“Time” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

J.M.W. Turner, Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842)

Time

“Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years, 
Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
Are brackish with the salt of human tears! 
Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow
Claspest the limits of mortality! 
And sick of prey, yet howling on for more, 
Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore; 
Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm, 
Who shall put forth on thee, 
Unfathomable Sea?”
 

John Kerr comments:

In his life and writings, Shelley was fascinated with the element—water—that would one day take his life. In the above poem, Shelley explores another subject, “time,” by linking it to the great waterways of the world. Like time, the “unfathomable sea” wields great power over human life, and its unknowability makes it sublime—that is, both captivating and terrifying. 

The ocean, whose space appears to stretch on infinitely, would seem to be the best symbol we have for thinking about time. But for Shelley, the ocean also says something about human limitations. Readers of the second-generation Romantics might recognize this convention: as the primary setting of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, for instance, the sea illustrates the confusion and turmoil—you might say adriftness—both of the Byronic hero and the British society he comes from. There is also Keats’ famous epitaph, “here lies one whose name was writ in water,” which shares with Shelley’s poem a fear that our lives might be as transient and unremembered as a wave breaking on the shore. For these writers, the great waterways are both majestic illustrations of the world’s hidden power, and ever-present reminders of our vulnerability as mortal beings.

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Jon Kerr is a recently graduated from the University of Toronto with his PhD in English literature with a specialization in the Romantics. He is currently at Mount Alison University in New Brunswick, Canada on a post doctoral fellowship.

P.B. Shelley, from "Julian and Maddalo" (1818-19)

Lord Byron and Shelley remained close friends influenced each other's writing, despite their notable and differences in outlook.

                                                         “‘See
This lovely child, blithe, innocent and free; 
She spends a happy time with little care, 
While we to such sick thoughts subjected are
As came on you last night. It is our will
That thus enchains us to permitted ill. 
We might be otherwise. We might be all
We dream of happy, high, majestical. 
Where is the love, beauty, and truth we seek
But in our mind? and if we were not weak
Should we be less in deed than in desire?’ 
‘Ay, if we were not weak—and we aspire
How vainly to be strong!’ said Maddalo: 
‘You talk Utopia.’ ‘It remains to know,’ 
I then rejoin'd, ‘and those who try may find
How strong the chains are which our spirit bind; 
Brittle perchance as straw…’”

“Julian and Maddalo” is a conversation poem that centres on the relationship between two figures: the aristocratic Maddalo (who resembles Shelley’s friend and fellow poet Lord Byron) and Julian (an idealist who closely resembles Shelley himself). Throughout the poem, the conversations and experiences of the two compatriots touch on subjects that preoccupied both Shelley and Byron in their life and writing. Julian (whose voice begins our excerpt) argues for the mind’s power to change itself and the world around it: “look at your child,” he encourages Maddalo; “there is nothing preventing us from achieving this state of innocent happiness except our own self-imposed agony. Like William Blake, Julian proposes that the chains we wear in our lives are “mind forg’d.” But we “might be otherwise,” he says; “We might be all | we dream of.”

The far more skeptical Maddalo calls this “Utopian”—Julian is being naively idealistic, in other words. Maddalo takes Julian’s rhetorical question—“if we were not weak | Should we be less in deed than in desire?”—and turns it on its head: the problem, he says, is that we are weak, and only “aspire… vainly to be strong.” The will is not free, says Maddalo; rather, our lives are shaped by forces beyond our control.

As is common in debates staged between the two companions throughout the poem, the argument here ends in a stalemate: Julian gets the closing word, but merely says “it remains for us to find out | How strong the chains are which our spirit bind.” In other words, even if Shelley closely resembles Julian in certain ways, his objective in this poem isn’t to demonstrate the superiority of his worldview over that of Byron’s. Neither side is proven correct or incorrect in the poem; rather, Shelley seems far more interested in faithfully exploring competing ways of seeing the world. In fact, Shelley might even be using some of Byron’s ideas to test out the durability of his own convictions: can I be absolutely certain that “we might be all | We dream of”? How do I know? Shelley seems to be asking himself. As we’ve explored elsewhere on Tuesday Verse, this willingness to ask hard questions about his own values and worldview is a recurrent characteristic of Shelley’s scepticism.

This is our "Tuesday Verse" series. Commentary comes from Jonathan Kerr, who has recently completed his PhD in English at the University of Toronto with specialization in the Romantics. 

Captions: Thomas Phillips, Lord Byron (1813); Alfred Clint, Percy Shelley (1829)

P.B. Shelley, “The Flower that Smiles Today” (1821-22)

Louis Édouard Fournier, The Funeral of Shelley (1889)

INTRODUCTION

Welcome the The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley. This site is managed by me, Graham Henderson. My blog feature reflections on the philosophy, politics and poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a radical thinker who has receded into the shadows. Shelley has the power to enthrall, thrill and inspire. His poetry changed the world and can do so again.

When Shelley famously declared that he was a "lover of humanity, a democrat and an atheist," he deliberately, intentionally and provocatively nailed his colours to the mast knowing full well his words would be widely read and would inflame passions. The words, "lover of humanity", however, deserve particular attention. Shelley did not write these words in English, he wrote them in Greek: 'philanthropos tropos". This was deliberate.  The first use of this term appears in Aeschylus’ play “Prometheus Bound”. This was the ancient Greek play which Shelley was “answering” with his own masterpiece, Prometheus Unbound. 

Aeschylus used his newly coined word “philanthropos tropos” (humanity loving) to describe Prometheus, the titan who rebelled against the gods of Olympus. The word was picked up by Plato and came to be much commented upon, including by Bacon, one of Shelley’s favourite authors.  Bacon considered "philanthropy" to be synonymous with "goodness", which he connected with Aristotle’s idea of “virtue”. Shelley must have known this and I believe this tells us that Shelley identified closely with his own poetic creation, Prometheus. In using the term, Shelley is telling us he is a humanist - a radical concept in his priest-ridden times.

When he wrote these words he was declaring war against the hegemonic power structure of his time. Shelley was in effect saying: I am against god. I am against the king. I am the modern Prometheus. And I will steal the fire of the gods and I will bring down thrones and I will empower the people. Not only did he say these things, he developed a system to deliver on this promise.

As Paul Foot so ably summed it up in his wonderful book, "Red Shelley":

"Shelley was not dull. His poems reverberate with energy and excitement. He decked the grand ideas which inspired him in language which enriches them and sharpen communication with the people who can put them into effect."

It is time to bring him back – we need him; tyrannies, be they of the mind or the world, are phoenix-like and continually threaten to undermine our liberties.  Shelley's ideas constitute a tool kit of sorts which have direct applicability to our own times.  As did Shelley, we too live in a time when tyrants, theocrats and demagogues are surging into the mainstream.

Please enjoy this website! There are guest contributors, book reviews and much much more.

Please tell me where you discovered this post by writing to me at graham@grahamhenderson.ca

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The Flower that Smiles Today

The flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow dies; 
All that we wish to stay
Tempts and then flies. 
What is this world's delight? 
Lightning that mocks the night, 
Brief even as bright. 

Virtue, how frail it is! 
Friendship how rare! 
Love, how it sells poor bliss
For proud despair! 
But we, though soon they fall, 
Survive their joy, and all
Which ours we call. 

Whilst skies are blue and bright, 
Whilst flowers are gay, 
Whilst eyes that change ere night
Make glad the day; 
Whilst yet the calm hours creep, 
Dream thou—and from thy sleep
Then wake to weep. 

Likely written in the final year or so of his life, “The Flower that Smiles Today” captures Shelley’s increasing preoccupation with the transience of life and its joys. The final years of Shelley’s life were marked by increasing difficulties, both personal and political: between 1816 and 1819, Shelley and Mary had lost three children, which brought growing strain to their marriage; at the early 1820s came with a series of critical setbacks to England’s reform movement that, just a few years prior, seemed on the verge of creating real change in the country. These issues hang over Shelley’s mutability poems like this one, which ponders how it is possible to survive particular joys—friendship, love, beauty—once we know we can never experience them again.

Some of you might also notice connections, both stylistic and thematic, with some of Byron’s poetry, which often ponders similar questions. Both the Byronic hero and the speaker of Shelley’s poem capture the zeitgeist of Britain’s revolutionary period as it gradually drew to a close: that is, both reflect upon the disappointed hopes that come to people (and societies) that once seemed destined to achieve great things.

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Commentary Jonathan Kerr, who has recently completed his PhD in English with specialization in the Romantics.