Transcript PRESENTATION NAME

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Quest for (Poetic) Revolution via
Nature and Free Love
How’s your poetry reading
so far?
1. Which poems do you like the best?
2. How do you overcome the
difficulties of reading poetry?
3. Do you like the Romantic poets?
Do you find them too passionate?
Can you relate to their passionate
quest for poetry, love, nature and
revolution?
Quest: a long search for something that is
difficult to find, or an attempt to achieve
something difficult (Cambridge)
Outline
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Introduction: Shelley—His Life and Idealism
To a Skylark (1820) (compared with « Nightingale » Ode)
Quiz
Ode to the West Wind (1819) (next week: compared
with « To Autumn» Ode)
• Short Lyrics (to be compared)
– “To —— [Music, when soft voices die]” (1821)
– “When the Lamp is Shattered (1821)”
• Next Week
Film Clips:
How the Romantics are connected
• Six Degrees of Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Byron (BBC) Part 8 (4:41 « What makes you write? ») Part 9
(8:55 Shelley’s death)
• The Romantics (part)–
– “The Necessity of Atheism”
– (Coleridge – Kubla Khan)
– 16:00 Shelley –: “A God made by man…”
– Free love –Harriet 21:00 elopement with Mary
and Claire
– 24:00 Byron – Childe Harold Pilgrimage; 34:00 Keats
– 53:28 – Shelley, seeing his own double, his death
Shelley’s Free Love
Jane Williams
Shelley’s desertion of Harriet
Westbrook – whose infedility?
Mary Shelley
Harriet Shelley: Wife of the Poet
Shelley: Bio
• 1811 – [age 19] eloped married Harriet
Westbrook (age 16).
• 1814 - abandoned his pregnant wife and child to
Byron divorced
run away with Mary Godwin.
his wife and left
England for good.• 1816 – met Byron in Italy
• 1816 - married Mary, following the suicide of
Harriet Westbrook.
• 1822 – drowned in a sudden storm while sailing
back from Livorno to Lerici..
He was unrecognised in his lifetime, earning
around £40 for his writing over the duration of
his entire life.
Shelley’s Idealism
• Atheism: Expelled from Oxford for producing a
pamphlet called, “The Necessity of Atheism”
• Works promoting his ideals:
– “Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things”
(1811), a long, strident anti-monarchical and anti-war
poem.
– several essays on Vegetarianism , writing that eating
meat is “subversive to the peace of human society.”
-- admired by C.S Lewis, Karl Marx,
Gandhi (for his non-violence in
protest and political action).
To a Skylark: Summary
• 21 stanzas divided into 3 parts:
– 1-6: 1) strain of unmeditated art compared to
different things;
– 7-12: 2) «What thou art we know not »--further
comparison.
– 13-18: 3) teach us your thoughts and origins of
your music, though we can only sing sad songs.
– 19-21: 4) teach me half your gladness.
• What is the poem’s main idea?
• To what is the skylark and its music compared?
To a Skylark: Discussion Questions
• What is the poem’s main idea?
• To what is the skylark and its music compared?
How can a bird be compared to so many
things? Can you find something close to it?
• How is the ways Shelley relate to skylark
different from or similar to Wordsworth or
Coleridge or Byron?
To a Skylark: Note
– the first 4 lines are metered in trochaic trimeter,
the fifth in iambic hexameter (Alexandrine). The
rhyme scheme: ABABB
– Compared with « Ode to Nightgale »
– Nightingale—of dark night; skylark—bright sky.
– The nightingale inspires Keats to feel “a drowsy
numbness” of happiness that is also like pain, and
that makes him think of death; the skylark inspires
Shelley to feel a frantic, rapturous joy that has no
part of pain. (source: Spark Notes)
Ode to the West Wind:
Discussion Questions
The poem marked
& paraphrased
– Terza rima (tercets in iambic pentameter
with an interlaced rhyme scheme--aba, bcb,
cdc) ending with a concluding couplet
(intensified climax)
– 5 parts divided into two parts: invocation to
the wind and a plead to the wind.
• What is the poem’s main idea?
• To what does the speaker compare the
west wind and its influences?
• What does the speaker plead for the
wind to do?
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Short Lyrics
How are they different from each other in
their views of the love represented and lover’s
responses?
« WHEN THE LAMP IS SHATTERED »
« MUSIC, WHEN SOFT VOICES DIE »
« WHEN THE LAMP IS SHATTERED »
• Pay attention to images of space (cell, nest,
home) and its progressive emptiness.
• Do you have experience of the following lines?
• When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot.
• The heart's echoes render
No song when the spirit is mute No song but sad dirges,
Like the wind through a ruined cell,
Or the mournful surges
That ring the dead seaman's knell.
When the Lamp is Shattered
When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead When the cloud is scattered,
The rainbow's glory is shed.
When the lute is broken,
Sweet tones are remembered not;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot.
When hearts have once mingled,
Love first leaves the well-built nest;
Love?
The weak one is singled
To endure what it once possessed.
O Love! who bewailest
The frailty of all things here,
Why choose you the frailest
For your cradle, your home, and your bier?
As music and splendour
Survive not the lamp and the lute,
The heart's echoes render
No song when the spirit is mute No song but sad dirges,
Like the wind through a ruined cell,
Or the mournful surges
That ring the dead seaman's knell.
Its passions will rock thee,
As the storms rock the ravens on high;
Bright reason will mock thee,
Like the sun from a wintry sky.
From thy nest every rafter
Will rot, and thine eagle home
Love?
Leave thee naked to laughter,
When leaves fall and cold winds come.