The Iowa Review
Volume 27
Issue 1 Spring
1997
Remembering Shelley
Russell Fraser
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Fraser, Russell. "Remembering Shelley." The Iowa Review 27.1 (1997): 120-125. Web.
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Article 14
Fraser
Russell
Remembering
Shelley
never
old, was
I cared about most
the poet
in my
once
Newman
His
still
watercolor
likeness,
White's,
hangs on
youth.
if he
the wall in my study. But I haven't often re-read him, and wonder
isn't a poet for the young, his appeal fading as the shades of the prison
who
Shelley,
got
all so young, Shelley
and friends, col
upon us. They were
the Pisa Gang, Trelawny,
did the
Jane and Ned Williams?he
electric
and
with
the mad
Clare
eyes?Mary
Shelley
close
house
lectively
watercolor
half sisters by Godwin's
Claremont,
a real Byronic
over thirty. Trelawny,
the end came back to die in Rome.
two wives,
hero,
the only one
Byron,
into great old age, at
living
For half a year, no more, he saw
to be buried beside him. Browning's
poem
Shelley
plain and wanted
a
on
the
the
hand's
the
moor,
sense,
up
picked
gives
eagle-feather
amid the blank miles.
breadth
coun
to a great estate, among the largest in England's
southern
ties, Shelley did what he could to throw this inheritance
away. He was
a fool for Christ's
at
round later.
Christ
sake, rejecting
first, coming
Heir
Once,
home
meeting
without
a barefoot
creep / The else
like the Sensitive
He
woman
shoes. A nerve,
his
over rough
hobbling
he called himself,
stones,
he came
"o'er which
do
of the earth." This
sounds a little
oppressions
not
the
the
known
for shrinking.
Plant,
poem,
poet,
though. "I go on until I am stopped," he said, adding,
unfelt
surprises you,
I am never stopped."
A boyhood
friend, Thomas
"and
him reading
remembered
Jefferson Hogg,
out
in Greek, Lucretius
in
"for 16
of every 24 hours." He read Homer
in
in
in
Tasso
Italian.
Goethe
Calder?n
German,
Latin,
Living
Spanish,
sat
in his last years, he read Herodotus.
He
in the Italian countryside
naked
on
the rocks
dropped
into
reading,
die.
Keats
His
he
a forest
the fountain. When
and Sophocles,
commitment,
asked
beside
rhetorically:
back the page,
then, folding
pool,
at sea it was like that, his
he drowned
thrust
into his jacket
early, was to Intellectual
"Have I not kept the vow?"
vowed
as he got
ready
to
and later
Beauty,
But it thinned his
120
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of Atlas, "a sexless bee,"
poetry, not provincial
enough. Like his Witch
to none. Other
himself
he tasted all blossoms,
poets make
confining
on
turns
he
this around, hard
those who
abstract
substantial;
things
loved
him.
"Don't
be
like your brother,"
care that you don't
a younger
son. "Take
a heavy, but his conventional
the earth,
above
soaring
didn't
too much."
learn
has
its corner
to
the baronet
of
The
truth.
is
father
Shelley,
see that.
for an atheistical
he took lodgings
pamphlet,
to mind Thaddeus
It brought
of Warsaw
or any place for long, bitten
But he didn't stay in London
at age nineteen?having
In Dublin
divine
and prosaic.
from Oxford
Expelled
in London
wisdom
said his father
on Poland
and freedom.
by discontent,
Street.
gone there, he said, to forward the cause of Catholic
emancipation?he
an Address
stood on the balcony
of his hotel,
showering
passersby with
to the Irish People. "O IRISHMEN, REFORM YOURSELVES!" he told
them.
on
Lynmouth
Like a castaway's
of Rights.
made boats
Stories
on
like
the water,
these
he issued a Declaration
Channel,
out in home
in a bottle,
it went
the Bristol
From
message
or floated
endear
aloft
to fire-balloons.
tied
to me,
but send up danger
anyway
the prod
and the talk is too declarative,
him,
talks too much
signals. Shelley
uct of a mind often violated
and carelessly,
by ideas. He wrote
quickly
even
to make his details
not always bothering
and
antecedent
square,
Like many poets of the last two hundred
years, he puts his
pronoun.
cards
on
the
table,
a fault.
It seems
a bizarre
complaint
obscure. But
to make
of
faulted for being
poetry, generally
great poetry
more
sense
of
than it says, and clamorous
the
po
meaning
gives you
means.
as
as
at
it
like
least
much
Prometheus
Unbound,
says
etry
Shelley's
is pitched
often called his greatest
very high, a strain on the
poem,
"modern"
reader.
but nag
Interspersed
rhyming
at us all the same.
Though
Swinburne
they can to lower
the pitch,
verse forms, his experiments
are more
the
of
less im
than Sidney,
Murano,
spun-glass
shapes
to make them. In "The Sensitive Plant"
than the skill that went
he
tries out different
pressive
and "The Cloud,"
Sound
songs do what
is mesmeric
like
the relentless
and incantation
beat
tells of "poetry," and it wearies.
goes
duty for thought. Matter
does
one way, manner
another, not a deliberate
See, for instance,
disjunction.
on
cast seems
lines
the
where
the
his
Euganean Hills,
intellectualizing
to sleep.
blurred by the meter,
lulling intellect
121
In the threnody
for Keats, political
asides
matter
dead poet. This
between
the lines
Shakespeare,
dirge shows
himself
vie
for attention
with
the
as with
doesn't
function,
a greater world,
a
only
special bias. A brief
storm tossed and sounding
like it ought
to, but he
to intimate
nature
hears
it wailing
"for
the world's
this peg
wrong."
Paradoxically,
on. The wrong will be rectified
is too
slight to hang his poem
someday,
yet, and "the world's
great age" is always about to begin. Always
never
seems a bad recipe for poetry
and life. Raising
tomorrow,
today,
their eyes, writers
like Shelley
leave the foreground
But it
untended.
us. He
con
isn't the politics
of his vision
that fatigues
isn't enough
not
victed
of
sin.
In his "Mont
don't
song
he
Blanc"
crop up in the poetry much.
from his unfinished
drama,
bough,
millwheel.
make
frozen
wind,
Auden
room
for
a "universe
of things," but things
confirm
the rule, like the
celebrates
freezing
and Pearson,
Exceptions
the First:
Charles
stream,
leafless
the
forest,
best when
liking Shelley
in their Viking
Portable
this poem
a bird
on
a wintry
sound of a
least
typical,
no
Poets, regrettably
reserves
attention
to
in print. Mostly,
his ideal poet
however,
longer
raw
the noumenal
world. Our physical world?the
"painted veil"?was
more
them
he
created
from
"forms
and
real than living man."
materials,
could make
the word flesh.
Anyone
that one of the poems
lacked "human inter
complained
as well go to a gin-shop
for a leg
est," he agreed it was so. "You might
or
he said, "as expect
human
from
of mutton,"
me."
anything
earthly
When
Mary
the poetry quivers with erotic feeling. A rose is like a nymph
step
a
all the way
(in "The Sensitive
Plant"),
ping into her bath, disrobing
is a chalice
when
her lover's being
his
woman,
overflows,
receiving
at
in
him
itches
wine
Prometheus
Unbound). Sexuality
(in
"Epipsychidion,"
But
a defense
of free love. (Scholars
heatedly
deny
on
a
Italian girl, Emilia Viviani
young
this.) Heaping
praises
("Seraph
a litany better
suited to the Virgin. He
of Heaven!"
etc.), he composes
and his heroine's
"loose
isn't a through-and-through
Platonist,
however,
other
among
hair"
he
smells
things
like a woman's.
says, to the
Both
cranks
Newman
White,
Socialist
Party
122
The
"wild
odor"
men
line
it gives
off
invades
him,
soul.
and
eleemosynary
his best
scholar
of North
Carolina.
and
Others,
his standard.
up beneath
a man
chaired
the
of feeling,
dinosaur
Marxists,
sponsor
a
of political
science. Christopher
turgid professor
nonsense
in the Spanish War,
but died bravely
by the restraints
bourgeois
capitalist "trameled
who wrote
Caudwell,
saw in Prometheus
the
of the era of mercantil
never so crude, makes
ism" (Illusion and Reality,
1936). Shelley,
though
love to this trivializing
employment.
for
Keats
his "magnanimity,"
criticized
just the right tactful word
over the poem. Curb
to
he
when
it
take
zeal
seeks
it,
said,
political
have warped
the
"and be more
of an artist." But doing
that would
out
In
&
C.
of
his
the
Oilier
1817,
J.
genius.
grain
publishers
brought
to the Vote throughout
the Kingdom,"
for Putting Reform
on
of Marlowe."
the Thames, Marlowe
Up river
signed by "the Hermit
was one of his many way
In the same year the same firm
stations.
"A Proposal
Poems, byJohn Keats, a conjunction
published
him. Loving
he loved humanity
art, however,
But love of the world begins with
love of
little. Trelawny
said he "loved
everything
accounts
for his abjectness,
side
the other
he was Actaeon,
imagination,
savaged by the
he envied
by "a heavy weight,"
to, and the skylark's unmeditated
Bowed
wants
that might
more.
have distressed
self, and ofthat
better
of
than
he had
himself."
too
This
spirit. In his
or his own
thoughts.
that blows where
it
the blithe
world
the wind
Ill health
tormented
gladness.
no
one has
he
shook
like
with
of
but
and
him,
spasms
pain,
Coleridge
an
ever said
tears for
many
emphasis?too
why. His grief bears such
man
men
we
we
love not"?that
the
"whom
wince when
don't turn
away.
a poem
in Dejection,"
that
he seems to judge
however,
in the light
like Dante's
sinners, for melancholy
a sentimental
the Lamp Is Shattered,"
lyric, often
I am quoting
from his "Stanzas Written
lives up to its title. In the last stanza,
himself,
of
the
condemned,
sun. "When
anthologized,
tion poem,
Will
continues
itself
every
rot, and
rafter
Leave
When
This
thine
eagle home
to laughter,
fall and cold winds
thee naked
leaves
impersonal
strain. But like the Dejec
self-regarding
sins:
and
the
redeems many
ending
together,
the
it pulls
voice
that makes
come.
little of palliatives
isn't often
Shelley's.
123
his best,
At
he
and
peaks
controls
in quality,
Uneven
it, however.
he
is a poet
of
troughs.
between
them, and most
lavishing praise, don't discriminate
critics in our time haven't given
their due. The machinery
the former
in their dismay, etc., etc.?nearly
of the elegiac poem?winds
sobbing
un
does for Adonais. But Shelley, though much falling, reaches heights
Admirers,
since the greater Jacobeans.
E.g. the "leprous" corpse that turns
equaled
"the merry worm
into flowers and mocks
that wakes beneath."
Sorrow
its opposite,
is the meat he feeds on, but accommodating
he sets against
all gone, the note of
death's pallor the color of sky and earth. Hecticity
quiet seems
its voice:
a throwback
Great
to earlier
times,
before
poetry
began
raising
and mean
in death, who
life must borrow.
lends what
As long as skies are blue, and fields are green,
Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow,
follow month with woe,
and year wake year to sorrow.
Month
Meet
massed
sense. Adonais, the bleak
isn't invariably Romantic,
Shelley
pejorative
est of funerary poems, offers for consolation
only "shelter in the shadow
to earth, stays
of the tomb." In "The Sensitive
Plant,"
truth, crushed
rise up from their charnels. Purposive
the wicked
there, while
Shelley
in the "Letter to Maria Gisborne,"
takes a holiday
suiting his informal
to a polite occasion.
is the stuff of "Julian
Civilized
discourse
couplets
sets
and Maddalo,"
a.k.a. Shelley and Byron under Italian skies. Berlioz
the scene
loping
sweetness
different
and yearning.
voice,
For once,
gal
part captures all Romanticism's
a
leaves this alone. He wants
Shelley
and natural.
masculine,
to a shorter line, surface again
Couplets,
meant
for Jane Williams,
his
makes no bones
piece,
his
friend's
about
"I am gone into the fields
this sweet hour
To take what
124
the two of them
fluent,
fitted
Reflection,
can hear
in Italy"?you
in the viola
the Lido?and
in his "Harold
across
you may
come
pretty
it.
yields;?
to-morrow,
in a sexy "Invitation,"
wife. A virile
seduction
Sit by the fireside with Sorrow.?
You with
the unpaid bill, Despair,?
tiresome
You,
I will
verse-reciter,
Care,?
in the grave."
pay you
years
Shelley harks back two hundred
sophisticated
norm.
the
tion poets. But I mustn't make
exceptions
to Restora
This
Essential
his Witch
our
Shelley
Both
Byron
when
forward
ing
but these
morbid,
bound, he
underworld,
his
are gone
him
called
pressure.
fatal
is the
case-history
lonely man who
to breathe,
drinks
oracular
vapor
from
to the dregs the maddening
of
wine
a world where men
to elaborate
led him
"women
being wicked,
an
with
few
intensity
move,
tall beyond
the average and lean
In person
he was
tense, in sensibility
terms say too little. In Prometheus Un
the Snake,
he walked.
or drains
chimera,
at every pore, attuned,
like
agonizes
we
in
and
hear
sounds
feelings
thrilling
soon
but his poems
record
their
enough,
to inchoate
of Atlas,
youth.
is the one who
too,
can
frank,
support,
beautiful,
knowing
the dark
life.
have
Ideas,
and kind."
But
he
quit
lives
"the
of bliss
/ To
pain
to be."
used to insist on, and misses
isn't that perfect
Shelley convention
as often as he hits it. Living in a
high place, he has a long way
no doubt exces
to fall. But his ardor is enormously
taking. Emotion,
He
the mark
to his youthful
to the horny
"tears throng
sive, belongs
time, when
haunt the desolated
heart." It "should have learnt
eyes, / And beatings
he
and
with
of
the
says,
age this happens. An ambigu
coming
repose,"
ous privilege,
it wasn't
his.
125