1st Edition
The Poems of Shelley: Volume Four 1820-1821
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the major Romantic poets, and wrote what is critically recognised as some of the finest lyric poetry in the English language. This is the fourth volume of the five-volume The Poems of Shelley, which presents 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 written between late autumn 1820 and late summer 1821. They include Adonais, Shelley’s lament on the death of John Keats, widely recognised as one of the finest elegies in English poetry, as well as Epipsychidion, a poem inspired by his relationship with the nineteen-year-old Teresa Viviani (‘Emilia’), the object of an intense but temporary fascination for Shelley. The poems of this period show the extent both of Shelley’s engagement with Keats’s volume Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820) — a copy of which he first read in October 1820 — and of his interest in Italian history, culture and politics. Shelley’s translations of some of his own poems into Italian and his original compositions in the language are also included here.
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. The volumes of The Poems of Shelley form the most comprehensive edition of Shelley’s poetry available to students and scholars.
Note on Illustrations
Preface to Volume Four
Acknowledgements
Publisher’s Acknowledgements
Chronological Table of Shelley’s Life and Publications
Abbreviations
THE POEMS
359 ‘There is a Spirit, whose inconstant home’
360 ‘I am as a Spirit who has dwelt’
360 Appendix Fragments connected with ‘I am as a Spirit who has dwelt’
361 ‘Methought I was a billow in the crowd’
362 ‘I went into the deserts of dim sleep’
363 ‘Into the plain, out of the mountains hoar’
364 ‘The path was broad’
365 ‘Such hope as is the sick despair of good’
366 Italian translation of Prometheus Unbound II v 48–110, IV 1–55 and 57–82
367 Italian translation of Laon and Cythna ll. 667–98
368 ‘Thy beauty hangs around thee like’
369 The Fugitives
369 Appendix Unused lines for The Fugitives
370 The Tower of Famine
371 ‘Faint with love, the lady of the South’
372 ‘I faint, I perish with my love—I grow’
373 ‘Thy gentle face, [ ? ] dear’
374 ‘Il tuo viso, o [?vaga] [ ? ]’
375 ‘Che Emilia, ch’era più bella [a vedere]’
376 ‘E da la [?buona] che forse [?sfrenata]’
377 The Woodman and the Nightingale
378 Fiordispina
378 Appendix Fragments connected with Fiordispina
379 ‘Rose leaves, when the rose is dead’
380 ‘[?When] May is painting with her colours gay’
381 Dirge for the Year
382 Aeschylus Fragment
383 ‘I would not be, that which another is’
384 ‘Ye gentle visitations of calm thought’
385 ‘He has made / The wilderness a city of pavilions’
386 ‘Come da una avita quercia’
387 Buona Notte
387 Appendix Medwin’s translation of Buona Notte
388 Ode alla Libertà
389 ‘These are two friends whose lives were undivided’
390 ‘Ye who [ ] the third Heaven move’
391 Epipsychidion
391 Appendix Fragments connected with Epipsychidion
392 ‘O time, O night, O day’
393 To Emilia Viviani
394 ‘If shadows [ ? ] [?when] the [ ? ] lie’
395 ‘Dal spiro della tua mente, [è] istinta’
395 Appendix ‘Cosi la Poesia, incarnata diva’
396 ‘Unrisen splendour of the brightest sun’
397 ‘The flowers have spread’
398 Ginevra
399 A Lament (‘O World, O Life, O Time’)
400 ‘When passion’s trance is overpast’
401 Epithalamium
402 ‘From the wrecks of the gloomy past’
403 Adonais
403 Appendix Unused stanzas for Adonais
404 ‘It is a savage mountain slope’
405 The Aziola
406 The Boat on the Serchio
407 Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon
408 ‘A snake came to pay the mastiff a visit’
Appendix A The Order of the Poems in 1822
Appendix B Orpheus
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
Biography
The Editors
Michael Rossington is Professor of Romantic Literature at Newcastle University, UK.
Jack Donovan was formerly Reader in English at the University of York, UK.
Kelvin Everest is A. C. Bradley Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Liverpool, UK.
The General Editors
Paul Hammond, FBA, is Professor of Seventeenth-Century English Literature at the University of Leeds, UK.
David Hopkins is Emeritus Professor of English Literature and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, UK.
The Founding General Editor
F. W. Bateson, who founded the series and acted as General Editor for its first generation of titles, was a distinguished critic and scholar. He was lecturer in English and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, the editor of the original Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, and founding editor of the journal Essays in Criticism.
