1st Edition
The Poems of Shelley: Volume Five 1821–1822
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was one of the major poets of the English Romantic period. This is the fifth volume of a six-volume edition of The Poems of Shelley, which aims to present all of Shelley’s poems in chronological order and with full annotation. Date and circumstances of composition are provided for each poem and all manuscript and printed sources relevant to establishing an authoritative text are freshly examined and assessed. Headnotes and footnotes furnish the personal, literary, historical and scientific information necessary to an informed reading of Shelley’s varied and allusive verse.
Most of the poems in the present volume were composed between late summer 1821 and late January 1822. They include Hellas, a lyrical drama written in support of the Greek War of Independence, composed in September–November 1821 and published in February–March 1822, his unfinished tragedy Charles the First which he had been planning for several years, as well as important shorter poems such as ‘The Indian Girl’s Song’, ‘Autumn: a Dirge’ and his ‘Epitaph’ for John Keats.
In addition to accompanying commentaries, there are extensive bibliographies to the poems, a chronological table of Shelley’s life and publications, and indexes to titles and first lines. Now completed, this is the most comprehensive edition of Shelley’s poetry available to students and scholars.
Note by the General Editors
Note on Illustrations
Preface to Volume Five
Acknowledgements
Chronological Table of Shelley’s Life and Publications
Abbreviations
THE POEMS
409 ‘In the great morning of the world’
410 ‘As the sunrise to the night’ [Fragment: To Italy]
411 Hellas
411 Appendix Lines connected with Hellas
412 The Indian Girl’s Song [Lines to an Indian Air]
413 ‘Which like a crane, its distant home pursuing’
414 ‘An archer stood upon the Tower of Babel’
415 Autumn: a Dirge
416 ‘Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years’ [Time]
417 ‘The flower that smiles today’ [Mutability]
418 ‘A fresh fair child stood by my side’ [Love, Hope, Desire, and Fear] (Translation of Brunetto Latini, Il Tesoretto xxi 82–156)
418 Appendix Brunetto Latini, Il Tesoretto xxi 82–156
419 ‘A capering, squalid, squalling one’
420 Epitaph [On Keats]
421 The Zucca
422 ‘Rough wind that moanest loud’ [A Dirge]
423 ‘Alas, if I could feign’
424 ‘There was a star when Heaven was young’
425 ‘Though thou scatterest their ashes’
426 Charles the First
426 Appendix Lines connected with Charles the First
427 ‘A widowed bird sate mourning for her love’ [A Song]
428 ‘Art thou pale for weariness’ [To the Moon]
429 Lines to — [Sonnet to Byron]
Appendix A: The Order of the Poems in 1822
Appendix B: ‘[ ? ] / As when within a chasm of [?mighty] seas’
Appendix C: ‘O thou whose cold hand tears the veils from error’ (Translation of Petrarch, Africa vi 901–2)
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
Biography
Carlene Adamson was formerly Assistant Professor of English at Vesalius College, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.
Will Bowers is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Thought at Queen Mary University of London, UK.
Jack Donovan was formerly Reader in English at the University of York, UK.
Kelvin Everest is A. C. Bradley Professor Emeritus at the University of Liverpool, UK.
Mathelinda Nabugodi is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at University College London, UK.
Michael Rossington is Professor of Romantic Literature at Newcastle University, UK.
