Someone once said that if you get interested in Shelley you end up knowing everything about everything, a slight exaggeration no doubt but a comment that reflects his incredible breadth of knowledge. (See the appendix in Volume II of F.L. Jones's edition of Shelley's letters for his truly staggering reading list). So Shelley is a resource or an entry point for many different areas of knowledge and literature. His life also provides many discussion points in the areas of social history and morality.

• Our CD 'The Shelley Story' can be used by students for private study - to get acquainted with his life and his work - and as a kicking off point for further exploring Shelley's work. I also make some suggestions below as to topics which could be explored either alone or in a group situation, suggestions which take English as a broad rather than a narrow subject - for deep rather than shallow learning. The CD booklet, reprinted in the Lyrics and Commentary section, is another resource.
  
  
• For the classroom or in a further education seminar ... first listen to the CD as a group. It will introduce a wide variety of Shelley lyrics and relate them to his life story. (This could stimulate closer reading and research into specific poems). Many other issues will arise along the way which over the next weeks can then be researched either as individuals or as small groups. Write a short presentation on a selected topic or one of your own choice or devising; these can then be all presented together at one or two subsequent lessons. It's a way of greatly increasing the sum knowledge of the group. O The CD can also be used informally – throw a Shelley party, depending on the atmosphere play the entire CD or just the songs from it and see if you feel better at the end of it ! Paradise of Exiles, Rise like lions, Wild Spirit.

Band 1: Paradise of Exiles.

Have a look at 'The boat on the Serchio' (from which the opening lines of the song are taken). It's a relatively straightforward conversational poem about a day out sailing. Shelley is Lionel, Melchior Ned Williams. Both were at Eton (lines 79 - 84). But note some typically Shelleyan touches: how closely nature is observed; the awareness of gothic horror banished by the day (lines 26 - 29) and the distancing from conventional religion (lines 30 - 38). Note also the final verse describes the landscape between Ripafratta, Pisa and the sea in terms which derive from Shelley's walking, riding or sailing in the areas. Is there not a closeness of observation that today's car journeys do not give rise to ?

Research Project: Plato's influence on Shelley is referred to in the first piece of narrative, and comes through at the end of 'Paradise of Exiles'. Find out about Plato's story of the cave and his 'Theory of forms'; how does this relate to Shelley's lines 'The One Remains, the many change and pass' ?

Band 2: Shelley's early life narrative:

Research Project: Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley, is referred to as a pioneer feminist. Give a short account of her life, including the time spent in France during the revolution, her suicide attempt at Putney bridge and her death in childbirth. Why did William Godwin's story of her life, published after her death, scandalise both friends and enemies ?

Hint: See Richard Holmes's introduction to 'A short residence in Sweden and Memoirs of the author of 'The Rights of Woman' by Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin (ISBN 0-14-043269-8)

Research Project: Why could Shelley and his first wife Harriet not get divorced ? Find out about the state of the divorce laws in Shelley's time and how they were reformed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Research Project: The summer of 1816, which the Shelleys spent with Byron at his villa on the banks of lake Geneva, is famous for having brought about Mary's novel Frankenstein. What were the poets talking about which contributed to the writing of the story ? Find Mary's own account of the moment when she had the idea for the book - turn the lights down and read it to everyone !

Band 3: Rise Like Lions

The Peterloo massacre was a sign of the political tension in the time before the Great Reform Bill of 1832. Shelley's response came in his Song to the Men of England and also in the Mask of Anarchy, which he sent to editor friend Leigh Hunt. But Hunt wrote: 'I did not insert it because I thought that the public at large had not become sufficiently discerning to do justice to the sincerity and kind-heartedness of the spirit that walked in this flaming robe of verse'. Have a look at The Mask of Anarchy - is it as inflammatory as Hunt make out ? Does it demonstrate an ambivalence in Shelley, on one hand stoking popular revolt and on the other fearful of mob violence ? Does the song 'Rise like lions' which marries lines from the 'Song to the Men of England with the final verse from The Mask of Anarchy misrepresent Shelley ?

Project: Have a look at the stanzas of The Mask of Anarchy (65 - 91) where he advocates non-violent action to pursue Parliamentary Reform. Do you think this is good advice ? Give reasons both for agreeing and disagreeing with Shelley.

Band 5: Wild Spirit

Let's take a closer look at the Ode to the West Wind. One effective way of beginning is to divide the poem up into sections, allocate the sections to people and then read the poem aloud with each person reading their own bit. Having done this, have a look at the structure. How many lines are there in each stanza ? What does this tell you ? The poem is divided into five fourteen line stanzas. Each is, in effect, a sonnet - but - it departs from the usual rhyme scheme of the sonnet. Have a look at the rhyming sequence of the stanzas. What has Shelley done ?

 

Shelley has combined the sonnet form with the Italian terza rima format. He has in effect realised that the rhyming sequence of the Shakespearean sonnet form is too static for his subject, the rushing west wind. Terza rima, by bringing a new rhyme every three lines, conveys a sense of ongoing movement. So he has combined an Italian verse format with an English form. The basic theme of the poem is, of course, the West Wind. Have a look at each 14 line stanza. Think of the elements of earth, water, fire and air. Which elements, in which stanzas, does Shelley apply the effect of the wind to ? Stanza 1 deals with the effect of the wind on the earth; stanza 2 on the air; stanza 3 on water; stanza 4 not on an element but on Shelley himself; stanza 5 continues with the wind's effect on Shelley but completes the element cycle by bringing in the final element of fire:

 

'Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words amongst mankind !'

 

This amounts to a technique of extending a theme or metaphor, something Shelley had learned from his recent reading of Spanish writer Calderon de la Barca. Finally, a difficult image from the poem. What do you make of the line '(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)' (l. 11). Is this an example of Shelley's impenetrability or slapdash imagery ? Can you work out what it means ? One Shelley commentator wrote that he never understood this line until he saw a flock of sheep spreading out upwards on a hill. Shelley is transferring that image to the way that the buds on a tree gradually unfold into the air. F.R. Leavis famously put Shelley down for slapdash imagery, but this was simply because he did not grasp Shelley's meaning. Work through the rest of the poem keeping the pattern of the elements in mind. If anyone in the group has been to 'Baiae's bay' (line 32) maybe they could fill in with some detail. Having gone through the poem then read it again out loud in a group and see how your understanding of it has changed. Something to think about: Are the lines 'And, by the incantation of this verse/Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth/Ashes and sparks my words amongst mankind' a conscious attempt by the poet to raise the memory of himself and his humanist cause ? Who and what does that remind you of ?

 

Heart of Hearts, The Pine Forest.

Band 9: Heart of hearts

Try this: courtly love imagery lines 1 - 145; Shelleyan love philosophy lines 147 - 189; narrative of Shelley's love life in symbolic terms (190 - 344); recognition of Emilia (if one interprets it literally) or union with a platonic world-soul (if one interprets it metaphorically) lines 345 -591. Who do you think 'Marina, Vanna, Primus' are (line 601)?

 

Marina - Mary Shelley; Vanna - Jane Williams; Primus - Ned Williams. After arriving in Italy in 1818 the influence of Italian poets - Tasso, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio - became far stronger on Shelley's work.

 

Research project: To get a flavour of the courtly love tradition and see how it might relate to Epipsychidion, have a look at some of Petrarch's lyric poems. A possible starting point might be poems 3 and 323 in his Rima Sparse, which deal with his first glimpse of Laura and her death. One could read the poems to the group with a presentation what you make of them. (A useful Petrarch edition is Petrarch's lyric poems, translated by Robert Durling; Harvard ISBN 0-674-66-348-9)

Note - Shelley on Petrarch: 'Petrarch: whose verses are as spells which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is in the grief of love'. - From his Defence of Poetry.

Band 11: The Pine Forest

 

What do you think is the difference in tone between Epipsychidion and the later love lyrics that make up the Pine Forest ? Is this about getting older ? Epipsychidion is about young love with its hopes and expectations while the Pine forest lyrics have a more measured sadness to them. The ending of Shelley's excitement over Emilia - (she finally was found a husband, a much older man with whom she hardly had a happy marriage) - left him in a state of 'morbid quietness' as he put it and left his poetry reflecting on love's delusory nature rather than its promise. Incidentally, Emilia had good memories of Shelley when Tom Medwin met her in Florence about ten years after Shelley's death: she felt he had both cared about her and supported her while in the convent in Pisa. The Triumph of Life, Immortal Deity, Adonais, The World's Great Age.

Band 13: The Triumph of Life.

Shelley took over an outhouse near the Casa Magni where he wrote The Triumph of Life. He wrote it on large sheets in large handwriting: they are covered with sketches and also sums and calculations which indicate how he was juggling his accounts. The Triumph of Life sequence also includes other poems including 'She left me at the silent time - lines written in the bay of Lerici'. As a way of establishing the atmosphere of The Triumph of Life have a look at this short and relatively simple poem. Who do you think it is about ?

How do you understand the final image of the fish and the fisher with his lamp ?

Shelley and Mary were staying at the Casa Magni with their friends Edward and Jane Williams. Of the fifteen poems known to have been written in 1822 seven were addressed to Jane; Shelley was exploring his friendship with her. This friendship hovered on the brink of sexuality: in the Triumph, opposite the line 'And fell, as I have fallen by the wayside' (line ) Shelley wrote in tiny letters 'Alas I kiss you Jane'. Another poem begins 'We meet not as we parted' probably referring to the effect of this kiss and adds: 'One moment has bound the free' referring to the kiss itself.

So the lines written in the bay of Lerici were about Jane leaving Shelley alone with his thoughts looking out from the balcony over the bay. The final image reflects on the fact that the fish are lucky to be extinguished in the moment of pleasure by the fisher with his spear whereas people have to live with the regret of knowing that that pleasure has passed.

And on to the Triumph itself...

Maybe a good starting point would be to read a commentary on it such as that in 'Shelley's major Poetry' by Carlos Baker (Princeton University Press, 1948) (pp 255 - 270).

Points:

• From CD booklet: 'The poem is a philosophical search for the sources of meaning in human life, with the poem maintaining that most, even Shelley's admired Plato, fall by the wayside. As well as the Roman triumph it also draws on Petrarch's 'Trionfi del Morte' (Triumph of Death).'
• For the first time in Shelley's work it presents sexuality as a destructive force - previously it had been celebrated - so the way the poem would have been resolved is of great interest'.
• 'In Shelley's most mature phase he puts ethics at the centre of his project without sacrificing psychology (the task of self-knowledge), politics or history'. Michael Scrivener, Radical Shelley, p. 315.
• If Shelley could not find meaning in religious orthodoxies where then did he look for hope ? The next song, Immortal Deity, combines selections from his poetry and prose in an attempt to suggest an answer.
• First World War poet Wilfred Owen was greatly influenced by Shelley. Have a look at his poem 'Strange Meeting' which tells of an encounter with a dead soldier and compare it with Shelley's account of his meeting with Rousseau in 'The Triumph of Life' (from line 176). Can you see the influence ? What is going on in each poem and how do they compare ?

Band 15: Immortal Deity

Background; from CD booklet: 'This selection is an indication of how the Triumph of Life might have ended; it tries to make a unity out of Shelley's many comments on God and spirituality. He called himself an atheist - 'I took up the word, as a knight took up a gauntlet, in defiance of injustice' he told Trelawny - and battled mightily with contemporary attitudes to God. He certainly never believed in what he calls here a 'creative god', ie a protective, caring/angry paternal god, and was consistent in attacking this Judeo-Christian model of God. The result was that he looked elsewhere for sources of morality - substituting what he regarded as innate qualities of benevolence and love of justice and liberty that were inherent in people. Of course, these could be overridden, though they would not disappear'.

Think about some examples of when that innate benevolence has broken down; perhaps - Japanese treatment of prisoners of war in WWII; Nazi persecution of the Jews and others; genocide in Ruanda; the mass murder in New York on September 11th 2001. What, in Shelleyan terms, has gone wrong? Basically some sort of ideology that prevents any kind of empathy between the persecutors and their victims has taken over. The Shelleyan humanist morality, which sees the imagination as an important component in moral behaviour - the conduit by and through which empathy is aroused - has been overridden.

Consequently, as seen in the above examples, there is no empathy displayed towards the victim. Interestingly enough, the leader of the hijackers on September 11th, Mohammed Atta, would not converse in any meaningful human way with Americans when he was learning to fly in Florida. He could not afford to let his ideology be challenged by any hint of an awareness of the humanity of the people he was planning to murder.

Immortal Deity: conclusion ... and a question.

One interesting aspect of Shelley is that he doesn't go the way of the materialist; he was well described by Timothy Webb as 'a humanist with a sceptical and tentative awareness of some higher power'. Perhaps being a poet and experiencing the mystery of poetic inspiration (which he found explored in Plato's dialogue Ion) made him suspicious of materialist doctrines. The fragment Immortal Deity, together with the extracts from the Defence of Poetry, expresses that tentative sense of a spirituality bound up with human potential - ''what men call God' being a kind of spirit of wisdom/justice/liberty/creativity/poetry that can visit anyone'.

Question: What do you think of this conception of 'what men call God ?'. Do you think it is more or less persuasive than the traditional (Old Testament) idea of an activist God who intervenes in human affairs ?

Question : How do you understand Shelley's comment: 'Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man' ?

Note: Shelley uses the word poetry in a very broad sense: 'Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression of the imagination'.

Background, from CD booklet:

'This song may represent the first time that Plato (in verse 1) has ever been put to a backbeat ! Though a philosopher, two epigrams of Plato survive, evidence perhaps of an early desire to be a poet/playwright. His evident failure to succeed may have been why, in book 10 of The Republic, he proposed banishing poets from his ideal state ! His epigram is a soulful tribute to a lost friend, Stella, who 'gives new splendour to the dead'. The second verse, from Adonais, plays on the old philosophical notion that perhaps this life is nothing but a dream. The opening lines of Stanza 40 of Adonais are followed by the two final lines of the poem. Adonais often comes to mind when the young and gifted suffer an untimely death; examples could include Bryan Jones of the Rolling Stones (Mick Jagger read pieces from Adonais at the concert in Hyde Park), River Phoenix or - the prime contemporary example, John Lennon. You could see Lennon in Shelleyan terms as an 'unacknowledged legislator' who now 'shines in the heavens like the evening star'. In his poem A Terre (Being the Philosophy of many soldiers) World War One poet Wilfred Owen referred to Adonais (see stanza 42):

'I shall be one with nature, herb and stone',
Shelley would tell me. Shelley would be stunned.
The dullest Tommy hugs that fancy now.
"Pushing up the daisies is their creed, you know'.

In other words Shelley's lyrics on death synchronise with today's (western) largely agnostic attitudes on the existence of the afterlife. What can continue after death though is inspiration and strength for those who remain. The spoken fragment comes from Shelley's notebook from Lerici, and is significant in that it repeats the central idea from the Ode to the West Wind. This emphasises the fact that the grim vision from The Triumph of Life, written at the same time as the fragment, is not a final descent into pessimism on Shelley's part but part of a longer work in which sources for hope in a secular world would have been explored. The third verse is a reprise of the platonic verse from Paradise of exiles, and the final chorus is from the last line of the Ode to the West wind. It brings out the link between the Ode to the West Wind and Adonais: at the beginning of the final stanza Shelley wrote 'The breath whose might I have invoked in song/ Descends on me ….' - a reference back to the west wind in Florence'.' Stanza 42 of Adonais (which Wilfred Owen was referring to) reads:

'He is made one with Nature: there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird; He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, Spreading itself where'er that Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own; Which wields the world with never-wearied love, Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above'.

And continues, in lines originally written for his son William: 'He is a portion of the loveliness Which once he made more lovely ....'

Question: How does this attitude towards bereavement strike you ? How do you think it compares to the doctrines on the afterlife of the world's major religions ?

Band 21: The World's Great Age

To conclude, a mini-essay on the final song, the World's Great Age.

Background, from CD booklet:

'This song gathers together Shelley's utopian verses from a variety of sources: as the narration makes clear, Shelley's positive thinking worked over the following century. So this collection of Shelley lyrics ends with the poet in idealistic mode. He understood the value of a vision, but saw its achievement as subject to 'the difficult and unbending realities of actual life'. As he put it to Leigh Hunt in the dark days after the Peterloo massacre: 'You know my principles incite me to take all the good I can get in politics, for ever aspiring to something more. I am one of those whom nothing will fully satisfy, but who is ready to be partially satisfied by all that is practicable'. Yet - I add after September 11th 2001 - he was also sceptical; after the verses 'The world's great age begins anew' his poem Hellas ends:

'Oh, cease ! must hate and death return ?
Cease ! must men kill and die ?
Cease ! drain not to its dregs the urn Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past
Oh, might it die or rest at last !'

But the last Act of Prometheus Unbound, from which some of the utopian lines are taken, was written in Florence after the Peterloo massacre - I think as a gift of hope for the reform movement in Britain. The picture that emerges is that of someone who had no illusions about humanity and its capacity for wrong but wrote: 'we derive tranquillity and courage and grandeur of soul from contemplating an object which is, because we will it, and may be because we hope and desire it, and must be if succeeding generations of the enlightened sincerely and earnestly seek it'. (Philosophical View of Reform, my italics). At the same time he was concluding the final Act of Prometheus Unbound with the same thought, that acts of will and courageous hope are what humanity can look to.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
Out of its wreck the thing it contemplates
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.

Primary sources: Shelley; Poetical works. Oxford University Press Mary Shelley; Frankenstein. Everyman

Commentaries:

Some books which might be useful, a half century old commentary which is still pretty sound, a generally good biography and two more investigations of Shelley's radicalism which supplement the previous two:

'Shelley's major Poetry' by Carlos Baker (Princeton University Press,(1948)
'Shelley: The Pursuit' by Richard Holmes (Weidensield and Nicholson 1974)
'Radical Shelley' by Michael Scrivener (Princeton 1982)
'Red Shelley' by Paul Foot (Sidgwick and Jackson 1980)

Using ‘Lord Byron and the Greek War’ in education

A track by track guide, for classroom/tutorial use. It is suggested tracks are taken and worked on individually, the songs to be used to introduce Byron’s poetry.

• Further background information, plus the text and provenance of the song lyrics is given in the reprint of the CD booklet in the Lyrics and Commentary section.
  
  

Track 2: (Freedom song) See CD notes; compare with the original 3 verse poem.

Track 3: At the end of this narrative reference is made to Byron’s dalliance in Ravenna before setting off for Pisa. During this period of transition he wrote his diary-like ‘Detached Thoughts’, in which he reflected on his past life and explored a number of issues.

Suggestion: Find a bit that interests you, read it out to others as a basis for discussion (group exercise).

Track 4: This audio clip supplements the song ‘Lord B. in Motion’ with a reconstruction of Shelley’s welcome to Byron when he arrived in Pisa, based on their letters. It covers:

1. their different perspectives on the death of John Keats, said by Shelley (erroneously) as having been killed off by a reviewer. Find Byron’s verse on the death of Keats, a typical piece of Byronic wit.
2. Byron’s difficulties in persuading his publisher John Murray to publish his satire The Vision of Judgement.
3. Their plans to set up a journal as a vehicle for political reform (Shelley) and to counter critics in England (Byron). See journalist John Watkins’s piece on their decision below.

Click here to download.

Track 5:

* In the resumé of Byron’s experience of Greece and understanding of the political situation there, there is a reference to his poem ‘The Curse of Minerva’, with the comment that it represents the anti-imperialist tradition in British life. Don’t the lines below (220-228) seem to anticipate and welcome the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and condemn what Byron called ‘this mania for collecting colonies’ ?

‘Look to the East, where Ganges’ swarthy race Shall shake thy tyrant empire to its base; Lo ! There Rebellion rears her ghastly head And glares the Nemesis of native dead
Till Indus rolls a deep purpureal flood
And claims his long arrear of northern blood So may ye perish ! Pallas, when she gave Your free-born rights, forbade ye to enslave’.

* Shelley’s funeral: Trelawny’s account of the death and funeral of Shelley in Records of Shelley, Byron, & the Author is the classic memoir.

* Have a look at Don Juan, Canto 6, to see how Byron resumed his poem (in April 1822) after a break of 18 months. Cantos 6 – 17 were written over the next year, the unfinished Canto 17 being started in Genoa in May 1823.

Track 6: Marathon. Find the original context of the opening verse in Don Juan Canto 3 following Stanza 86. See how he distances himself from the heroic content (the song presents the verse as if straight from the author).

Track 8: Lady Blessington dialogue. Can you detect a bitterness behind his flip comments on the English and English high society ?

Track 9: Byron’s departure is well described in Iris Origo’s book The Last Attachment. Teresa gave Byron a lock of her hair to take with him; after his departure it was found in a desk drawer in his villa in Genoa. What do you think this says about his relationship with Teresa and with women in general ?

Track 10: The journey to Cephalonia is described in Records of Shelley, Byron, & the Author.

Track 12: The extent of Byron’s reputation was partly due to his lifestyle but partly due to his poetry, which, Richard Cronin argues, had restored people’s sense of individuality after being bound up in a communal approach to the Napoleonic wars. Do you think the impact of the Beatles in their first years could be attributed to a similar kind of freeing up of individual personalities ?

Track 14: Listen to the dialogue as a group: What do you think of Byron’s approach to religion ? ‘I am attacked from all sides, including from the pulpit’…. Have a look at this attack on him, by the Bishop of Calcutta.

Byron is: ‘the systematic poet of seduction, adultery and incest; the contemner of patriotism, the insulter of piety, the raker into every sink of vice and wretchedness to disgust and degrade and harden the hearts of his fellow creatures’

Is Byron right to detect an inner violence in such attacks ?

Track 15: Byron in Missolonghi. Further reading includes Harold Nicholson’s book The Last Journey.

Track 16: See CD notes below. Do you find Byron’s quasi-humanist approach to the afterlife convincing ?

Track 17: It is argued that Byron’s intervention in Greece was an example of internationalism rather than colonialism. Do you think this is a model for British foreign policy today ?

Track 18: See CD notes below. What do you think his lyric ‘So, we’ll go no more a-roving’ is about ?

John Keats and 'To Autumn'

Part One:

Keats walk to Winchester -
photographs taken at the time of year 'to autumn' was written

'I was astonished to find that it wasn't autumn at all - the poem's actually about late summer, with the world on the brink of change'. - John Webster

1. From the city centre past the cathedral

2. through the cathedral close (+ 3, + 4)

5. Past Jane Austen's house

6. Into the country

7. 'Along the river sallows'

8. Towards St.Cross

9. 'Full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn'

10. St. Cross meadow and Abbey

12. the river at st. cross

Part Two:

Using ‘John Keats’s Sublime Single’ in education.

The cassette presents two John Keats lyrics as if he was a contemporary singer/songwriter. Listen to the first song, To Autumn….

In the song’s spoken introduction (from a letter of 22/9/1819) Keats mentions the effect of seeing the setting sun turning the stubble fields red. But where does this key image figure in the poem ?

It’s brought in almost casually in the final verse – ‘and touch the stubble plains with rosy hue’.

If you refer to Daudet’s analysis of inspiration quoted in the essay ‘Shelley and Creativity’ you can see he talks about such a moment, which then goes on to release the contents of a reservoir of thoughts and images in the artists’ mind.

Verse one of To Autumn can then be seen as a working out of things in Keats’s mind – for example a few days before he had written: ‘Autumn is encroaching – for the Autumn fog over a rich land is like the steam from cabbage water’. Could this down-to-earth image of the fog be the beginnings of the poem’s famous first line ???!!!

Scholars say that manuscript evidence indicates that verses 1 & 3 of the poem were written at the same sitting, and that verse 2 was added later. For the songwriter verse 3 seemed to carry naturally from verse 1.

So verse 2 was a later addition. What was Keats doing in it ?

He was comparing the autumn to the various occupations of the Hampshire people he observed around him in Winchester.

Notice the reference to the gleaner, which some maintain could be a politically-charged reference. Keats was probably aware of prosecutions that had taken place for gleaning after the passing of the 1815 corn laws (they had been denounced in the letters page of the examiner, which he read regularly). 'By reinscribing the word ('gleaner') into poetry and into the poetic tradition, Keats was making (consciously or not) a claim for the legitimacy of the act of gleaning: he discovered another way of writing politics into poetry, one that, through its silence, exerted a political pressure of presupposition' (andrew j. bennett).

Could there be a political dimension to the poem ?

It was written shortly after the Peterloo massacre, when demonstrators in Manchester calling for the vote for all British men and women had been attacked by yeomanry and cavalrymen. 11 had been killed, 600 wounded. Keats had been in London recently and had witnessed a tumultuous demonstration there greeting the main speaker Henry Hunt and with a young man bearing the sabre wounds he had received.

Could the tone of the poem, so full and calm, be a reaction to the political and financial chaos that Peterloo threatened to unleash ? It has been said that Britain at this time was closer to revolution than it had ever been since the Civil War – though memories of that civil conflict were fresher than they are now and very few will have wanted to repeat those days.

Underlying the poem is the theme of change, but change unfolding peacefully and naturally. Could this be Keats’s subliminal political message after Peterloo ? (He had written once ‘I hope to put something to the liberal side of the question before I die’)

Rock and pop stars often comment on current political matters. Very often there’s a directness of approach: perhaps Keats’s poem To Autumn shows another way of reflecting such issues ????

Part Three

Song 2: When I have Fears.

Keats’s sonnet ‘When I have fears’, titled on the single ‘On the Shore’, is on the theme of untimely death. It was written as a literary exercise, before Keats knew of his fatal infection with tuberculosis, perhaps in response to one of Shakespeare’s sonnets (no 64).

The ‘fair creature of an hour’; refers to a girl glimpsed at the Vauxhall gardens in London.

Keats and the afterlife.

‘Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith thy weave paradise for a sect’ Keats wrote in The Fall of Hyperion; John Keats, a freethinker who even on his deathbed, refused the consolations of religion, cannot be satisfied with such predictions, or any other conception of an afterlife. All he can say, confronted with the issue of death ‘before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain’, is that: ‘On the shore, I stand alone and think/Till love and fame to nothingness do sink’. And that surely has the merit of honesty, rather than of false optimism, about our human situation.

The Spanish steps in Rome; Keats Died in the house on the right, aged 25

Keat’s grave (on the left) in the Protestant cemetry in Rome.
Buried beside him is Joseph Severn, his artist friend who nursed him in his final days. The inscription refers to his instruction that his gravestone should simply read: ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’.