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Teachers' Resource Web Notes on Shelley Poems Al Drake, UCI "Ozymandias": Go over the theme of history in romanticism and the significance of ruins of past civilization. Ruins, rebellion, religion. Has Pharaoh won? The same problems remain. The poem is rebellious. The traveler reports his observation a something to be wondered at, considered in its mysteriousness and persistence. I saw this--what do you make of it? What Sphinx-like riddle does the head of Ramses II hold for us? The riddle of human cruelty, mastery, pride, power inequalities, political and spiritual oppression. The sculptor rebelled, mocked Ramses 3000 years ago, and the Hebrew God defeated Ramses, hardened his heart, etc. But the cruel expression and "sneer of cold command" outlived all of this, and here it is confronting us again. So has Ramses won after all? Still, the statue does not mean quite what Ramses wanted it to mean. We do not despair because he built a monument to himself; that material thing is not important. That his cruelty and oppressiveness, his hardness of heart, are still around: that is the problem, the reason for our despair. Why does blank Nature recede? It is blank and pitiless, gives no answer. The traveler thinks he has brought home to us something exotic, a little picturesque fragment from an ancient time, But he has brought us home to the same old passions, the same political and spiritual riddle of human nature. "Stanzas Written in Dejection": Failure of imagination--the poem's title announces its failure. Nature is not a mere reflection of the poet's inner state, but there is some relation. As in Coleridge, the poet's failure to animate nature by imagination is the theme. The poem valorizes an extreme emotional state (unlike neoclassical authors, who shunned extremes as indecorous and dangerous). Point is to get beyond the scripts or rules that civilization hands us from birth, even if the price of the attempt is to expose our failure. The poet can describe nature, but he cannot feel the power of his words. It is always possible for poetic language to fail: breath/dead leaves. The poet is in a state of alienation from nature and from his fellow humans. He cannot reproduce original joy in others; he can only set going a chain reaction of alienation and depression. The poem is about alienated consciousness. The poet cannot simply take from nature what he needs because the relation is reciprocal--he needs to be able to animate nature before it will respond. "England in 1819": Provide historical circumstances--the year of the Peterloo massacre Carlyle writes about in Past and Present (1843). Post-Napoleonic repression is the thing Shelley protests against. A rebellious, revolutionary poem agains repressive post-Napoleonic aristocracy. Shelley does not seem to fit entirely into the Abrams thesis about internalization of revolutionary sentiments concerning democracy and liberty. I.e. internal change before external, political change. But some of his poetry does. "Ode to the West Wind": An optimistic poem that tries to overcome the limitations and fallenness of human language. Poetic language holds prophetic, revolutionary promise. Wordsworth's "correspondent breeze"--inspiration from nature. Shelley admits that he "strives" with the West Wind, but prays that it will make him its lyre, and then even prays that it will become him. Notice the images he ties to human speech: dead leaves--yet they will fertilize a new birth. The verses he speaks are incantations--ritualized, sacred, meant to effect something magic. The words are ashes, sparks. They are the trumpet of a prophecy, not the prophecy itself. But the spring is coming. "To a Skylark": Again, the theme is failure, though tinged with optimism. Optative poetics. Shelley is not the skylark, but the poem competes with the bird's song. The bird is unconscious in our fallen sense--it does not "look before and after and pine for what is not." It does not experience fallen desire for that from which it has become alienated. The bird is the summation of mystery in nature through its clarity and joy. Nature is the model of inspiration, not of imitation. The bird is the best in nature, and nature is better even than the Greeks. So the poem recognizes the present failure of the human voice, of writing, but still conveys a tone of excitement and optimism. The poet has been inspired by the unseen bird to write the poem we are reading. He reads the bird as possessor of a kind of harmony and simplicity lost to humankind. The optimism is put in terms of a conditional sentence: if the bird will agree to teach the poet its secrets, the world will then be as enraptured at his song as he is by the bird's. So the question is, what does this poem claim for poetic language? Can it help us overcome the effects of the fall? Unite us? Two Major Themes: hope invested in poetic language; romantic revolutionism.
The flip side of these themes is tendency to dwell upon failure of
imagination and poetic language, withdrawal, in some cases, into
the self and from political commitment in the wake of the French
Revolution. But all these themes must be questioned constantly. The
English romantics are gloriously inconsistent.
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