Volume 1 / Part 2 — PART 2. (continued 2)
Reading edition
‘How vain Are words! I thought never to speak again, Not even in secret,—not to mine own heart— But from my lips the unwilling accents start, _475 And from my pen the words flow as I write, Dazzling my eyes with scalding tears…my sight Is dim to see that charactered in vain On this unfeeling leaf which burns the brain And eats into it…blotting all things fair _480 And wise and good which time had written there.
‘Those who inflict must suffer, for they see The work of their own hearts, and this must be Our chastisement or recompense—O child! I would that thine were like to be more mild _485 For both our wretched sakes…for thine the most Who feelest already all that thou hast lost Without the power to wish it thine again; And as slow years pass, a funereal train Each with the ghost of some lost hope or friend _490 Following it like its shadow, wilt thou bend No thought on my dead memory? … ‘Alas, love! Fear me not…against thee I would not move A finger in despite. Do I not live That thou mayst have less bitter cause to grieve? _495 I give thee tears for scorn and love for hate; And that thy lot may be less desolate Than his on whom thou tramplest, I refrain From that sweet sleep which medicines all pain. Then, when thou speakest of me, never say _500 “He could forgive not.” Here I cast away All human passions, all revenge, all pride; I think, speak, act no ill; I do but hide Under these words, like embers, every spark Of that which has consumed me—quick and dark _505 The grave is yawning…as its roof shall cover My limbs with dust and worms under and over So let Oblivion hide this grief…the air Closes upon my accents, as despair Upon my heart—let death upon despair!’ _510
He ceased, and overcome leant back awhile, Then rising, with a melancholy smile Went to a sofa, and lay down, and slept A heavy sleep, and in his dreams he wept And muttered some familiar name, and we _515 Wept without shame in his society. I think I never was impressed so much; The man who were not, must have lacked a touch Of human nature…then we lingered not, Although our argument was quite forgot, _520 But calling the attendants, went to dine At Maddalo’s; yet neither cheer nor wine Could give us spirits, for we talked of him And nothing else, till daylight made stars dim; And we agreed his was some dreadful ill _525 Wrought on him boldly, yet unspeakable, By a dear friend; some deadly change in love Of one vowed deeply which he dreamed not of; For whose sake he, it seemed, had fixed a blot Of falsehood on his mind which flourished not _530 But in the light of all-beholding truth; And having stamped this canker on his youth She had abandoned him—and how much more Might be his woe, we guessed not—he had store Of friends and fortune once, as we could guess _535 From his nice habits and his gentleness; These were now lost…it were a grief indeed If he had changed one unsustaining reed For all that such a man might else adorn. The colours of his mind seemed yet unworn; _540 For the wild language of his grief was high, Such as in measure were called poetry; And I remember one remark which then Maddalo made. He said: ‘Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong, _545 They learn in suffering what they teach in song.’
If I had been an unconnected man, I, from this moment, should have formed some plan Never to leave sweet Venice,—for to me It was delight to ride by the lone sea; _550 And then, the town is silent—one may write Or read in gondolas by day or night, Having the little brazen lamp alight, Unseen, uninterrupted; books are there, Pictures, and casts from all those statues fair _555 Which were twin-born with poetry, and all We seek in towns, with little to recall Regrets for the green country. I might sit In Maddalo’s great palace, and his wit And subtle talk would cheer the winter night _560 And make me know myself, and the firelight Would flash upon our faces, till the day Might dawn and make me wonder at my stay: But I had friends in London too: the chief Attraction here, was that I sought relief _565 From the deep tenderness that maniac wrought Within me—’twas perhaps an idle thought— But I imagined that if day by day I watched him, and but seldom went away, And studied all the beatings of his heart _570 With zeal, as men study some stubborn art For their own good, and could by patience find An entrance to the caverns of his mind, I might reclaim him from this dark estate: In friendships I had been most fortunate— _575 Yet never saw I one whom I would call More willingly my friend; and this was all Accomplished not; such dreams of baseless good Oft come and go in crowds or solitude And leave no trace—but what I now designed _580 Made for long years impression on my mind. The following morning, urged by my affairs, I left bright Venice. After many years And many changes I returned; the name Of Venice, and its aspect, was the same; _585 But Maddalo was travelling far away Among the mountains of Armenia. His dog was dead. His child had now become A woman; such as it has been my doom To meet with few,—a wonder of this earth, _590 Where there is little of transcendent worth, Like one of Shakespeare’s women: kindly she, And, with a manner beyond courtesy, Received her father’s friend; and when I asked Of the lorn maniac, she her memory tasked, _595 And told as she had heard the mournful tale: ‘That the poor sufferer’s health began to fail Two years from my departure, but that then The lady who had left him, came again. Her mien had been imperious, but she now _600 Looked meek—perhaps remorse had brought her low. Her coming made him better, and they stayed Together at my father’s—for I played, As I remember, with the lady’s shawl— I might be six years old—but after all _605 She left him.’…’Why, her heart must have been tough: How did it end?’ ‘And was not this enough? They met—they parted.’—‘Child, is there no more?’ ‘Something within that interval which bore The stamp of WHY they parted, HOW they met: _610 Yet if thine aged eyes disdain to wet Those wrinkled cheeks with youth’s remembered tears, Ask me no more, but let the silent years Be closed and cered over their memory As yon mute marble where their corpses lie.’ _615 I urged and questioned still, she told me how All happened—but the cold world shall not know.
CANCELLED FRAGMENTS OF JULIAN AND MADDALO.
‘What think you the dead are?’ ‘Why, dust and clay, What should they be?’ ‘’Tis the last hour of day. Look on the west, how beautiful it is _620 Vaulted with radiant vapours! The deep bliss Of that unutterable light has made The edges of that cloud … fade Into a hue, like some harmonious thought, Wasting itself on that which it had wrought, _625 Till it dies … and … between The light hues of the tender, pure, serene, And infinite tranquillity of heaven. Ay, beautiful! but when not…’ … ‘Perhaps the only comfort which remains _630 Is the unheeded clanking of my chains, The which I make, and call it melody.’
NOTES: _45 may Hunt manuscript; can 1824. _99 a one Hunt manuscript; an one 1824. _105 sunk Hunt manuscript; sank 1824. _108 ever Hunt manuscript; even 1824. _119 in Hunt manuscript; from 1824. _124 a Hunt manuscript; an 1824. _171 That Hunt manuscript; Which 1824. _175 mind Hunt manuscript; minds 1824. _179 know 1824; see Hunt manuscript. _188 those Hunt manuscript; the 1824. _191 their Hunt manuscript; this 1824. _218 Moons, etc., Hunt manuscript; The line is wanting in editions 1824 and 1839. _237 far Hunt manuscript; but 1824. _270 nor Hunt manuscript; and 1824. _292 cold Hunt manuscript; and 1824. _318 least Hunt manuscript; last 1824. _323 sweet Hunt manuscript; fresh 1824. _356 have Hunt manuscript; hath 1824. _361 in this keen Hunt manuscript; under this 1824. _362 cry Hunt manuscript; eye 1824. _372 on Hunt manuscript; in 1824. _388 greet Hunt manuscript; meet 1824. _390 your Hunt manuscript; thy 1824. _417 his Hunt manuscript; its 1824. _446 glance Hunt manuscript; glass 1824. _447 with Hunt manuscript; near 1824. _467 lip Hunt manuscript; life 1824. _483 this Hunt manuscript; that 1824. _493 I would Hunt manuscript; I’d 1824. _510 despair Hunt manuscript; my care 1839. _511 leant] See Editor’s Note. _518 were Hunt manuscript; was 1839. _525 his Hunt manuscript; it 1824. _530 on Hunt manuscript; in 1824. _537 were now Hunt manuscript; now were 1824. _588 regrets Hunt manuscript; regret 1824. _569 but Hunt manuscript; wanting in editions 1824 and 1839. _574 his 1824; this [?] Hunt manuscript.
NOTE BY MRS. SHELLEY.
From the Baths of Lucca, in 1818, Shelley visited Venice; and, circumstances rendering it eligible that we should remain a few weeks in the neighbourhood of that city, he accepted the offer of Lord Byron, who lent him the use of a villa he rented near Este; and he sent for his family from Lucca to join him.
I Capuccini was a villa built on the site of a Capuchin convent, demolished when the French suppressed religious houses; it was situated on the very overhanging brow of a low hill at the foot of a range of higher ones. The house was cheerful and pleasant; a vine-trellised walk, a pergola, as it is called in Italian, led from the hall-door to a summer-house at the end of the garden, which Shelley made his study, and in which he began the “Prometheus”; and here also, as he mentions in a letter, he wrote “Julian and Maddalo”. A slight ravine, with a road in its depth, divided the garden from the hill, on which stood the ruins of the ancient castle of Este, whose dark massive wall gave forth an echo, and from whose ruined crevices owls and bats flitted forth at night, as the crescent moon sunk behind the black and heavy battlements. We looked from the garden over the wide plain of Lombardy, bounded to the west by the far Apennines, while to the east the horizon was lost in misty distance. After the picturesque but limited view of mountain, ravine, and chestnut-wood, at the Baths of Lucca, there was something infinitely gratifying to the eye in the wide range of prospect commanded by our new abode.
Our first misfortune, of the kind from which we soon suffered even more severely, happened here. Our little girl, an infant in whose small features I fancied that I traced great resemblance to her father, showed symptoms of suffering from the heat of the climate. Teething increased her illness and danger. We were at Este, and when we became alarmed, hastened to Venice for the best advice. When we arrived at Fusina, we found that we had forgotten our passport, and the soldiers on duty attempted to prevent our crossing the laguna; but they could not resist Shelley’s impetuosity at such a moment. We had scarcely arrived at Venice before life fled from the little sufferer, and we returned to Este to weep her loss.
After a few weeks spent in this retreat, which was interspersed by visits to Venice, we proceeded southward.
***
PROMETHEUS UNBOUND.
A LYRICAL DRAMA IN FOUR ACTS.
AUDISNE HAEC AMPHIARAE, SUB TERRAM ABDITE?
[Composed at Este, September, October, 1818 (Act 1); at Rome, March-April 6, 1819 (Acts 2, 3); at Florence, close of 1819 (Act 4). Published by C. and J. Ollier, London, summer of 1820. Sources of the text are (1) edition of 1820; (2) text in “Poetical Works”, 1839, prepared with the aid of a list of errata in (1) written out by Shelley; (3) a fair draft in Shelley’s autograph, now in the Bodleian. This has been carefully collated by Mr. C.D. Locock, who prints the result in his “Examination of the Shelley Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library”, Oxford (Clarendon Press), 1903. Our text is that of 1820, modified by edition 1839, and by the Bodleian fair copy. In the following notes B = the Bodleian manuscript; 1820 = the editio princeps, printed by Marchant for C. and J. Ollier, London; and 1839 = the text as edited by Mrs. Shelley in the “Poetical Works”, 1st and 2nd editions, 1839. The reader should consult the notes on the Play at the end of the volume.]
PREFACE.
The Greek tragic writers, in selecting as their subject any portion of their national history or mythology, employed in their treatment of it a certain arbitrary discretion. They by no means conceived themselves bound to adhere to the common interpretation or to imitate in story as in title their rivals and predecessors. Such a system would have amounted to a resignation of those claims to preference over their competitors which incited the composition. The Agamemnonian story was exhibited on the Athenian theatre with as many variations as dramas.
I have presumed to employ a similar license. The “Prometheus Unbound” of Aeschylus supposed the reconciliation of Jupiter with his victim as the price of the disclosure of the danger threatened to his empire by the consummation of his marriage with Thetis. Thetis, according to this view of the subject, was given in marriage to Peleus, and Prometheus, by the permission of Jupiter, delivered from his captivity by Hercules. Had I framed my story on this model, I should have done no more than have attempted to restore the lost drama of Aeschylus; an ambition which, if my preference to this mode of treating the subject had incited me to cherish, the recollection of the high comparison such an attempt would challenge might well abate. But, in truth, I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind. The moral interest of the fable, which is so powerfully sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high language and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary. The only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgement, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandisement, which, in the Hero of “Paradise Lost”, interfere with the interest. The character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider that magnificent fiction with a religious feeling it engenders something worse. But Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends.
This Poem was chiefly written upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, among the flowery glades, and thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees, which are extended in ever winding labyrinths upon its immense platforms and dizzy arches suspended in the air. The bright blue sky of Rome, and the effect of the vigorous awakening spring in that divinest climate, and the new life with which it drenches the spirits even to intoxication, were the inspiration of this drama.
The imagery which I have employed will be found, in many instances, to have been drawn from the operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed. This is unusual in modern poetry, although Dante and Shakespeare are full of instances of the same kind: Dante indeed more than any other poet, and with greater success. But the Greek poets, as writers to whom no resource of awakening the sympathy of their contemporaries was unknown, were in the habitual use of this power; and it is the study of their works (since a higher merit would probably be denied me) to which I am willing that my readers should impute this singularity.
One word is due in candour to the degree in which the study of contemporary writings may have tinged my composition, for such has been a topic of censure with regard to poems far more popular, and indeed more deservedly popular, than mine. It is impossible that any one who inhabits the same age with such writers as those who stand in the foremost ranks of our own, can conscientiously assure himself that his language and tone of thought may not have been modified by the study of the productions of those extraordinary intellects. It is true, that, not the spirit of their genius, but the forms in which it has manifested itself, are due less to the peculiarities of their own minds than to the peculiarity of the moral and intellectual condition of the minds among which they have been produced. Thus a number of writers possess the form, whilst they want the spirit of those whom, it is alleged, they imitate; because the former is the endowment of the age in which they live, and the latter must be the uncommunicated lightning of their own mind.
The peculiar style of intense and comprehensive imagery which distinguishes the modern literature of England has not been, as a general power, the product of the imitation of any particular writer. The mass of capabilities remains at every period materially the same; the circumstances which awaken it to action perpetually change. If England were divided into forty republics, each equal in population and extent to Athens, there is no reason to suppose but that, under institutions not more perfect than those of Athens, each would produce philosophers and poets equal to those who (if we except Shakespeare) have never been surpassed. We owe the great writers of the golden age of our literature to that fervid awakening of the public mind which shook to dust the oldest and most oppressive form of the Christian religion. We owe Milton to the progress and development of the same spirit: the sacred Milton was, let it ever be remembered, a republican, and a bold inquirer into morals and religion. The great writers of our own age are, we have reason to suppose, the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition or the opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring, or is about to be restored.
As to imitation, poetry is a mimetic art. It creates, but it creates by combination and representation. Poetical abstractions are beautiful and new, not because the portions of which they are composed had no previous existence in the mind of man or in nature, but because the whole produced by their combination has some intelligible and beautiful analogy with those sources of emotion and thought, and with the contemporary condition of them: one great poet is a masterpiece of nature which another not only ought to study but must study. He might as wisely and as easily determine that his mind should no longer be the mirror of all that is lovely in the visible universe as exclude from his contemplation the beautiful which exists in the writings of a great contemporary. The pretence of doing it would be a presumption in any but the greatest; the effect, even in him, would be strained, unnatural and ineffectual. A poet is the combined product of such internal powers as modify the nature of others; and of such external influences as excite and sustain these powers; he is not one, but both. Every man’s mind is, in this respect, modified by all the objects of nature and art; by every word and every suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon his consciousness; it is the mirror upon which all forms are reflected, and in which they compose one form. Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age. From this subjection the loftiest do not escape. There is a similarity between Homer and Hesiod, between Aeschylus and Euripides, between Virgil and Horace, between Dante and Petrarch, between Shakespeare and Fletcher, between Dryden and Pope; each has a generic resemblance under which their specific distinctions are arranged. If this similarity be the result of imitation, I am willing to confess that I have imitated.
Let this opportunity be conceded to me of acknowledging that I have, what a Scotch philosopher characteristically terms, ‘a passion for reforming the world:’ what passion incited him to write and publish his book, he omits to explain. For my part I had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon, than go to Heaven with Paley and Malthus. But it is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree as containing a reasoned system on the theory of human life. Didactic poetry is my abhorrence; nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse. My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarise the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness. Should I live to accomplish what I purpose, that is, produce a systematical history of what appear to me to be the genuine elements of human society, let not the advocates of injustice and superstition flatter themselves that I should take Aeschylus rather than Plato as my model.
The having spoken of myself with unaffected freedom will need little apology with the candid; and let the uncandid consider that they injure me less than their own hearts and minds by misrepresentation. Whatever talents a person may possess to amuse and instruct others, be they ever so inconsiderable, he is yet bound to exert them: if his attempt be ineffectual, let the punishment of an unaccomplished purpose have been sufficient; let none trouble themselves to heap the dust of oblivion upon his efforts; the pile they raise will betray his grave which might otherwise have been unknown.