Chapter 14

Shelley and the Limits

of Sustainability
Adam R. Rosenthal

To raise the question of sustainability in Percy Shelley is to confront not only

the full scope of his life and work, but also the registers, both biographical
and literary, practical and theoretical, in which they have been archived.
This is evinced by much recent, and not so recent, work on the ecological
bent of Shelley’s writing. From Michael Demson and his investigation of
Shelley’s agrarian politics, to Timothy Morton and his analysis of Shelley’s
revolutionary diet, Alan Bewell’s discussion of Shelleyan climatology, and
Earl Wasserman’s classic examination of the interchange between nature and
power in his verse, it becomes clear that questions of sustainability and ecol-
ogy manifest at every level of the poet’s work.1 This very volume wrestles
with the many faces of Shelley’s engagement, as M. P. Jones’ essay and my
own struggle, on our own terms, to understand Shelley’s radical habits and
theory of terrestrial consumption, as well as the apocalyptic visions of mass
extinction that can be traced in his writing. The question of sustainability, in
other words, seems particularly well-suited to a poet whose engagement with
nature’s processes traversed traditional epistemological as well as aesthetic
categories of high and low, visibility and invisibility, and mind and mouth.
Indeed, if there is one thing that ecological catastrophe, climate change,
and the problem of sustainability each brings into question, it is the possibil-
ity of sustaining the division between what one eats and what one thinks, or
what it is possible to eat and to think.2 Today, it is the consequences of global
practices of consumption that render foreseeable new possibilities of catastro-
phe, and even of distinctly un-apocalyptic catastrophic outcomes, as Timothy
Clark explores.3 Unsustainable human practices, in other words, have ush-
ered in the thought of different kinds of planetary eventualities, certainly not
least being those of global warming, mass extinction, and the anthropocene.
While Shelley’s interest in, and notion of, sustainability is certainly too vast

233

Robertson_9781498518901.indb 233 23-09-2015 12:19:39

 234 Adam R. Rosenthal

to adequately treat here, in what follows I will ask how one late lyric in par-
ticular, “The Cloud” (1820), may help us to rethink the scope of Shelley’s
insights into climatic processes and their vicissitudes.
By climatic processes I do not simply mean Shelley’s contributions to, or
borrowings from, the meteorological science of his day, which many others
have treated.4 Rather, I intend by it Shelley’s insights into the establishment
of climate as such, and into the contingencies upon which climate depends.
“The Cloud,” like a number of other well-known works such as “Ode to the
West Wind” (1819), “The Sensitive Plant” (1820), and “Mutability” (1814),
offers a vision of the cycle in which life and death are found and made to cir-
culate. As a figure of and for mutability, it narrates the rhythm of solution and
dissolution, or construction and deconstruction. Just as “Mutability” (which
begins, “We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon; / How restlessly they
speed, and gleam, and quiver” [ll. 1–2]) concludes with an affirmation of
mutability’s immutability (“Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow; /
Nought may endure but Mutability” [ll. 15–16]), so too does “The Cloud’s”
final stanza express the exuberance of the eternal return of change (“I pass
through the pores, of the oceans and shores; / I change, but I cannot die—”
[ll. 75–76]).5 It is precisely the cyclical nature of the cloud’s changes—
beyond any one of its forms and transformations, yet always returning to a
(different) form of the same, or of the “I”—that gives an image of ecological
sustainability in all the wonder of its aerial and terrestrial complexity. For
not only does the cloud itself shift and change, but by virtue of its own trans-
formations, it makes possible the processes by which life develops on earth
and weather takes form in the heavens. “The Cloud,” we could say, insofar
as it interacts with and even embodies an entire ecosystem, offers an image
of environment at its sustainable height.
And yet, precisely by giving figure to the web of connections through
which the earth and firmament relate to and support one other, “The Cloud”
in some sense makes visible the virtual horizon of this web’s disruption. It
references, if only implicitly, the fragility or vulnerability of this relation, and
it forces us to ask about the possibility of a distinctly unsustainable event and
its effects on this circuit. Could we, in other words, imagine an eventuality in
which the water necessary to form clouds would itself be absent, or in which
the eagle, to which the Cloud compares the sun in the third stanza, would be
extinct? Such questions, although ostensibly absent from the explicit figura-
tion of “The Cloud,” were quite pressing for Shelley, featuring prevalently
in other works such as Queen Mab (1813), “Mont Blanc” (1816), and Pro-
metheus Unbound (1820). The problem of climate change—as we have come
to call it—is strikingly on display in these works, although as Morton and
Bewell have shown, in them it is intimately bound up with human political
and social action. Morton, in Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body

Robertson_9781498518901.indb 234 23-09-2015 12:19:39

 Shelley and the Limits of Sustainability 235

and the Natural World, looks at the role that diet plays for Shelley as he imag-
ines the relation between the social and environmental.6 In “Shelley’s Green
Desert,” on the other hand, Morton shows how physical and moral pollution
are linked in Shelley and become tied to his varying “technotopian” and
“ecotopian” visions of technology.7 In his chapter, “Percy Bysshe Shelley and
Revolutionary Climatology” in Romanticism and Colonial Disease, Bewell
refers to what he calls Shelley’s “ideopathology,” or the assumption of a strict
political and ecological bond through which positive—or negative—political
and social climates directly contribute to forming like ecological climates.8
Indeed, Bewell asserts, Shelley “sees the physical environment itself as a
social product [. . .]. Geography is thoroughly a social construction.”9 Thus
for Shelley, Bewell argues, the unsustainable, unhealthy manifestations of
miasma, or the arid desert conditions of Queen Mab or “Ozymandias,” result
from social blight, poisonous policies, and political corruption. Indeed, they
are already political manifestations, the physical environment being itself part
of the social world.
Reading “The Cloud” in light of these insights allows us to understand the
cyclical, distinctly sustained mutations of its speaker as the positive moment
of eco-political, or ideopathological practice, contrasting with what elsewhere
corrupt tyranny sows in negative, unsustainable, and catastrophic climates. In
terms of inexorable mutability, given these contrasting examples, we might
finally have to differentiate between (at least) two modes: While, on the one
hand, in “The Cloud” the necessity of change takes a distinctly regular form,
or one in which the endless alteration of cloud forms nevertheless takes on a
rhythmic or cyclical shape, on the other hand, in the unsustainable manifesta-
tion of the lifeless ruins of “Ozymandias,” or even in the inhospitable winter
threatened by “Mont Blanc,” the shape of mutability becomes distinctly
non-cyclical and unproductive. Given the inevitability of change, the shape
or economy of the mutable may nevertheless support the circuit of life and
death, or fall into the barren lifelessness of permafrost and desert.
Although, as Morton and Bewell both demonstrate in their writings, the
insights gleaned from such an eco-critical perspective are far-reaching for
Shelley’s work, these insights nevertheless fall short in a number of respects.
First and foremost, while the swings between the ecologically friendly circle
of life and death, and the unfriendly fall into decay may be vast, in both cases
the Shelleyan reliance on the concept of mutability remains unquestioned.
In other words, whether the situation is sustainable and blithe, as in “The
Cloud,” or ruined and desperate, as in “Ozymandias,” because the eco-critical
discourse of Shelleyan ideopathology remains tied to immediate physical and
political contexts—and even to a progressive version of them—it is helpless
to interrogate what, both at the figural and pre-figural levels of the text, par-
ticipates in, or may bring into question, Shelley’s notion of the transcendent

Robertson_9781498518901.indb 235 23-09-2015 12:19:39

 236 Adam R. Rosenthal

nature of Mutability. As recent work by Luke Donahue has shown, however,

implicit in the Shelleyan concept of change is a thought of the future as being
itself unimpeachable and not susceptible to contingency.10 For the thought
that “Nought may endure but Mutability” (l. 16) not only assures that phe-
nomena remain eternally susceptible to alteration, but also that alteration, or
mutability, is itself eternal.11 Mutability ensures the future of future change,
which is to say the future of the future. However bleak life on earth may
become, then, and even if it is reduced to the mere ruins of life, the thought of
immutable mutability assures that something, nevertheless, will remain, and
insofar as it remains, will continue to be susceptible to hope and reversion
to an improved state.12 This thought applies equally, Donahue shows, to the
ecosphere as well as to the written trace (i.e., poetry), each of which is assured
of a future—of some kind—so long as the principle of mutability remains
unquestioned and at work.
The concept of sustainability, in other words, so long as it remains strictly
environmental, cannot access the poet’s forays into the transcendent, eternal,
and ostensibly immutable domain of Mutability and Power. Yet one of the
most remarkable features of “The Cloud,” as Reiman, Freistat and Wasser-
man have each noted, lies precisely in its liminal bearing between the mate-
rial world and immaterial heavens.13 Or, in the Cloud’s own words: “I am the
daughter of Earth and Water, / And the nursling of the sky” (ll. 73–74).14 The
speaker of “The Cloud” speaks for the very relation between the mutable and
immutable, or put otherwise, for the immutability of mutability, and does so
neither as a purely climatic phenomenon, nor as a strictly transcendent force.
This between-ness of “The Cloud” has been largely responsible for its
susceptibility to allegorical reading. As Reiman has pointed out, in addition
to narrating the “mythopoetic autobiography” of a cloud, “The Cloud’s”
mutations express the shifts of the mind and vicissitudes of the human soul.15
Chernaik, reading the poem alongside “To a Sky-Lark” and “Ode to the West
Wind,” sees “The Cloud” as an, “embodiment and symbol of a human ideal,
a human characteristic carried to its absolute pitch.”16 As a figure for the rela-
tion between the phenomenal, mundane world and the heavenly transcendent
one, and even for their very mediation, interpretations of “The Cloud” can
easily model the cloud’s own mutations, shifting between more and less lit-
eral or figurative frames seemingly without end. For not only does the Cloud
present a figure for the physical ecosystem, as well as the movements of the
mind, but it also expresses the very link between the material and transcen-
dent, or immaterial. It thus acts as a figure for figuration, or for the move-
ment from literal to figural trope. The passage that “The Cloud” enacts is
therefore neither restricted to the environmental passage of water from sky to
land, nor even to the ontological passage from this phenomenal realm to the
transcendent, but includes as well the passage from the first kind of passage

Robertson_9781498518901.indb 236 23-09-2015 12:19:39

 Shelley and the Limits of Sustainability 237

to the second, or that from the literal to the metaphorical. “The Cloud” bears
a figure of bearing; it is a metaphor of metaphor.
One need look no further than the poem’s opening lines to see how this
complicates the eco-critical vision. “The Cloud” opens: “I bring fresh show-
ers for the thirsting flowers, / From the seas and the streams; / I bear light
shade for the leaves when laid / In their noon-day dreams” (ll. 1–4).17 These
lines begin the poem by establishing its central position as one within a net-
work of relations. Bearing, from the seas and streams, showers for thirsting
flowers, the poem’s speaker plays an essential role as mediator and courier.
Thirsting, the flowers call for the moisture that they are incapable of secur-
ing for themselves. As we shall see, the Cloud does not simply bear it with a
grin, but often does so with bounteous laughter (ll. 12, 53, 81), contributing
its own affective approbation to the cycle of the seasons.18 Even when rain is
not falling, however, the sheer body of the Cloud in motion supplies respite
for flora otherwise abandoned to the sun’s heat. Indeed, it is the Cloud’s
very presence that makes suitable conditions for this midday siesta. Yet
these lines, while clearly situating meteorological phenomena, nevertheless
also describe a literary movement, or more precisely, the movement into
the literary. These flowers are also the flowers of rhetoric, the turns of trope
and verse that themselves thirst for or desire a steady flow of “showers,”
or poetic material. Nor is this simply the translation, or carrying-over, of a
literal, environmental language into a metaphorical, literary one, but it is the
passage of an always already literary language as it treads back and forth
between registers. Literary language is the complication of referential with
self-referential tropes. Bearing showers for thirsting flowers is thus not sim-
ply a figure for poetic activity, but is itself, already, a metaphor of metaphor,
or a metaphor for the process by which the one domain moves into the other
while supplying a figure for its very comprehension. The “showers,” then, are
not only rain, nor even simply the material stuff or content of poetry—which,
“The Cloud,” as both the name of an aerial phenomenon and that of a poem
would bring—but also describe the constant replenishing of the poem’s first
line as it rejuvenates itself through the relation of the former to the latter.
“Fresh showers” name the cross-pollination of flower into flower—or literary
trope into heliotrope, and vice versa—which makes of the Cloud something
both more and less than a meteorological phenomenon.
It is the same for lines three and four. Here, the Cloud, as an obfuscation
of sunlight, shades sleepy “leaves” at noon. While its shade certainly makes
for a soporific setting during the harsher hours of the day, the leaves that are
depicted dreaming there are folio pages, not swaths of foliage. The play of
fiction—the confusion between dreaming- and waking-life that dream, at its
apex, is capable of producing—is here conditioned by the Cloud, who shields
all from the demands of the tyrannical light of truth. What is then produced

Robertson_9781498518901.indb 237 23-09-2015 12:19:39

 238 Adam R. Rosenthal

is a shadowy setting where one may happily mistake books for branches. Yet
the question that is raised by such confusion goes beyond that of mere poetic
double entendre. Even if we could separate out literal from figural levels of
interpretation in this instance—which here seems doubtful—such semantic
parsing would do nothing to counteract the ineluctable embedding of eco-
logical into literary phenomena that Shelley here cultivates. The question
becomes how to read the intersection between the Cloud’s ecological engage-
ment and its literary one, and above all the economy of this crossing over, its
passage back and forth between these domains. How, in other words, does
the inherently allegorical, ironic, and literary nature of the writing of ecology,
of an ecology whose limits are penetrated by and penetrate into a writing on
writing, affect the very concept or nature of sustainability? Of the rhythm of
sustained and sustaining environmental forms? Can Shelleyan sustainability,
in sum, be thought without reference to the ways in which its very figures of
transport, relay, and transference are inseparable from literary operations and
linguistic activity? In order to begin to answer these questions, in what fol-
lows I will examine the relation in “The Cloud” between the Cloud’s physical
transformations and its own capacity for linguistic figuration.

SUSTAINING POETIC LANGUAGE

As most readers of “The Cloud” have observed, the dominant principle of

the poem’s composition is that of cloud formation. Each stanza projects a
different cloud shape, beginning with nimbus in the first, cumulus in the sec-
ond, and stratus, cirrocumulus, and cirrostratus in stanzas three through six.19
What conditions or constricts the movements of this figure for mutability is
thus figure, or more precisely, figuration. “The Cloud” concerns forms, or the
formation of forms, in transition, which it gives figure to by way of its muta-
tions, until finally reflecting on the status of this cloud scripture—the traces,
or lack thereof, which it leaves—in the sixth and final stanza. The Cloud,
whose feminine voice is the only constant throughout the poem, thus embod-
ies embodiment, or the process by which shape takes shape.
Yet this cloud “shape” is not simply an autonomous creation. It does not
exist apart from its immediate environment, nor, for that matter, apart from
the language of its appearance. As we may observe throughout, its processes
of condensation and precipitation contribute, along with the surrounding,
earthen or celestial, bodies, to forming something like tableaux vivants.
Such is the effect of snow on mountain tops in the second stanza: “I sift the
snow on the mountains below, / And their great pines groan aghast; / And all
the night ‘tis my pillow white, / While I sleep in the arms of the blast” (ll.
13–16).20 This scene unifies an otherwise ephemeral, haphazard, and passing

Robertson_9781498518901.indb 238 23-09-2015 12:19:39

 Shelley and the Limits of Sustainability 239

configuration of physical bodies into an intelligible, readable image through

the anthropomorphizing act of “sleep.” Hence, a natural or unmotivated
apposition here becomes a scene or figure through the Cloud’s imposition of
a totality. Yet these tableaux consist in more than mere images, incorporating
the play of light and shadow (ll. 45–58) as well as sound, as the Cloud comes
into contact with the sun, moon, and mountains, etc.: “Sublime on the towers
of my skiey bowers, / Lightning my pilot sits; / In a cavern under is fettered
the thunder, / It struggles and howls at fits” (ll. 10–12).21 Here, an enchained
thunder bellows like a trapped animal, while a sovereign lightning know-
ingly orchestrates celestial movements above. As with the prior image, the
Cloud’s narrative forms a unified, vivified scene out of otherwise unrelated
or paratactic parts. Without simply conflating the Cloud with the figure of the
poet—for which only one allusion in the third stanza would stand in explicit
support—the Cloud’s attentiveness to the aesthetics of its manifestations,
its care in narrating its turns and transformations as well as in composing
meaningful scenes, nevertheless reveal an investment in the poetic processes
of figuration.22 Hence, not only in the formation of discrete, physical cloud
forms, but also in the articulation of those forms through distinctly linguistic
means. This investment culminates when, in the third stanza, to present an
image of itself and the inventive forms of its rebirth, the Cloud makes use of
simile to project its projection:

The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes,

And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning star shines dead,
As on the jag of a mountain crag,
Which an earthquake rocks and swings,
An eagle alit one moment may sit
In the light of its golden wings. (ll. 31–38, my emphasis)23

Or again in the conclusion to the same stanza:

And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit Sea beneath,
Its ardours of rest and love,
And the crimson pall of eve may fall
From the depth of Heaven above,
With wings folded I rest, on mine aëry nest,
As still as a brooding dove. (ll. 39–44, my emphasis)24

The use of simile, as opposed to other prominent figures in “The Cloud”

such as metaphor, personification, and prosopopoeia, explicitly highlights
the figural character of the Cloud’s language. Not only the figural nature of

Robertson_9781498518901.indb 239 23-09-2015 12:19:39

 240 Adam R. Rosenthal

the language employed in “The Cloud”—which goes without saying—but

the Cloud’s own reflection on the status of her language, and on the necessity
of finding turns of phrase capable of giving figure to what she figures. It is
as though the Cloud’s changes were not simply a matter of physical evolu-
tions, but also of imagining or cognizing, indeed experiencing, this evolution
inventively. She gives figure to different cloud shapes, but only insofar as she
also gives figure, through her speech, to figures for these figures. The Cloud’s
formations are thus inseparable from the Cloud’s ability to narrate, not only
because it is only by way of this narration that we have access to her forms,
but also because the narration of these forms involves a linguistic process of
figuration no less distinct or inventive than the physical forms and shapes to
which they correspond.
In the sixth and final stanza of the poem, the speaker of “The Cloud” wit-
nesses the process by which its traces are made and then effaced. Unlike in
the previous stanzas, where despite varying technical and figural innovations
the narration focuses merely on her comings and goings, on what “I bring”
(l. 1), what “I sift” (l. 13), how “I rest” (l. 43), when “I widen” (l. 55) and how
“I bind” (l. 59), with the sixth stanza there is a turn beyond the immediacy
of individual mutations and towards the origins and ends of the process as a
whole.25 Opening, “I am the daughter of Earth and Water, / And the nursling
of the sky; / I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; / I change, but
I cannot die—” (ll. 73–76), the sixth stanza focuses on the conditions that
made, and continue to make possible, the formation of this ever-changing,
and ultimately formless, force.26 Earth, water, and sky name those realms
inhabited by the Cloud as well as its sustaining conditions, without which its
cycle of birth, death, and rebirth would be discontinued. The Cloud here thus
makes an ontological turn, beyond the experienceable activity of its moment-
to-moment existence, and towards what makes possible this play in the first
place.
Taking these observations upon its origins and state of being as its starting
point, the Cloud attempts to demonstrate the non-identity of itself with itself
in what follows. At stake here is not only its proper sustainable perpetuity, the
futurity of its future as one always on the horizon, indeed the very status of
the “horizon” as the exemplary figure for futurity, but also the possibility of
recording this movement in legible traces. The Cloud reads its own absence
in a monumental sky-writing, and its response to it in the form of “silent
laughter” betrays its own sovereign distance from the very anthropomorphic
figure of mourning it simultaneously inscribes of itself:

For after the rain, when with never a stain,

The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex gleams,

Robertson_9781498518901.indb 240 23-09-2015 12:19:39

 Shelley and the Limits of Sustainability 241

Build up the blue Dome of Air,

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise, and unbuild it again. (ll. 77–84)27

A distance here separates the mutational body of the Cloud—what consti-

tutes its environmental future as always arising and unbuilding again—and
its reflection on this perpetual cycle of formation and deformation. The
Cloud is in the process of reading its own cycle of mutations, yet this reflec-
tion produces an unexpected, and wholly unexperienceable, effect of silent
laughter at the very moment of the cloud’s physical disappearance. Reflecting
on its cenotaph, the rising of the “blue Dome of Air” in which it recognizes
a memorial and empty tomb to itself, the Cloud’s burst of laughter erupts,
interrupting the cycle of life, death, and mourning before it may “arise,” and
resume the cycle again. Its laughter, emerging from nowhere, from a point
beyond the visible horizon, has no place within this sequence. Nor does
it possess any phenomenal form, as it passes soundlessly. It emerges as a
spontaneous reflection upon itself: a writing without body responding to the
changing bodily writing of cloud figures.
As with the Cloud, to understand the scope of environment in Shelley is
not merely to consider the social nature of the “natural,” nor even the inter-
penetration of the environmental and political realms, but it is also to ask
how the writing of environment coincides with the writing—or reading—of
writing. The Cloud combines the mutability of materiality with an excessive
literariness that, while remaining bound to its environmental manifestation,
nevertheless also remains irreducible to it.

NOTES

1. See Michael Demson, “Percy Shelley’s Radical Agrarian Politics,” Romanti-

cism 16.3 (2010), 279–92; Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste:
The Body and the Natural World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
Timothy Morton, “Shelley’s Green Desert,” Studies in Romanticism 35.3 (1996),
409–30; Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999), and Earl Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Study (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).
2. Bewell, following Morton, shows how Shelley tied the possibility of social rev-
olution to healthy eating practices, and particularly vegetarianism (Bewell, Romanti-
cism and Colonial Disease, 208, and Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste,
207–40). Both authors also discuss the indissociability of practices of consumption
and social revolution in Shelley.

Robertson_9781498518901.indb 241 23-09-2015 12:19:39

 242 Adam R. Rosenthal

3. See Timothy Clark, “Some Climate Change Ironies: Deconstruction, Envi-

ronmental Politics, and the Closure of Ecocriticism,” Oxford Literary Review 32.1
(2010), 131–49, on the difficulties posed by climate change to the liberal tradition in
political thought, as well as on the role of decision-making and its effects on apoca-
lyptic discourses.
4. In Shelley, Newman Ivey White argues for the influence of Adam Walker’s
lectures on “The Cloud,” ([New York: A.A. Knopf, 1940], I, 23–24). Grabo, in The
Magic Plant, points to Shelley’s knowledge of Erasmus Darwin and Beccaria’s work
on atmospheric electricity (Carl Henry Grabo, The Magic Plant [Chapel Hill: Univer-
sity of North Carolina, 1936], 282). D.G. King-Hele, in “Shelley and Science” and
Shelley: His Thought and Work, points to the importance of Luke Howard’s Essay on
Clouds (1803) and The Climate of London (1818–20), as well as Erasmus Darwin’s
The Botanic Garden (1791) for Shelley’s poem (“Shelley and Science,” Notes and
Records of the Royal Society of London [1992], 256–62; and Shelley: His Thought
and Work [Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971], 219–20). Richard
Hamblyn, in The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the
Language of the Skies, argues that Shelley’s poem invokes numerous cloud forma-
tions, “in a direct and knowing tribute to Howard’s contention that clouds unite, pass
into one another and disperse in distinct and recognizable stages” ([New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2001], 216). J. E. Thornes, finally, in “Luke Howard’s Influence
on Art and Literature in the Early Nineteenth Century,” plots Shelley’s descriptions
of cloud formations in “The Cloud” against Howard’s cloud classifications (Weather
39.8 [1984], 252–55).
5. All citations of Shelley’s poems are taken from Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s
Poetry and Prose (hereafter, SPP), edited by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Freistat
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), 304.
6. Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste, 207–40.
7. Morton, “Shelley’s Green Desert,” 411.
8. Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease, 207.
9. Ibid., 209.
10. See Luke Donahue, “Romantic Survival and Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West
Wind,’” European Romantic Review 25.2 (2014), 219–42.
11. Shelley, SPP.
12. On the problem of “remaining” in Shelley, see also my essay, “The Gift of
the Name in Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’” Studies in Romanticism 55.1,
forthcoming 2016.
13. See Reiman and Freistat’s commentary to the poem in the Norton Critical Edi-
tion (Reiman and Freistat, SPP, 303n4), as well as Donald H. Reiman, Percy Bysshe
Shelley (New York: Twayne, 1969), 96. Wasserman shows how “The Cloud” develops
out of Shelley’s work on the “Hymn to Apollo” and “Hymn to Pan,” with respect to
which he argues it represents the mediation of Pan’s theme of mutability and Apollo’s
theme of eternity (Shelley, 245). Among those who see Shelley’s poem as an explora-
tion of the cyclical changes of nature, see also Allan H. MacLaine, “Shelley’s ‘The
Cloud’ and Pope’s ‘Rape of the Lock’: An Unsuspected Link,” Keats-Shelley Journal
8.1 (1959), 14–16.

Robertson_9781498518901.indb 242 23-09-2015 12:19:39

 Shelley and the Limits of Sustainability 243

14. Shelley, SPP, 33.

15. Reiman, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 96.
16. Judith Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley (Cleveland: Press of Case Western
Reserve University, 1972), 130.
17. Shelley, SPP, 301–2.
18. Ibid.
19. These are the observations of J. E. Thornes, who draws on work by F. H.
Ludlam (1972) and D. King-Hele (1970) in identifying the cloud approximations of
each stanza (Thornes, “Luke Howard’s Influence on Art and Literature in the Early
Nineteenth Century,” 254; see also Ludlam, “The Meteorology of the ‘Ode to the
West Wind,” Weather 27 (1972), 503–14; King-Hele, Shelley).
20. Shelley, SPP, 302.
21. See also lines 17–20 and 72 (Ibid.).
22. Reiman and Freistat note in their commentary that lines 43–44, “With wings
[. . .] brooding dove,” emulate Milton’s opening of Book I of Paradise Lost: “Dove-
like [. . .] brooding” (Shelley, SPP, 303n9). King-Hele also identifies the Cloud with
Shelley in “Shelley and Science.” “Shelley,” he argues, “is the Cloud, an aerial spirit,
but also a spirit well informed in science and strongly attracted by the natural cycle
of water circulation [. . .]” (261).
23. Shelley, SPP, 302.
24. Ibid., 302–3.
25. Ibid., 301–3
26. Ibid., 303–4.
27. Ibid., 304.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bewell, Alan. Romanticism and Colonial Disease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1999.
Chernaik, Judith. The Lyrics of Shelley. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve
University, 1972.
Clark, Timothy. “Some Climate Change Ironies: Deconstruction, Environmental
Politics, and the Closure of Ecocriticism.” Oxford Literary Review 32.1 (2010):
131–49.
Demson, Michael. “Percy Shelley’s Radical Agrarian Politics.” Romanticism 16.3
(2010): 279–92.
Donahue, Luke. “Romantic Survival and Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind.’” Euro-
pean Romantic Review 25.2 (2014): 219–42.
Grabo, Carl Henry. The Magic Plant. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina,
1936.
Hamblyn, Richard. The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged
the Language of the Skies. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.
King-Hele, D. G. “Shelley and Science.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of
London (1992): 253–65.

Robertson_9781498518901.indb 243 23-09-2015 12:19:39

 244 Adam R. Rosenthal

———. Shelley: His Thought and Work. Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 1971.
Ludlam, F. H. “The Meteorology of the ‘Ode to the West Wind.” Weather 27 (1972):
503–14.
MacLaine, Allan H. “Shelley’s ‘The Cloud’ and Pope’s ‘Rape of the Lock’: An
Unsuspected Link.” Keats-Shelley Journal 8.1 (1959): 14–16.
Morton, Timothy. Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural
World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
———. “Shelley’s Green Desert.” Studies in Romanticism 35.3 (1996): 409–30.
Reiman, Donald H. Percy Bysshe Shelley. New York: Twayne, 1969.
Rosenthal, Adam R. “The Gift of the Name in Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty.’” Studies in Romanticism 55.1 (forthcoming 2016).
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, edited by Donald H. Reiman and
Neil Freistat. New York: Norton, 2002.
Thornes, J. E. “Luke Howard’s Influence on Art and Literature in the Early Nine-
teenth Century.” Weather 39.8 (1984): 252–55.
Wasserman, Earl. Shelley: A Critical Study. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 1971.
White, N. I. Shelley. New York: Knopf, 1940.

Robertson_9781498518901.indb 244 23-09-2015 12:19:39