By Dr. Ratan Bhattacharjee
Denounced as a rebel or a devil during his lifetime, Percy Bysshe Shelley became an angel after death. Two centuries later, he remains more powerful than when he was alive.
It is not easy to analyse why Shelley is more popular than any other English romantic poet across the globe with the possible exception of his friend, Lord Byron. His works continue to evolve decades after his death from drowning in the Gulf of Spezia at the age of 30 in 1822. It was ironic for the poet who had imagined time as an ocean in these lines: “Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years,/Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe/Are brackish with the salt of human tears!”
Born three years after the French Revolution, he naturally grew up in the ambience of the uprising. Since his childhood days he was uncomfortable with ‘Bysshe’, a title he got from his grandfather. He was by temperament unfit for the regimented discipline at Syon House Academy, which he joined in 1802.
Here, Shelley was subjected to the usual bullying, as he later faced life’s toughest obstacle in Oxford from which he was rusticated along with his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg for writing the pamphlet ‘The Necessity of Atheism’. In his free-ranging mind, there was no contradiction between an interest in science and an appetite for trashy Gothic romance thrillers. By the end of his career at Eton he finished reading Plato, Pliny and Lucretius widely, Robert Southey enthusiastically and Walter Scott less so, as well as continued to read many Gothic romances.
Southey patronised him and tried to steer him away from radical causes. Shelley became much more interested in meeting another of his cultural heroes – William Godwin, whose ‘Political Justice’ had been for Shelley a book to live by. While at Keswick, Shelley conceived a plan to put his radical political ideas into action. He had been working on a pamphlet simply titled ‘An Address to the Irish People’.
Shelley emerged as the revolutionary poet of the most discussed second generation that sees him as “the poet of the future”. He always lived in a world of ideas and visions that seemed to him a lot more reasonable, sensible and realistic. He never possessed a liking for the so-called or presumed tangible realities of the universe. Shelley’s major literary project at this time was ‘Queen Mab’, which reiterates many of the themes of Shelley’s political pamphlets, attacking the oppressiveness of religious dogma and superstition as well as of customs and institutions such as the monarchy. The poem’s perspective is utopian, viewing the pettiness and selfishness of the world from distant, lofty heights and suggesting the great potential of the uncorrupted human soul. The utopian and visionary perspectives of the poem foreshadow the apocalyptic and millennial vision of Shelley’s later poetry. ‘Alastor’, with its use of symbols, visionary elements, and mythic sources (the Narcissus-Echo myth in particular), marks a real advance over Shelley’s earlier efforts in writing poetry.
Shelley borrowed ideas from Thomas Paine’s ‘The Rights of Man’ to write ‘The Revolt of Islam: A Poem in Twelve Cantos’. He said: “Love is celebrated everywhere as the sole law which should govern the moral world.” During this period (1818-1819), Shelley wrote what many consider to be his masterpiece, ‘Prometheus Unbound’ subtitled ‘A Lyrical Drama’, in which he could not accept the idea that Aeschylus had bound the champion of mankind for eternity, or even worse, that Prometheus would have been reconciled with Jupiter in Aeschylus’s lost drama, the sequel to ‘Prometheus Bound’. As Shelley avers in the preface, “I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind.” In the same volume as ‘Prometheus Unbound’ were published some of Shelley’s finest extended lyrics, including “Ode to the West Wind,” “The Cloud,” “To a Skylark,” and “Ode to Liberty.”
“Ode to the West Wind” employs natural imagery and symbolism to foretell not only a change in the physical but in the political climate. He was the pyrotechnic romantic who even left instructions for his ceremonial immolation in classic fashion and his body after drowning was cremated and later buried. Fournier’s painting shows the funeral pyre surrounded by three of the dead poet’s closest friends. From left to right they are the author and adventurer Trelawny and Shelley’s fellow-poets Leigh Hunt and Byron. In Trelawny’s own account of the event, ‘Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron’, he described the hot August day on which the funeral took place. Fournier chose to ignore this aspect of the description. Instead, he depicted the weather as grey and cold to accentuate the sombre and dramatic mood of the piece. Byron’s desire was to preserve Shelley’s skull and the solitary seabird flying over the beach. Overcome by the experience, Byron, as the flames took hold, stripped and swam out to sea, causing him to miss most of it. So even in his death, he was an unconventional figure.
Today we see in him the beautiful angel of prophetic excellence but in his lifetime, he was denounced as a devil. He was the infidel of poetry. His father disowned him and the society of the elites imposed all sorts of bans on him. But as a poet, he explicated the causes behind humankind’s regeneration. His words in the poems deal with the liberating of humanity. In truth, he advocated three main pillars of the French Revolution – equality, liberty, and fraternity. He possessed profound hatred for priests, kings and many other tyrants and oppressors. The great poet even resented the “tyrant God” originating from custom and fear. The famous “Ode to the West Wind” shows his belief in mending and restoring humankind. His insurmountable zeal and revolutionary ideas were expressed in platonic and political idealism in each line of his poetry, which is the source of positive motivation for the present generation even after two centuries after his death.
(The author is a contributor at The Shillong Times)