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:

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.