PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

[Anonymous No.11390530]

This is the second Shelley reading thread. This week's thread will cover "The Cloud," "Mont Blanc," "Song of Apollo," and "Ode to the West Wind." The full schedule is below:

WEEK 1: (Already covered) The Masque of Anarchy, Ozymandias, and Song: To the Men of Englanf
WEEK 2: (That's this week. See the paragraph above.)
WEEK 3: To a Skylark, Adonais, and Mutability
WEEK 4: Alastor; Or the Spirit of Solitude and Queen Mab
WEEK 5: Prometheus Unbound
WEEK 6: Hellas

Anyway, the last discussion was a pretty good one. I hope this discussion will be even better, since it covers what I consider to be some of Shelley's best shorter poetry.

[Anonymous No.11391230]

Bump

[Anonymous No.11391356]

>>11390530
read the four (even read the poems of 1816 to gain a little context on Mt. Blanc- the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty being the most important of the little bunch) but am not in a position to comment adequately, and won't be till tomorrow afternoon. Keep this thread alive, Shelleyanons!

[Anonymous No.11391989]

While I will hold Shelley in a variety of lights, I cannot say he was a particularly incredible individual and many of his celebrated poems seem to descend into cognitionless rambling. Even while being contrasted against some of the biggest romantic titans the world over. His rhymes feel lackluster and many of his longer works are uneventful and frankly, quite boring. That being related; I've only partial research, love of poetic history, and my personal taste to build these remarks upon. So take them with a grain of salt, or as you wish, it's all the same to me.

A great many things are always taken into account when discussing a poem. Predominately the culture and sentiment of the Era it was birthed within... The political systems and societal attitude toward government, life, et cetera ad infinitum. You get the picture. While I will not claim to be well read in these areas, another important part is always present in evaluating a poem's verve and constitution: the artistic appeal to beauty, its aesthetic value. So!

I'll get the ball rolling, I suppose, and stab in the dark at a handful of the selected works by Shelley.

(I know this one was the previous week, sue me)
Ozymandias - it seems as if he set out to embody the essence of a grecian fragment. It is a grand theme with grand implications that ultimately can never confirm nor deny itself, inherently and purposefully. A brilliant, pithy, sweet roll of a poem. Thematically, WB Yeat's "The second coming" is reminiscent while reading this. One can only wonder if it held any impression with the young Yeats.


Mount Blanc - Shelley at his best, on his best day, with his best quill and his best bestness. If he can be a long and grueling bore when he fails, he can also be a towering mind when he succeeds. Zesty, enrapturing, phenomenal, this one is quite the treat. More of an internal argument, fencing with himself over concepts and contraries, all the way down rill to the mouth. Really extraordinary work here. Really wakes up a slumbering mind with electric headshots.

The cloud - Long, dreary, and like a wound that won't heal, it continues to annoy and pester you until you eventually die. In my opinion, if this is celebrated with solemnity - those people have lost their mind altogether. The rhyme scheme is basic, ABAB probably, which is fine. But the execution of the verse is an utter embarrassment. It's clumsy, dreadfully boring, and worst of all - it comes off amateurish.

Ode to the west wind - As you can see, nature and her objects hold a special place in the musings of these heart-throbbing-softies. The ol' English western breeze, Zephyr and her gang of wind fairies.. Finally!~ a physical meditation that doesn't break apart upon initializing, wonderful structure, a volcanic arsenal of lexicon and drama, a slap in the face and a kick in the ass with verse; howit outta be. If Ozymandias was the mythical opus of Shelley, his ode is certainly the gladiator of well-constructed poetry.

[Anonymous No.11392229]

>>11391989
>One can only wonder if it held any impression with the young Yeats.
It's interesting that you mention that. They are distinct poems, certainly, but Ozymandias always reminded me of The Second Coming.
>"His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display Yeats's debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood."
There's no doubt that Yeats admired Shelley. In particular, he praised Prometheus Unbound. Both poets also seemed to show an interest in Platonism and Eastern spirituality (maybe not so much Shelley) as opposed to praying to the God of Abraham.

While I do agree that The Cloud is less impressive than Mont Blanc, I personally can't denigrate it. The ideas of rebirth and immortality are certainly explored better in other works, but a few of the lines are aesthetically pleasing:
>And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,
>Like a swarm of golden bees,
>When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent,
>Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas,
>Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high,
>Are each paved with the moon and these.

[Anonymous No.11392264]

*danders in with a broad stroke of urbane and suave sophistication*

greetings, hoi polloi of jarvies and dandlymuffins; still latched, attached, and thatched to shelley, i see; i saw that i was summoned and referred to as 'keatsfag' (really just a detestable and disgusting name, but something that i could identify as belonging to me); so i took to it; latched on to it; what is this? are we still keeping on with shelley? did you not hear what i said last time? did you not take note of what i said last time? the other anon is spot on; cognitionless; no cognition, no cogitation, no thought, no peregrinations of cerebral feet; nothing, nothing; just vacuous and empty words marching on to the page; in whatever verse he so chooses; percolating and perambulating onto the page words coated in only scent; opoponax and jessamine; just the ostentatious and outward redolent flavor of the odor, but nothing underneath; flesh and skin without bones to support it; take a look at prometheus unbound for example; really, he should have took some diligence and prudence to put bounds to it; it stretches out way too much; it's too aesthetic, too precise, too clean; it needs control, it needs to stop trying so much; or at least put the effort into the plot itself, to the emotion itself; emotion is not derived, is not derived from pure image; the image must have a meaning; of suffering, of loss; of unspeakable horror; and not set up in an ideated, idealized fantastical land of the gods (that were the stories of the grecian effete storytellers years ago);

[Anonymous No.11392342]

>>11392264
Do you genuinely hate Shelley, or is this an act? I love both, not that they aren't different poets. Also, Shelley was one of the only people to appreciate Keats during his life.

[Anonymous No.11392370]

TO BE FAIR. The Romantics had a rough time. No seething resentment and pizzaz like over-the-top-anon.

>But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
>Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
>A savage place! as holy and enchanted
>As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
>By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

Colridge seemed to have placed the marker right on the dot with this nod and scoff towards the current paradigm of poetry. They are what they are. The modernists tried to murder and bury them. Lol.

[Anonymous No.11393032]

>>11390530
Waiting for this. Be by in the morning....

[Anonymous No.11393361]

>>11390530
EXTREMELY OVERRRATED

[Anonymous No.11393488]

>>11392264
>no peregrinations of cerebral feet

[Anonymous No.11393807]

>>11390530
Shelley had a small flaccid penis I know this from seeing the Shelley Memorial so much. Even though he was expelled from University College Oxford (or 'Univ' as we know it), we have a huge memorial to him there with a grand statue and his own big room. They light it up on special occasions. I'm just waiting on the nude statue of Bill Clinton, also Univ alumni.

[Anonymous No.11394932]

Bump

[Anonymous No.11394940]

>>11392264
what a larp

[Anonymous No.11394943]

shelley is the greatest poet ever and anyone who contests contrarily is wrong

[Anonymous No.11395234]

>>11392229
>While I do agree that The Cloud is less impressive...
Perhaps. But in the sense that a sophisticated children's poem is less impressive than one clearly intended for adults- Alice in Wonderland as less impressive than Middlemarch.
I unashamedly love this poem- and freely admit that from 'the perspective' of terms and doctrines from (like) Morgan's Canon to Animism, Personification to (latter day theorists misuse of Ruskin's) Pathetic Fallacy that there IS I guess much to be ashamed of..
What I love (to attempt to put it into words!) is the poem's movement and perspectivism- how one is in deep space, the cloud's shade, the poet's head, in the midst of the cloud's electrically charged self etc. etc. etc. as the poem rolls along. Without a title this would be an elaborate riddle poem, like one of Emily Dickinson's just as wild if more economic many-
>I sift the snow on the mountains below..
or
>The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
>And his burning plumes outspread,
>Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
>When the morning star shines dead--
'dead' btw as in dead ahead and of lessening brilliance at the same time, the effect being (as mentioned) one of dynamism, or one of movement, as 'the sailing rack' moves toward (and must obliterate) the planet's lessening brightness.
Anyone familiar with Bachelard's L'Air et les Songes? It is essentially Bachelard's book on Shelley, Rilke, and Nietzsche's use of aerial perspectivism and imagery, and well worth the reading.
I love the (concluding) ultimate 'spirit' of cloudhood that resolves the poem--
>I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
>And the nursling of the Sky;
>I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
>I change, but I cannot die.
>For after the rain when with never a stain
>The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
>And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
>Build up the blue dome of air,
>I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
>And out of the caverns of rain,
>Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
>I arise and unbuild it again.
Unbuild it!
What I love most about this poem is the way it makes me feel like I participate in the manic, joyful mind that made it. To love Keats, his superior skill and technical (somtimes clockwork puppet like) mastery I suppose is one thing. Shelley's movement, his dynamism is something else entirely, and I confess to preferring it- to loving it more.

[Anonymous No.11395971]

>>11393807
There's a room like this for Poe on the lawns of the University of Virginia, glassed up, there for the viewing (though he left after a year).

[Anonymous No.11396871]

>>11390530
>Hymn of Apollo
I like how the god is both present and absent at the same; i.e. how natural phenomena is 'wrought forth' in terms of human action-
>Then I arise, and climbing Heaven's blue dome,
>I walk over the mountains and the waves,
>Leaving my robe upon the ocean foam;
>My footsteps pave the clouds with fire; the caves
>Are filled with my bright presence...
I know this is an ancient poetic device exploited by many- it was even used in a non-deomorphic way in The Mask of Anarchy- but it 's really lovely here, both inventorying and agglutinating all the god's major properties, major functions as if they were of a single piece (called Apollo).
My favorite detail comes at the beginning, Apollo's bedchamber, which exists as if in a kind of negative space-
>The sleepless Hours who watch me as I lie,
>Curtained with star-inwoven tapestries
>From the broad moonlight of the sky,
>Fanning the busy dreams...
The Hours are female attendants (or should be seen as such) and the moon he is curtained off from is of course his twin sister. They are Night and Day.
I couldn't read this poem without thinking of Hoelderlin's Hyperions Schicksalslied which is of course a masterpiece.. Nonetheless I did enjoy Shelley's modest hymn.
In the Cloud poem Shelley identifies with a cloud's various manifestations from different perspectives; here he directly identifies with the god Apollo. I mention this because identity of this sort seems a theme in this week's batch of poems.

[Anonymous No.11397671]

Bump

[Anonymous No.11397828]

>I will not cease from
>Mental Flight,
>Nor shall my Sword sleep
>In my hand:
>Till we have built
>Jerusalem
>In England's green &
>pleasant land.
Shelley's sentiments precisely, though he'd let the place-name stand, no doubt.

[Anonymous No.11397841]

>>11392264
>peregrinations of cerebral feet

[Anonymous No.11397848]

>>11397841
Where's that from? The Triumph of Life?

[Anonymous No.11397858]

>>11397841
sexy pentameter line, m8

[Anonymous No.11398028]

>>11394943
don't know if I'd go that far; but if youre being ironic, the irony's misplaced.

[Anonymous No.11398326]

>>11390530
>Percy BITCH Shelley

[Anonymous No.11398956]

>>11395234
What of Mont Blanc?

[Anonymous No.11400223]

>>11391989
>..his ode is certainly the gladiator of well-constructed poetry.
Perhaps in poetic fact there is something gladiatorial about this ode- the armour Shelley himself 'as poet' would wear is that of the West Wind itself, however; his foe, the miseries and oppressors of mankind; his weapon, his verse. ..It's striking that this ode was made some years earlier than either The Cloud or The Hymn of Apollo, and that Mont Blanc is earlier still. Go, figure.
I like how after three strophes of praise and descriptive invocation, i.e. after (perhaps closing his eyes) and imagining himself to be the w wind in all of its colorful functionality, that his concluding petition is TO BE that wind itself, for he would have its (tricky word when dealing with PBS) power. Not immediately, however. He begins small-
>If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
>If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
>A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
>
>The impulse of thy strength, only less free
>Than thou, O uncontrollable!
But he then waxes Wordsworthian, recollects his boyhood when.. to imagine himself the wind was scarcely less than BEING IT in terms of felt power. This recollection serves as a bridge; what the poet really wants is a reversal of identities-
>....Be thou, Spirit fierce,
>My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
>
>Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
>Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
Etc.
Much can be said about this great poem, that's just my tuppence.

[Anonymous No.11400428]

Once read him after reading Plath, and was like, this nykuh's blood real thin

[Anonymous No.11400578]

His ancestors come into my store quite regularly. Wonderful people.

[Anonymous No.11400607]

>>11400578
>ancestors
>in the present
The absolute state of /lit/

[Anonymous No.11400715]

>>11400578
>descendants
They'd be of the Harriet line as both children of Shelley's first wife lived on into adulthood- Ianthe (who married) and Charles. Only Percy Florence survived of Mary's three kids, and he died childless.

[Anonymous No.11401051]

>>11400223
>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 tempetature 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 region.
> 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, sympathizes with that of the land in the change of seasons, and is consequently influenced by the winds which announce it.
This is Shelley's note to Ode to the West Wind. These are the lines alluded to:
>----- Thou
>For whose path the Atlantic's level powers
>Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
>The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
>The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
>Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
>And tremble and despoil themselves..
Is this actually, or does this allude to an actual natural phenomenon? Anybody?

[Anonymous No.11401343]

>>11398956
Shelley resists identification here. Oppose the West Wind with this massive earthen pile- take the Bachelardian route- and it's rather easy to discern why: his 'element' is air, not earth- the sublimity of a mountain such as this one offends him, literally, although he owns up to its influence, that influence scatters his thoughts, prompts him to recollect himself, to dissociate himself from the mountain. He therefore maintains an objectivity almost 'scientific' in his litany of descriptions. Some weird things are going on however-
>The wilderness has a mysterious tongue
>Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
>So solemn, so serene, that man may be,
>BUT FOR SUCH FAITH, with nature reconciled;
>Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
>Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
>By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
>Interptet, or make felt, or deeply feel.
This is great verse, but far more polemical in both idea and tone than any of the later poems read in this batch- Shelley's 23 here. Make of it what (you) will. It's implication is that an edgy doubter is more harmoniously attuned to Nature than some serene, Christian bonze. But who knows? Perhaps he's correct. I just don't personally care if he is or not.
I like, just before-
>--Is this the scene
>Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young
>Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea
>Of fire envelop once this silent snow?
>None can reply--all seems eternal now....
because I think its (perhaps intentionally) funny.

[Anonymous No.11401426]

No The Revolt of Islam / Laon and Cythna? Has anybody actually read the original Laon and Cythna text before he was forced to re-issue it due to its glorification of incest?

[Anonymous No.11401469]

>>11401426
Only Revolt itself. Rereading now The Witch of Atlas. What I miss from the list is Cenci, Epipsychidion, The Triumph of Life, some sonnets, and The Defense. OP's list is adequate, ..though he seems to have disappeared. Long holiday wkend, I guess.

[Anonymous No.11401527]

>>11390530
Mont Blanc is genius. If anyone wants any help with the message, it's about the piercing of the infinite deathly stillness that is beauty and eternity with the ephemeral nature of nature and beeing and by espying the beauty one becomes god

[Anonymous No.11401936]

>>11400607
Sorry m8 sort in my cups during that one.
>>11400715
Ill ask them about it.

[Anonymous No.11401961]

>>11401936
I know that Ianthe's married name was Esdaile and that she had 6 children; Charles I believe died quite young, though not in infancy too young to marry. Ianthe's middle name was Elizabeth; I mention this because she went by the name 'Eliza' throughout her life. My guess is that this is the line your friends derive from fwiw.

[Anonymous No.11402441]

>>11401527
>becomes God
Think? If there is a message I think it's more like- 'yeah, mont blanc, you inspired me- but without the language of my verse (which so envies your all but otherworldly serene take on your own sublimity and obvious power to move me) you'd be nothing!' Emphasize 'me'- that's the emphasis Shelley struggles for in this poem.

[Anonymous No.11403312]

>>11401527
Please explain!

[Anonymous No.11403361]

>>11398028
no irony here friendo

[Anonymous No.11403381]

>>11392229
Is this OP? If so, what is your take on Mt. Blanc? I'm not really happy with anything I've seen here. The verse itself is fantastic, but what of the sentiments? the thoughts? This poem does not at all seem 'Wordsworthian' although there does seem to be something of Milton's Satan in it. If I take that path, however, I fear I'll only be recapitulating something I read (and am under the impression that I've forgotten) in Harold Bloom. For instance, though sublime, many of the descriptions are clearly negative, and in such a way that Satan might view God- which seems maybe silly, maybe not. I'm a little confused! This isn't an easy poem.

[Anonymous No.11403393]

>>11403361
I love Shelley. And though I don't think he's the best poet going, I love that there's someone out there who thinks so.

[Anonymous No.11404312]

Bump!

[Anonymous No.11404363]

how do i get into poetry? i tried to read Mont Blanc but the meter isn't really pushing me through the poem and i just feel bored reading it.

[Anonymous No.11405796]

>>11392264
baka @ these hazlitt platitudes
not ok! very inaccurate! shelley is just as good as keats.

[Anonymous No.11406477]

>>11404363
There was a 'pataphysics thread up about two weeks ago and some kid posted how grateful he was to a teacher he otherwise disliked who one class period handed out a poem by Malarmee (notoriously frustrating) and said 'you all have an hour to figure this out.' He went over and over the poem, made sure he understood the words as used, their references, connections, etc. But what he was ultimately grateful for was the knowledge, or for the discovery, that reading poetry is very different from reading history, fiction, textbooks, anything. ..One kind of allows oneself to exist with a poem (like Mt. Blanc)for awhile until one gains confidence that one understands the words, what they add up to, how they connect, etc. Of course it takes patience. But once one gains this preliminary understanding the poem will flow and begin to make more and more sense both in its own context and in the context of ALL poetic literature.
I wish I could be more helpful. I will say that if (you) do get bitten by the bug youll love it forever, guaranteed.