The Columbia History of British Poetry (98 page)

Read The Columbia History of British Poetry Online

Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

Tags: #test

BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
7.54Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 389
imposed. "This is the age of the war of the oppressed against the oppressors," Shelley proclaims in his preface to
Hellas
. Oppressions of nations and of classes are at issue. The Greek rebellion against Turkey, the struggles of the northern Italian republics against the Austrians, the wars and revolts in Spain, Irish Catholic rebellion, and attempts by British laborers to improve their working conditions are bases for the intensely political nature of the poetry of Byron, Shelley, and, to a lesser but still important extent, of Keats.
In two early poems,
Queen Mab
and
The Revolt of Islam
, Shelley considers the possibilities for revolution and reform. Queen Mab"the fairies' midwife" in
Romeo and Juliet
and a figure commonly associated with eighteenth-century children's storiestakes the soul of the sleeping Ianthe on a journey in her magic car. Showing Ianthe the "desolate sight" of the world's past and present, Queen Mab provides commentary that outlines Shelley's views on the political, religious, and cultural systems of Europe in the nineteenth century. "'Palmyra's ruined palaces,'" the pyramids of Egypt, the temple at Jerusalem, and the "'moral desart'" where "'Athens, Rome, and Sparta stood''' evidence the transitoriness of empires and human power. "Kings, priests, and statesmen, blast the human flower." Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew, is summoned. His centuries of punishment make him well qualified to deride Christian justice and the horrors religious systems impose. The fairy queen speaks of how man also violates the world by eating animal flesh and by imposing the restraints of marriage.
While falsehood, madness, and misery may be everywhere, "the eternal world / Contains at once the evil and the cure." An image Shelley also used in
The Cenci
, that of evil as a scorpion bound "with a wreath / Of ever-living flame," suggests that evil must destroy itself. Understanding the "Spirit of Nature" as the "all-sufficing Power, / Necessity" offers some hope for the future. Shelley draws on Baron d'Holbach to assert that every molecule acts only as it must. In accepting the doctrines of religions that see man as fallen and that depend on the omnipotence of an illusory, supreme being, humans create the chaos that supports the oppression of their rulers. When reason, which necessarily must assert itself, allows man to understand the workings of the world, reform must occur. The future promises glory "When man, with changeless Nature coalescing, / Will undertake regeneration's work."
The Revolt of Islam
presents what Shelley in a letter of 1817 describes as "the
beau ideal
" of the French Revolution. Raising the possibility of
 
Page 390
nonviolent revolution, the poem considers the struggle as one of teaching and persuading more than of fighting. Such a revolution, Shelley continues in his letter, is "produced by the influence of individual genius and not out of general knowledge."
In
The Revolt of Islam
Shelley connects the power of revolution with the power of love. Two lovers, Laon and Cythna, rebel against the oppression of women"Can man be free if woman be a slave?"and against the tyranny of Othman the Turk. In keeping with persistent attempts to avoid and reverse violence, Laon finally surrenders himself to be burned alivea punishment called for by a Spanish priest. Laon has negotiated Cythna's freedom, but she joins him in death. The spirits of the two are liberated to tell the story of what revolution can be. Originally, Laon and Cythna were brother and sister, but the element of incest in addition to the condemnation of religion was so objectionable to his publishers that they forced him to make substantial revisions. Keats observes in a letter of 1817, "Shelley's poem is out & there are words about its being objected too, as much as Queen Mab was. Poor Shelley I think he has his Quota of good qualities, in sooth la!!"
Despite constant public censure and continuing unpopularity, Shelley persisted in responding in verse to the political events of his age. "Ode to Liberty" commemorates the uprising of Spanish liberals that occurred in the spring of 1820. Popular revolts in Italy inspired "Sonnet: To the Republic of Benevento" and "Ode to Naples." In England, near Manchester at St. Peter's Field, mounted soldiers (some of whom were drunk), fired on a group of men, women, and children peacefully rallying for parliamentary reform. Derisively dubbed Peterloo in a jibe at Tory pride over Waterloo, the event enraged Shelley, who then composed "The Mask of Anarchy, Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester.''
"The Mask of Anarchy"which has become the classic Romantic example of how great political poetry survives its local originis about resisting not just murderous state power, but also the way that power forces itself to be understood. It shows how poetry can be most political by focusing on what is most poeticalthe force of images in the world. In crisp three-and four-beat ballad lines and traditional allegorical tropes, Shelley broadcasts an ideal, linking metaphor and political action. The single meanings tyranny imposes cannot ultimately withstand the multiple meanings of liberty: "'Ye are manythey are few.'"
 
Page 391
Murder, Fraud, and Hypocrisy appear in front of Anarchy, the state that lets Peterloo happen. They wear the faces of individual ministers, while the comprehensive emblem on anarchy's brow is a numbing unified code: "I AM GOD AND KING, AND LAW!" The "adoring multitude" frees itself from this code when a plural order of meanings resists the single faces and meanings of the dominant, repressive order. Hope, looking like Despair, awaits destruction "with patient eye.'' Then a "Shape arrayed in mail" and associated with England's maternal earth rises from mist to light to imagea manifestation of the spirit or power in "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," which Shelley also describes as light and mist and which may "free / This world from its dark slavery."
As if speaking "an accent unwithstood" of freedom, this activist "presence" in "The Mask of Anarchy" empowers the people of England by letting them see how Anarchy's simple figures have chained their minds and political wills. They are being kept down by the iron law of subsistence wages and dehumanized into simple metonymies: "'Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade.'" They are being duped by a figure of finance, paper money, the "'Ghost of Gold'"; they have been in a dream of tyranny's "'dim imagery.'" Freedom, the poem insists, will overcome because it is replete with many actual meaningsnot just bread, clothes, fire, and foodbut also Justice, Wisdom, Peace, and Love, all in all an "'exceeding loveliness'" or excess of meanings that will absorb the limited figures of Anarchy.
Therefore, the poem enjoins a "'great Assembly'" of self-enfranchising political energies from all different corners, even palaces, of the nation. There the multitude's "'measured words'"the poetry of real governmentwill be "keen" and "wide" at once, able to withstand the merely "'fixed'" opposition of the fierce ghostly order. Shelley well knows the cost in blood for such resistance. But his belief is that power's set figures of speech have to be stopped first by the realization of the critical mass of liberty's powerful language: "'Shake your chains to earth like dew / Which in sleep had fallen on you/ Ye are manythey are few.'"
Murder in "The Mask of Anarchy" wears the face of Castlereagh, the despised Tory leader in the House of Commons. England's government provided many such figures for poetic attention. Himself a member of the House of Lords, Byron typically sympathized with radical causesas long as that did not mean outright democratic rule. In his maiden
 
Page 392
speech he advocated alleviating the conditions that pushed the stocking weavers of Nottingham to riot, rather than inflicting punishment on the people. "Lines to a Lady Weeping," which Byron insisted be published with
The Corsair
, sympathizes with Crown Princess Charlotte, the daughter of the Prince Regent, whose father sent her from the room for weeping over "these suffering Isles."
Writing of the death of the Regent's father, George III, in
The Vision of Judgement
, Byron portrays the blind, mad, old king's attempt to get into Heaven. Byron parodies Southey's eulogy for George III,
A Vision of Judgement
, and addresses the prefatory essay in which the "magnamious Laureate" condemned the immoral poetry of what he called the "satanic school," whose members he cited as Byron and Shelley.
In Byron's version George arrives at the Pearly Gates to find a dozing St. Peter who has never heard of him: "'
What George? what Third
?"' Lucifer follows the king and tries to claim his royal soul. The ensuing debate breaks down when a particularly bad poetSouthey of coursejostles his way onto the scene. One who "Had turn'd his coatand would have turn'd his skin," Southey offers to produce a nicely bound biography for Satan, demonstrating how he will write on any side of a political issue. He begins to recite, but St. Peter knocks him down, and in the ensuing hullabaloo King George slips into heaven, where he is last seen "practising the hundredth psalm."
In Byron's
Vision
George III is ridiculous rather than evil. Shelley's sonnet "England in 1819" presents a more sinister portrait"an old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King." The country's rulers are leeches, who suck the blood of people who despise them. The sonnet names the dominant legal, military, and religious forces of oppression. But by delaying the simple main verb "are," until the final couplet, Shelley constructs a syntactic suspension that represents a political reversalall the apparent entities "Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may / Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.''
A similar possibility for renewal and resurrection arises in the concluding line of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind": "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" The wind of this poem is both "Destroyer and Preserver." A world oppressed and numbed by incompetent government, by the Congress of Vienna, by massacres like Peterloo can awaken through the "trumpet of a prophecy," the words of the poet-prophet.
 
Page 393
For Shelley action and ontology are one, and the poem is also a statement of poetic possibility. The first three terza rima stanzas of the ode address the "wild West Wind" to describe its presence on earth, air, and sea in autumn, winter, and summer. In the next sections, the speaker seeks a relationship in which he attempts to replace the leaf, cloud, and wave of the preceding stanzas as objects of the wind's force. In a phrase sometimes quoted out of context to support the view of Shelley as Matthew Arnold's "beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain," the speaker cries, "I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" This borrowing of Keats's phrase in "Sleep and Poetry" serves to establish the poet as one who sacrifices in order to triumph. As the speaker realizes, ''If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" he affirms human possibility and points to Shelley's conclusion in the
Defence
: "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World."
The writing that defines and exposes political systems also speaks in "Ozymandias," a political sonnet on political writing. On the pedestal under his statue Ozymandias (Ramses II) tried to have his monumental will inscribed forever: "'Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!'" That inscription, like the missing trunk and head above it, is part of a wrecked imperial historiography. The sands of time, in the last line's metaphor, level Ozymandias's visage, sneer, name, and works. What he wants us to read about him has been monumentally empty in the "boundless and bare" desert.
What Ozymandias (and his ilk in 1817) refuse to know is that all such inscriptions are writing in the sandimpermanent, not bound by the will of kings. The sestet thus reads the pedestal antithetically, which raises the question of whether this political sonnet is itself monumental, yet another work of words doomed to "stretch far away." But the initial "I" in the poem who listens to the traveler speak of the ruined statue keeps the reader of the poem at a distance from the traveler's set reading of tyranny's "colossal Wreck." Ozymandias's words, the traveler's words, and the speaker's rehearsal of both all make for contingent readings of historical wreckage.
The power of kings and princes is set within and against the power of poetic discourse in the poetry of Shelley, Byron, and Keats. The fortunes of those who govern are also the focus of many of the verse dramas these poets wrote, although works such as Keats's
Otho the Great
, Shelley's
Cenci
, and Byron's Venetian plays have value more for their poetic and philosophical content than for their performance possibilities.
 
Page 394
Two of Byron's plays,
Marino Faliero
and
The Two Foscari
, make Italian politics relevant to those of England. In Byron's telling, the personal vendetta of Marino Faliero, a fourteenth-century Venetian doge, becomes a grand plan to set Venice free by destroying the power of "swoln patricians," the senators who limit the power of the prince to bring honor and justice to the state. Marino Faliero typifies the well-intentioned, thinking ruler who becomes involved with the masses of people revolting to find freedom. The struggle corresponds to that of the Carbonari in Italy of 1820, a fight in which Byron was deeply involved, and in which he saw "the very
poetry
of politics." Similarly, in
The Two Foscari
the honor and patriotism of the doge and his son are set against the decrees of the Council of Ten, the ''stern oligarchs" who stifle the people and those who care for them. In England, such powerful men joined George IV in his attempts to crush opposition, often those who rallied around his wife Caroline, whom he attempted to divorce and destroy. Another possibility for kingship is shown in
Sardanapalus
, a play in which Byron portrays a ruler whose enforcement of a "live and let live" policy brands him a "slothful" despot who must be eliminated.
The monumental figure of Napoleon evokes conflicting emotions from members of the generation who grew up as he grew to glory but who then witnessed his fall from what they saw as tyranny. Shelley's sonnet "Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte" begins: "I hated thee, fallen tyrant!" Having been seduced by "frail and bloody pomp," Napoleon is the "minister" of "Treason and Slavery, Rapine, Fear, and Lust." The speaker, however, realizes his repugnance has been misdirected: he now recognizes even more destructive forces than Napoleon, a typical Shelleyan trilogy of "old Custom, Legal Crime," and most of all religion"bloody Faith." In "The Triumph of Life" Napoleon has grown into a "great form," but he is also the great facilitator of evil, the man "Whose grasp had left the giant world so weak / That every pigmy kicked it as it lay."
Although amused to have acquired by marriage settlement the same initials as the French emperor, Noel Byron realizes the paradoxes of a man who can grasp the world but whose weaknesses destroy it. "Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte" condenses Napoleon's fall into "the Desolator desolate." This fate comes from not knowing when to quit, as did those leaders whom Byron contrasts with NapoleonSulla, Washington, and Bolivar. Napoleon's glory derives in part from his very inability to stop,

Other books

Never Say Never by Tina Leonard
The Deeds of the Disturber by Elizabeth Peters
Unauthorized Access by McAllister, Andrew
Just a Little Sequel by Tracie Puckett
Fake ID by Hazel Edwards
Every Woman for Herself by Trisha Ashley
Her Montana Man by Cheryl St.john
The Vampire Narcise by Colleen Gleason