from him. In his first resentment against the Chancellor, on the passing of the decree, he had written a curse, in which there breathes, besides haughty indignation, all the tenderness of a father's love, which could imagine and fondly dwell upon its loss and the consequences. It is as follows:— TO THE LORD CHANCELLOR. THY country's curse is on thee, darkest Crest Thy country's curse is on thee! Justice sold, Plead, loud as thunder, at Destruction's throne. And whilst that slow sure Angel, which aye stands, Watching the beck of Mutability, Delays to execute her high commands, And, though a nation weeps, spares thine and thee; O let a father's curse be on thy soul, And let a daughter's hope be on thy tomb, And both on thy grey head, a leaden cowl, To weigh thee down to thine approaching doom! *The Star Chamber. I curse thee by a parent's outraged love, Which were a fire within a stranger's hearth, By those unpractised accents of young speech, By all the happy see in children's growth, By all the days under a hireling's care Sadder than orphans, yet not fatherless! By the false cant, which on their innocent lips, By thy most impious Hell, and all its terrors, By thy complicity with lust and hate, By thy most killing sneer, and by thy smile, By all the acts and snares of thy black den, And-for thou canst outweep the crocodile.By thy false tears-those millstones braining men; By all the hate which checks a father's love, Yes, the despair which bids a father groan, And cry, my children are no longer mine; The blood within those veins may be mine own, But, Tyrant, their polluted souls are thine. I curse thee, though I hate thee not; O slave! At one time, while the question was still pending, the Chancellor had said some words that seemed to intimate that Shelley should not be permitted the care of any of his children, and for a moment he feared that our infant son would be torn from us. He did not hesitate to resolve, if such were menaced, to abandon country, fortune, everything, and to escape with his child; and I find some unfinished stanzas addressed to this son, whom afterwards we lost at Rome, written under the idea that we might suddenly be forced to cross the sea, so to preserve him. This poem, as well as the one previously quoted, were not written to exhibit the pangs of distress to the public; they were the spontaneous outbursts of a man who brooded over his wrongs and woes, and was impelled to shed the grace of his genius over the uncontrollable emotions of his heart : The billows on the beach are leaping around it, The bark is weak and frail, The sea looks black, and the clouds that bound it Come with me, thou delightful child, They have taken thy brother and sister dear, Come thou, beloved as thou art, Another sleepeth still, Near thy sweet mother's anxious heart, Fear not the tyrants will rule for ever, Rest, rest, shriek not, thou gentle child! Who hunt thee o'er these sheltering waves This hour will in thy memory Be a dream of days forgotten; We soon shall dwell by the azure sea Of Grecian lore; that by such name I ought to observe that the fourth verse of this effusion is introduced in Rosalind and Helen. When afterwards this child died at Rome, he wrote, apropos of the English burying-ground in that city, "This spot is the repository of a sacred loss, of which the yearnings of a parent's heart are now prophetic; he is rendered immortal by love, as his memory is by death. My beloved child lies buried here. I envy death the body far less than the oppressors the minds of those whom they have torn from me. The one can only kill the body, the other crushes the affections." In this new edition I have added to the poems of this year," Peter Bell the Third." A critique on Wordsworth's Peter Bell reached us at Leghorn, which amused Shelley exceedingly and suggested this poem. I need scarcely observe that nothing personal to the Author of Peter Bell is intended in this poem. No man ever admired Wordsworth's poetry more ; he read it perpetually, and taught others to appreciate its beauties. This poem is, like all others written by Shelley, ideal. He conceived the idealism of a poet-a man of lofty and creative genius,-quitting the glorious calling of discovering and announcing the beautiful and good, to support and propagate ignorant prejudices and pernicious errors; imparting to the unenlightened, not that ardour for truth and spirit of toleration which Shelley looked on as the sources of the moral improvement and happiness of mankind; but false and injurious opinions, that evil was good, and that ignorance and force were the best allies of purity and virtue. His idea was that a man gifted even as transcendantly as the Author of Peter Bell, with the highest qualities of genius, must, if he fostered such errors, be infected with dulness. This poem was written, as a warning-not as a narration of the reality. He was unacquainted personally with Wordsworth or with Coleridge, (to whom he alludes in the fifth part of the poem,) and therefore, I repeat, his poem is purely ideal ;—it contains something of criticism on the compositions of these great poets, but nothing injurious to the men themselves. No poem contains more of Shelley's peculiar views, with regard to the errors into which many of the wisest have fallen, and of the pernicious effects of certain opinions on society. Much of it is beautifully written—and though, like the burlesque drama of Swellfoot, it must be looked on as a plaything, it has so much merit and poetry-so much of himself in it, that it cannot fail to interest greatly, and by right belongs to the world for whose instruction and benefit it was written. |