Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." -- I copied that out when I first read it in high school, as words that felt more adequate to what I knew about life than many words do. Also some bits from "Ode to the West Wind." Purely from a critical standpoint, I think C. S. Lewis thought more highly of him than of many of his contemporaries.
But yes, the grief of the women -- and the children in foster care ...
(edit: To your "And yet ... and yet ..." I had to go ferret out Lewis' Selected Literary Essays and find the one on "Shelley, Dryden, and Mr Eliot". On Shelley's patchy quality: "His use of language is such that he seldom attains for long to the highest qualities of distinction, and often sinks to a facility and commonplace almost Byronic." -ouch- But Lewis maintains in the essay that "Shelley is to be regarded, on grounds which Mr Eliot himself will allow, as a more masterly, a more sufficient, and indeed a more classical poet than Dryden." Simply considered as a poet, not as a man, Lewis considers him a "great, flawed poet... a greatness to which the name of genius is particularly applicable.')
Granted, it is from a biography of Byron, but in it, it contrasts Shelley and Byron, both in Britain and in Switzerland. Wherein, as Shelley spends more time with him, envy seeps in, and he seems to become the very Satan, he would rule against. Perhaps Prometheus is his filtered view of how he should appear, than anything to real, or taking things to serious as opposed to going off on a Lark.
I got interested in what I might describe as Shelley's "casual" way with rhyming:
wert/heart/art
even/heaven
sphere/clear/there
loud/cloud/overflow'd
leaves/gives/thieves
etc.
I wondered if this was commonly accepted among poets of his time, or something Shelley is especially noted for. The poem reminds me that some poets of past ages were not necessarily strict "formalists."
I don't think it is about “the goodness [the man] could find when ransacking himself” or that ”he has loosed his bonds and reconciled himself to the order of a creation that provided him with fire in the first place”. It's almost the exact opposite. It's about the impossibility of perfect happiness on earth. In the run-up to the final stanza he repeatedly affirms that the skylark's ecstasy is irreconcilable with human life, and that even the greatest possible human happiness is fundamentally different:
”Chorus hymeneal,
Or triumphal chant,
Match’d with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt”
”... Thou lovest, but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety."
”Yet, if we could scorn
Hate and pride and fear,
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.”
He can only vaguely speculate as to what could justify the skylark's bliss:
”What objects are the fountains.....”
In the final stanza he isn't asking or expecting the skylark to teach him its gladness, he is saying “even if I only knew half of the joy you must know (the bird's gladness can only be inferred or guessed at, not comprehended), the world should listen to me" (“should", not ”will”, it is hypothetical, impossible).
That humans are denied perfect joy is one side of Shelley's main theme. In Alastor and Epipsychidion he shows men reaching for it and failing, in Prometheus Unbound and Adonais he shows that it can only be reached by death or apocalyptic revolution. To set up an opposition between the Skylark and Prometheus Unbound is strange.
I never cared for any poem of Shelley's that I encountered in sophomore English long ago, except Ozymandias. And have never have gone to any trouble to get better acquainted, especially as I came, a bit later, to detest his sort of radicalism. So, trying to read this one with an open mind, I find that I just don't respond to his style, as least as exhibited here. It seems thin, frothy. Rather too much trimeter. And I still think "bird thou never wert" is awful.
As for the man, I cherish the remark said to have been made by Mary Shelley when she was looking for a school for her one surviving son and was advised to find one that would teach him to think for himself. "Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!" (Quoted in the very wonderful Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes)
I was brought up in a generation still enough influenced by New Criticism to say artists are incidental to judgments about art, and so my tendency is toward agreeing we should not judge artworks by the possibility that, say, Villon was a murderous thief or Swinburne a neurotic who liked to hire women to beat him.
Then, too, I have lived through (am living still within, to some degree) an era that claimed elements of race and gender determine the goodness of art — and my distaste for that line of criticism adds to my strong championing of Art for Art's Sake.
But…ah, but. When I think about Shelley and his whole sick crew, I grow a little itchy. "Books are responsible for their authors; in a kind of child labor, they carry their fathers on their backs," as I once wrote — trying to thread the needle and say, in the real life of reading, we can't park what we know about the author entirely outside our readings of their work. And Shelley in particular has always annoyed me, intruding on my reading of his work.
All of which is a long-way-round-the-barn way of saying that, in the division of labor here at Poems Ancient and Modern, Sally has shouldered the burden of Shelley — sparing me, as friends do, from having to face up to my inconsistent feeling about the man and his art.
There’s a section in Scottish novelist Alasdair Gray’s “1982 Janine” where a schoolmaster asks for an example of euphony in an English lesson, and one of his kids pipes up with “bird thou never wert”, which sets the teacher off: ridiculous! “doubtless, you remember me saying that Percy Bysshe Shelley pinnacled dim in the intense inane is one of our most mellifluous poets, but to my ear bird thou never wert sounds damnably ugly and a downright lie when we consider that wee Percy is talking to a skylark.” But he’s not talking about a bird, or not only about a bird. I think we need to take seriously the idea that this bird is what the first line calls it: a spirit.
Shelley has a reputation as an atheist: was indeed sent down (expelled) from Oxford for publishing a pamphlet entitled “The Necessity of Atheism”. But he wasn’t an atheist in the Richard Dawkins, materialist sense: his beef was with the established church, which he saw as corrupt and tyrannical. He was a spiritual poet, and believed in a universal God which he called (capital-N) Necessity, or (capital-P) Power, the beauty and potency of whom he saw everywhere: the Arve river tumulting down the side of Mont Blanc, in the starlit sky, in nature—it was a common Romantic trope that the natural world was a wondrous work of art, and God the artist; lots of poems about Aeolian Harps and that’s what is going on here. Through the bird, nature is generating extraordinary beauty, unpremeditated art; and it is filling heaven, the bird is soaring to the very heights of heaven. If Shelley had been a conventional Christian, this poem would be taken as a hymn to the divine. But this is the author of The Necessity of Atheism and famous political radical (when Shelley died, Tory newspaper “The Courier” crowed: “Shelley the atheist is dead now he knows whether there is a hell or not!”
Not to get too technical-academic, but one angle I’m interested in is not just Shelleys Romantic deism, or pantheism, but his specific engagement with Christianity, which I am sure was lifelong and not hostile. The epigraph to Alastor, his mighty elegy on the death of Keats, is a quotation from Augustine’s Confessions, for instance; not what one might imagine ‘Shelley The Atheist’ reading. Except he clearly was. Indeed I wonder if this poem, so spacious and light, so clearly about light and song, doesn’t also engage Augustine. In his commentary upon John 1:5 (‘And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not’) Augustine praised the light as divine mind and truth: ‘O lux mentis! o lucens veritas!’ … and Shelley talks of the ‘lux mentis’, the light of thought, as bodying forth hymns, the word of John 1 that is the creation of the world:
Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.
And Augustine’s commentary upon Psalm 104 (God ‘Who makes the clouds His chariot/Who walks on the wings of the wind/Who makes His angels spirits … By them the birds of the heavens have their home/They sing’) says: ‘nothing in sweeter than this kind of birdsong. They chirp, spiritual persons discuss, nothing is sweeter than ths kind of birdsong’.
"I was not yet in love, and I loved to be in love, I sought what I might love, in love with loving," which is the second sentence of Book III, Chapter 1, of the Confessions. Worth noting that the first sentence of that chapter is "To Carthage I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves bubbled up all around me" — which would be borrowed by T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land.
Shelley--my first poetry love, so long ago. My first in-print mentor for Activism. It is lovely to read this poem again. Your commentary is fair and accurate. Thank you!
"We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." -- I copied that out when I first read it in high school, as words that felt more adequate to what I knew about life than many words do. Also some bits from "Ode to the West Wind." Purely from a critical standpoint, I think C. S. Lewis thought more highly of him than of many of his contemporaries.
But yes, the grief of the women -- and the children in foster care ...
(edit: To your "And yet ... and yet ..." I had to go ferret out Lewis' Selected Literary Essays and find the one on "Shelley, Dryden, and Mr Eliot". On Shelley's patchy quality: "His use of language is such that he seldom attains for long to the highest qualities of distinction, and often sinks to a facility and commonplace almost Byronic." -ouch- But Lewis maintains in the essay that "Shelley is to be regarded, on grounds which Mr Eliot himself will allow, as a more masterly, a more sufficient, and indeed a more classical poet than Dryden." Simply considered as a poet, not as a man, Lewis considers him a "great, flawed poet... a greatness to which the name of genius is particularly applicable.')
Granted, it is from a biography of Byron, but in it, it contrasts Shelley and Byron, both in Britain and in Switzerland. Wherein, as Shelley spends more time with him, envy seeps in, and he seems to become the very Satan, he would rule against. Perhaps Prometheus is his filtered view of how he should appear, than anything to real, or taking things to serious as opposed to going off on a Lark.
I got interested in what I might describe as Shelley's "casual" way with rhyming:
wert/heart/art
even/heaven
sphere/clear/there
loud/cloud/overflow'd
leaves/gives/thieves
etc.
I wondered if this was commonly accepted among poets of his time, or something Shelley is especially noted for. The poem reminds me that some poets of past ages were not necessarily strict "formalists."
I don't think it is about “the goodness [the man] could find when ransacking himself” or that ”he has loosed his bonds and reconciled himself to the order of a creation that provided him with fire in the first place”. It's almost the exact opposite. It's about the impossibility of perfect happiness on earth. In the run-up to the final stanza he repeatedly affirms that the skylark's ecstasy is irreconcilable with human life, and that even the greatest possible human happiness is fundamentally different:
”Chorus hymeneal,
Or triumphal chant,
Match’d with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt”
”... Thou lovest, but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety."
”Yet, if we could scorn
Hate and pride and fear,
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.”
He can only vaguely speculate as to what could justify the skylark's bliss:
”What objects are the fountains.....”
In the final stanza he isn't asking or expecting the skylark to teach him its gladness, he is saying “even if I only knew half of the joy you must know (the bird's gladness can only be inferred or guessed at, not comprehended), the world should listen to me" (“should", not ”will”, it is hypothetical, impossible).
That humans are denied perfect joy is one side of Shelley's main theme. In Alastor and Epipsychidion he shows men reaching for it and failing, in Prometheus Unbound and Adonais he shows that it can only be reached by death or apocalyptic revolution. To set up an opposition between the Skylark and Prometheus Unbound is strange.
I never cared for any poem of Shelley's that I encountered in sophomore English long ago, except Ozymandias. And have never have gone to any trouble to get better acquainted, especially as I came, a bit later, to detest his sort of radicalism. So, trying to read this one with an open mind, I find that I just don't respond to his style, as least as exhibited here. It seems thin, frothy. Rather too much trimeter. And I still think "bird thou never wert" is awful.
As for the man, I cherish the remark said to have been made by Mary Shelley when she was looking for a school for her one surviving son and was advised to find one that would teach him to think for himself. "Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!" (Quoted in the very wonderful Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes)
I was brought up in a generation still enough influenced by New Criticism to say artists are incidental to judgments about art, and so my tendency is toward agreeing we should not judge artworks by the possibility that, say, Villon was a murderous thief or Swinburne a neurotic who liked to hire women to beat him.
Then, too, I have lived through (am living still within, to some degree) an era that claimed elements of race and gender determine the goodness of art — and my distaste for that line of criticism adds to my strong championing of Art for Art's Sake.
But…ah, but. When I think about Shelley and his whole sick crew, I grow a little itchy. "Books are responsible for their authors; in a kind of child labor, they carry their fathers on their backs," as I once wrote — trying to thread the needle and say, in the real life of reading, we can't park what we know about the author entirely outside our readings of their work. And Shelley in particular has always annoyed me, intruding on my reading of his work.
All of which is a long-way-round-the-barn way of saying that, in the division of labor here at Poems Ancient and Modern, Sally has shouldered the burden of Shelley — sparing me, as friends do, from having to face up to my inconsistent feeling about the man and his art.
This marvellous poem!
There’s a section in Scottish novelist Alasdair Gray’s “1982 Janine” where a schoolmaster asks for an example of euphony in an English lesson, and one of his kids pipes up with “bird thou never wert”, which sets the teacher off: ridiculous! “doubtless, you remember me saying that Percy Bysshe Shelley pinnacled dim in the intense inane is one of our most mellifluous poets, but to my ear bird thou never wert sounds damnably ugly and a downright lie when we consider that wee Percy is talking to a skylark.” But he’s not talking about a bird, or not only about a bird. I think we need to take seriously the idea that this bird is what the first line calls it: a spirit.
Shelley has a reputation as an atheist: was indeed sent down (expelled) from Oxford for publishing a pamphlet entitled “The Necessity of Atheism”. But he wasn’t an atheist in the Richard Dawkins, materialist sense: his beef was with the established church, which he saw as corrupt and tyrannical. He was a spiritual poet, and believed in a universal God which he called (capital-N) Necessity, or (capital-P) Power, the beauty and potency of whom he saw everywhere: the Arve river tumulting down the side of Mont Blanc, in the starlit sky, in nature—it was a common Romantic trope that the natural world was a wondrous work of art, and God the artist; lots of poems about Aeolian Harps and that’s what is going on here. Through the bird, nature is generating extraordinary beauty, unpremeditated art; and it is filling heaven, the bird is soaring to the very heights of heaven. If Shelley had been a conventional Christian, this poem would be taken as a hymn to the divine. But this is the author of The Necessity of Atheism and famous political radical (when Shelley died, Tory newspaper “The Courier” crowed: “Shelley the atheist is dead now he knows whether there is a hell or not!”
Not to get too technical-academic, but one angle I’m interested in is not just Shelleys Romantic deism, or pantheism, but his specific engagement with Christianity, which I am sure was lifelong and not hostile. The epigraph to Alastor, his mighty elegy on the death of Keats, is a quotation from Augustine’s Confessions, for instance; not what one might imagine ‘Shelley The Atheist’ reading. Except he clearly was. Indeed I wonder if this poem, so spacious and light, so clearly about light and song, doesn’t also engage Augustine. In his commentary upon John 1:5 (‘And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not’) Augustine praised the light as divine mind and truth: ‘O lux mentis! o lucens veritas!’ … and Shelley talks of the ‘lux mentis’, the light of thought, as bodying forth hymns, the word of John 1 that is the creation of the world:
Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.
And Augustine’s commentary upon Psalm 104 (God ‘Who makes the clouds His chariot/Who walks on the wings of the wind/Who makes His angels spirits … By them the birds of the heavens have their home/They sing’) says: ‘nothing in sweeter than this kind of birdsong. They chirp, spiritual persons discuss, nothing is sweeter than ths kind of birdsong’.
The elegy on Keats is Adonais, not Alastor. Adonais does not have an epigraph from Augustine.
My mistake: of course you're right.
Alastor's epigraph is from St. Augustine's Confessions: "Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quaerebam quid amarem, amans amare."
"I was not yet in love, and I loved to be in love, I sought what I might love, in love with loving," which is the second sentence of Book III, Chapter 1, of the Confessions. Worth noting that the first sentence of that chapter is "To Carthage I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves bubbled up all around me" — which would be borrowed by T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land.
Apologies for this long, abstruse comment.
Shelley--my first poetry love, so long ago. My first in-print mentor for Activism. It is lovely to read this poem again. Your commentary is fair and accurate. Thank you!
first read for me of this spectacular poem!