SHELLEY'S PERSONAL LOVE POEMS
I
Shelley's great love poems were inspired by love repressions, and it
will be my province to try to trace some of the finest poems in the
English language to their sources.
His relations with women have been much criticised and also much
misunderstood. The first thing unusual about his life is the slight
influence his mother exerted upon him. Shelley, no doubt, loved
his mother, but he received very little sympathy from her. As a
result he became strongly attached to his sisters; in them he sought
unconsciously for the mother he had all but lost. He was alienated from
his father in boyhood, and there were definite clashes later. The poet
was the oldest of six children.
He loved his cousin, Harriet Grove, and was engaged to her. She broke
the engagement on account of the views he entertained. Her parents
influenced her in this action. It was Shelley's first love affair. The
poet was in his nineteenth year when he was jilted; he slept with a
loaded pistol and poison near him for some time after this. In January,
1811, in a letter to his friend, Hogg, he writes he would have followed
Harriet to the end of the earth. He asks his friend never to mention
her. He tells of a personal interview with Harriet and laments that
she is gone and that he still breathes and lives. On January 11 he
wrote: "She is gone! She is lost to me forever! She married! Married
to a clod of earth; she will become as insensible herself; all those
fine capabilities will moulder." She had, however, not yet married. It
was the recollections of these acute sufferings that he later put into
the mouth of the maniac in _Julian and Maddalo_; those poignant ravings
were for a half century regarded as impersonal, and were never thought
to be directed against a real woman whom he loved.
In the latter part of March, 1811, the poet was expelled from Oxford
for his pamphlet on atheism. In the meantime he had met Harriet
Westbrook and married her, in a spirit of gallantry, in the latter part
of August, 1811; he sympathised with her because of her sufferings at
home. He also liked Elizabeth Hitchener at the time, and later asked
her to come and live with his wife and himself. She did so about July,
1812. Shelley's wife had no liking for her, so Miss Hitchener was
practically bribed by the poet to leave. This she did in November.
Shelley was disillusioned in her, and he really had very little in
common with her, though she was intellectually superior to Harriet,
Shelley's wife.
In July, 1814, Shelley deserted his wife. A few weeks later he left
with Mary Godwin, with whom he had been friendly since the spring of
the year. On December, 1816, Harriet committed suicide by drowning,
while pregnant.
Shelley married his second wife legally December 30, 1816. He probably
was not madly in love with her. Mention should be made of two cases
of unreciprocated affection for him on the part of the poet's two
sisters-in-law, Fanny Godwin, who committed suicide, and Jane
Clairmont, the daughter of Mrs. Godwin by a previous marriage, and also
known as the mistress of Byron.
The two women whom Shelley loved after his marriage and who inspired
some of his best poetry were Emilia Viviani and Mrs. James Williams.
Shelley met Miss Viviani about December, 1820. That winter he wrote
the _Epipsychidion_, which was a love poem to her; here he also told
us the history of his love affairs. In June, 1822, he refers to his
disillusionment with her. About this time his feeling for his friend's
wife, Mrs. Williams, overpowered him, and he wrote a number of lyrics
to her. He was drowned July 8, 1822, with Mr. Williams.
Shelley never had a satisfactory love affair in his life. He was
discarded by his first love, for whom his affection was strong. He
did not love his first wife at all, and his second wife did not give
him that satisfaction in love for which he craved. Hence he yearned
after others. His new affairs brought him no happiness, as he was
disillusioned in his Emilia, while Mrs. Williams was married to his
friend; social intercourse was for a while stopped between Shelley and
the Williamses on account of Shelley's love. Two other women who cared
for him did not attract him. This whole state of affairs led to some
of his best poems, brought out some of his views on free love, and
influenced his lyrics. We will examine how his poetry arose from the
depths of his unconscious.
_Julian and Maddalo_ was first sketched in 1814. The maniac's
soliloquy, which is one of the most forceful outcries of love
disappointment in poetry, inspired by personal experience, and is,
with Swinburne's _The Triumph of Time_, among the greatest of all such
products in literature, is Shelley's own outburst. It is his full
fury cast at Harriet Grove, and was not, as surmised by Arabella
Shore (_Gentleman's Magazine_ [1887], v. 263, p. 329). and H. S. Salt
(_Shelley Society Papers_ [1888], p. 325), directed against his first
wife. He never loved her as that maniac loved; besides, it was not
true of Harriet Westbrook that she ceased to love Shelley. It is said
that the poet believed her guilty of adultery while living with him,
but even if this were so (and we have no evidence to warrant such a
belief), the poet had been casting longing eyes at Mary Godwin, his
future second wife, for some time before he left his first wife; we
have no proof that the poet was heartbroken after he left Harriet
Westbrook, though he sympathised with her.
His affair with Harriet Grove was not the ephemeral thing that William
Sharp deems it, in his biography of the poet. For even when married to
Harriet Westbrook, he was still chagrined about the first Harriet. When
Miss Grove married a cousin in the fall of 1811, a few months after his
own marriage, the poet wrote to her brother, asking how he liked his
brother-in-law, and added sarcastically and bitterly, "A new brother
as well as a new cousin must be an invaluable acquisition." This was
in October 28, 1811. Harriet Grove's conduct had caused him to spend
many sleepless nights, and only a few months before his marriage to
Miss Westbrook he had suicidal thoughts. He wrote sad love verses and
a complaint against love's perfidy. Captain Kennedy describes Shelley,
in June, 1813, as playing on the piano a favourite tune which Harriet
Grove used to play for him. (Dowden's _Life of Shelley_, p. 390.) It
was in the next year that he sketched the poem, _Julian and Maddalo_,
and while it is likely that in the final version, which was written
four years later though published after his death, unconscious emotions
regarding Harriet Westbrook were fused into the poem along with the
indignation at Harriet Grove. The reference to the tomb for which the
lady addressed in the poem deserted the poet, may have been suggested
by the dead Harriet Westbrook; but this fact is not sufficient reason
for regarding her the subject of the poem, as Miss Shore and Mr. Salt
do. We should look for truth beyond such incidental references. The
pain in this poem is the memory of a far greater and earlier agony than
that Shelley experienced by Harriet Westbrook's infidelity; rather of
the grief that Harriet Grove caused him. The passages in the letters to
Hogg prove that the poet's sorrow was too keen for him to forget; he
could not help but put them unconsciously in this poem.
There are references to Harriet Grove in _Epipsychidion_ written in
the early winter of 1821. Mr. Flea, in an article on _The Story of
Shelley's Life in Epipsychidion_, contends correctly that Harriet Grove
is the "one with the voice which was envenomed melody," from whose
cheeks flew a killing air which lay upon the leaves of the poet's heart
and made him feel the ruins of age. The bitterness of this passage is
equal to that in _Julian and Maddalo_, and hence the lines do not refer
to some vulgar affair as some critics think.
Shelley had written some of his earliest sad and lugubrious love poems
to Harriet Grove, and they appeared in 1810, in the volume _Victor and
Cazir_, a copy of which book the poet presented to Harriet Grove. In
the November of the same year, when he was losing her, he published
_Posthumous fragments of Margaret Nicholson_, and the concluding poem,
"Melody to a Scene of Former Times," has all the pain of the Maniac's
soliloquy in _Julian and Maddalo_, and was, no doubt, written to
Harriet Grove. It has passages of reproach like those in that poem.
The best-known lines in the latter poem are:
"Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong;
They learn in suffering what they teach in song."
The reader may think that it is utterly insignificant whether the
Julian poem was written about the first Harriet instead of the second,
but this is just as important as to know that, let us say, Arthur
Hallam, and not some one else, is the person mourned by Tennyson in
_In Memoriam_. And we are enabled to learn the influence upon his work
and ideas when we understand the nature of the earliest sex repression
in the poet's life. This affair in Shelley's nineteenth year was of
vast import; it made the Shelley we know, the enemy of society and the
reformer.
He hated intolerance, religion and monarchy because by his heterodoxy
and the offence it gave to Harriet Grove's parents, he lost her; not
to mention that he also lost his mother's love for his radical views.
He saw the world steeped in error, and he believed this condition made
him lose the love of his betrothed and of his mother. He wrote to Hogg
that he would never forgive intolerance. "It is the only point on which
I allow myself to encourage revenge; every moment shall be devoted to
my object which I am able to spare." Here in the words of this youth
we see the main factor which led to writing _Prometheus Unbound_ and
_The Revolt of Islam_. His plans shaped themselves at the time of the
jilting, and he never swerved from them. And in the opening stanzas of
the eleventh canto of the Islam poem he again describes the agonies
of his lost love, with Harriet Grove in mind, no doubt. This poem was
written in the summer of 1817. Shelley then became an uncompromising
reformer because he had suffered in love for his radical ideas; hence
he would make it his aim to spread the views which he held so that in
the future other lovers should not lose their sweethearts because of
liberal notions. And in the _Ode to the West Wind_ Shelley's prayer is
to spread his ideas over the universe.
Though the poet wrote a few good poems to Harriet Westbrook and
dedicated _Queen Mab_ to her, she had little or no influence on his
life except to bring him sorrow because of her suicide. One of the few
references to her in his later work is in the _Epipsychidion_, "And one
was true--oh! why not true to me?" Stopford Brooke thinks this refers
to Harriet Grove, but this is not likely, as Shelley continues, "there
shone again deliverance," and he speaks of one who was to him like
the Moon. The Moon was, of course, his second wife, Mary Godwin, who
immediately succeeded Harriet Westbrook.
II
The _Epipsychidion_ tells us of the poet's love adventures and gives us
his beautiful dream of love. In _Alastor_ he had depicted his longing
for love; the poem was written in 1815 at the time he was living with
Harriet Westbrook; it shows how lonely he felt and how he longed for
love. In _Epipsychidion_, where he speaks of his lying "within a
chaste, cold bed," he says that he had not the full measure of love
from his second wife. Hence he took refuge in building a fanciful isle
where he satisfies his love with Emilia Viviani. In this great poem
Shelley gives us a glimpse into his polygamously inclined unconscious.
He states his philosophy of free love in the poem. As physical desire
was a strong factor in Keats's one solitary love, the trait most
characteristic of Shelley was his polygamous instinct. This is present
in the unconscious of the male, and society has tried to eradicate it
by marriage. We all know that there has never been complete success
in this direction. The instinct which is repressed bursts forth
especially when the marriage has not been successful, or when the man
does not love his wife in full measure, though as the world is aware
it breaks out even in cases where he does love. Neither of Shelley's
two marriages gave him the real love he sought. He wanted other women
to live in his household. He invited Miss Titchener to live with him
and Harriet Westbrook, and he had Jane Clairmont, his wife's half
sister, who fell in love with him, live with them. He thought he would
be happy with Miss Viviani, but was disillusioned with her soon, and
then his polygamous instinct made Mrs. Jane Williams the object of his
affections. Yet Shelley led a chaste, upright life and did not satisfy
his instincts for polygamy; instead, he wrote poetry. He created
fantasies because of his repressions, and gave us the beautiful day
dream closing the _Epipsychidion_.
Mrs. Williams inspired some of the greatest lyrics in the language.
The painful poem to her husband beginning with the words, "The serpent
is shut out from paradise," tells how he flies because Mrs. Williams's
looks stir griefs that should sleep and hopes that cannot die. The
world owes to Shelley's attachment for Mrs. Williams such poems as,
_Rarely, Rarely, Comest Thou, Spirit of Delight_, _One Word Is too
Often Profaned_, _When the Lamp is Shattered_, _Oh, World! Oh, Hope!
Oh, Time!_ _Rough Wind, That Moanest Loud_, _With a Guitar, To Jane_,
_To Jane--the Invitation_, _To Jane--the Recollection_, _Remembrance_,
_Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici_, and _The Magnetic Lady to Her
Patient_. Here are a dozen poems that every lover of Shelley knows,
yet they are the outpourings of the poet's love for another man's
wife, written because he could not attain that love and satisfy his
polygamous instincts. Had these instincts been satisfied, these
beautiful poems would have been lost to the world.
We now come to two of his greatest odes, _To the Wild West Wind_ and
_To the Skylark_. Here, as in the case of Keats's two great odes, the
critics have feared to trace the poems to a love repression on the part
of the poet. In fact, most criticisms of the poems treat them as alien
to the subject of love. And yet unconsciously Shelley is here voicing
his longing for love and giving vent to his unconscious polygamous
instinct. Mr. Gribble, in his _Romantic Life of Shelley_, surmises that
the poet is really unconsciously expressing dissatisfaction with his
married life. When Shelley wrote these poems he was still groping for
love; he lived with his second wife, and as far as we know had no love
affair. He had not yet fallen in love with either Miss Viviani or Mrs.
Williams.
The _Ode to the West Wind_ was written in the fall of 1819. The poet
at the time was unhappy; a child of his had died, and his wife was
suffering great depression. When the poet was complaining that he
was falling on the thorns of life and bleeding, and speaking of the
"autumnal tone" in his life, he was referring to the repression of
his love life. He lived with Mary whom he did not love passionately.
If he concludes his poem with the prayer that the wind drive his dead
thoughts over the universe to quicken a new birth, he wants to profit
by this in love. He unconsciously meant that if his ideas on free love
should prevail, he would be able to take a new love without reproach
and without suffering such misfortunes as he did when he deserted his
first wife. He had been deprived of his children and was driven to
exile from his native land a year and a half previously, March, 1818.
It has been one of the ironies of Shelley's fate that the world has
admired this West Wind ode greatly, and tabooed the most important idea
Shelley wanted spread, that of free love. So if we read between the
lines in this great ode pleading for the dissemination of his idea,
we find the poet's unconscious stating he is unhappy and is longing
for another love than that of his wife. He pleads for a satisfaction
of his polygamous instincts. Should the reader think this conclusion
untenable, I can reply that the facts we have of the poet's life give
it unqualified support. Let us also remember that the fructifying wind
was always a sex symbol.
It is the same with _The Ode to the Skylark_, written nearly a year
later. He envies the bird its happiness. "Shadow of annoyance never
came near thee," he says to it. "Thou lovest--but ne'er knew love's
sad satiety." Here he betrays himself by a few words. He has had his
satiety of love, and sad it was, without satisfying him. He doesn't
love his present wife; he never cared deeply for his first wife; his
first sweetheart rejected him; and he had been loved by girls he did
not love. All these facts justify us in selecting the words, "love's
sad satiety" and assigning them a definite meaning. Had we known
nothing of the poet's biography we could not have spoken with such
conviction. He sings "our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest
thought." His saddest thoughts have been those about the difficulties
of finding love's ideal, and of loving another when pledged to some one
else. Then we have the unconscious sex symbolism in the wish to be
happy like the flying singing bird.
Psychoanalytic methods applied to Shelley reveal him then, in his love
poems and in lyrics which were not supposed to deal with love, as a
chaste man with polygamous inclinations and married to a woman he did
not love passionately. There is a connection between this state of
affairs and his interest in scattering liberal ideas. That he also
mistook real love for platonic love may be seen by _Epipsychidion_ and
the poems to Mrs. Williams. Unconscious love elements were at the basis
of other poems of his, like the _Ode to Dejection_.
_Alastor_, _Julian and Maddalo_ and _Epipsychidion_ of the longer
poems, his dozen lyrics inspired by love for Mrs. Williams, and his two
famous odes represent the personal Shelley from the love side, and are
among the greatest poems in any language.
A few words should be said about _Adonais_, his great elegy on Keats.
It is one of his personal poems, and among the best known lines are
those describing himself, "who in another's fate wept his own." The
critics who attacked the work of Keats, though they did not, as Shelley
erroneously thought, drive Keats to death, were the very reviewers who
attacked Shelley and his ideas. Even in this grand elegy Shelley was
also bemoaning unconsciously his failure, and complaining that his
ideas on free love, liberal religion and republicanism were attacked.