Percy Bysshe Shelley

/bɪʃ/
Pre – reading exercises
Born 4 August 1792, Sussex, England
Died 8 July 1822 (aged 29), Kingdom of Sardinia, Italy
Education University of Oxford
Literary Movement Romanticism
Marriages; 1st - Harriet Westbrook( 1811-1816); 2nd - Mary Shelly (1816);
1. Read Shelly’s biography and answer the following questions:
Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on August 4, 1792. He was born and raised in the English countryside in the
village Broadbridge Heath, just outside of West Sussex. He learned to fish and hunt in the meadows surrounding
his home, often surveying the rivers and fields with his cousin and good friend Thomas Medwin. His parents
were Timothy Shelley, a squire and member of Parliament, and Elizabeth Pilfold. The oldest of their seven
children, Shelley left home at age of 10 to study at Syon House Academy. After two years, he enrolled at Eton
College. There he had published two novels and two volumes of poetry, including St Irvyne and Posthumous
Fragments of Margaret Nicholson. In the fall of 1810, Shelly entered University College, Oxford. After a few
months, a dean demanded that Shelley visit his office. Shelley and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg had co-
authored a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism. Shelley was expelled.
Shelley’s parents were so exasperated by their son’s actions that they demanded he forsake his beliefs, including
vegetarianism, political radicalism and sexual freedom.
In August 1811, Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook, a 16-year-old woman his parents had explicitly
forbidden him to see. In addition to long-form poetry, Shelley also began writing political pamphlets, which he
distributed by way of hot air balloons, glass bottles and paper boats. In 1812, he met his hero and future mentor,
the radical political philosopher William Godwin, author of Political Justice.
Although Shelley’s relationship with Harriet remained troubled, the young couple had two children together.
Before their second child was born, Shelley abandoned his wife and immediately took up with another young
woman. Well-educated and precocious, his new love interest was named Mary, the daughter of Shelley’s
beloved mentor, Godwin.
In 1816, Mary’s step-sister, Claire Clairmont, invited Shelley and Mary to join her on a trip to Switzerland.
Clairmont had begun dating the Romantic poet Lord Byron and wished to show him off to her sister. Shelley
rented a house on Lake Geneva close to Bryon’s and the two men became fast friends. A few weeks later,
Shelley and Mary finally married. The couple moved to Italy and lived there for a year.

A dedicated vegetarian, Shelley authored several works on the diet and spiritual practice, including A
Vindication of Natural Diet (1813). In 1815, Shelley wrote Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude, a 720-line poem,
now recognized as his first great work.
In 1817 Shelley published a poem "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty". Shelley's understanding of Beauty as an ideal
and universal aspect, as opposed to the common understanding of the word as an aesthetic judgment of an
object, was influenced by his knowledge of Plato's writings. Shelley believed that philosophy and metaphysics
could not reveal truth and that an understanding of Beauty was vain. Instead, Beauty could only be felt and its
 source could not be known. Moreover, in his poems Shelley revealed different themes as the power of seen and
unseen nature (Ode to the West Wind), godless universe (The Mask of Anarchy), tyranny (Ozymandias) and
inspiration (England in 1819). The question of mortality and immortality appeared in his poems (Adonis, Mont
Blanc). Death, represented often through water and reference to Greek mythology in his works, is a common
occurrence in Shelley's canon. He is often found questioning both the future of the Romantic voice and the
immortality of other voices (Plato, Milton, Dante, Greek and Roman myths).
On 8 July 1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday, Shelley drowned in a sudden storm on the Gulf of
La Spezia while returning from Leghorn (Livorno) to Lerici in his sailing boat, the Don Juan. In Shelley's
pocket was a small book of Keats' poetry. Shelley's ashes were interred in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.
When Shelley's body was cremated on the beach, his "unusually small" heart resisted burning, possibly due to
calcification from an earlier tubercular infection. The heart was buried either at St. Peter's Church, Bournemouth
or in Christchurch Priory.

1. What famous people were among P. Shelley’s friends? In what way did their relationships influence his life?
2. Enumerate Shelley’s main works. What do you know about them?
3. What were the philosophical and political ideas of the poet?
4. Why was Shelley dismissed from the University?
5. In what way did his trips influence his works and beliefs? Support your point of view with the evidence from
the text.
6. What Shelley’s works were created during the Italian period?
7. What do you know about Shelly’s second wife Mary?

“Ode to the West Wind”

I
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!

II
Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion,
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread

On the blue surface of thine aëry surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear!

III
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear!

IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seem'd a vision; I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

V
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Vocabulary practice
1. Find the correct pronunciation and the meaning of the following words.
Chariotest, azure, Maenad, Mediterranean, Baiae’s Bay
2. Explain in English the meaning of the following words: a clarion; dirge, vapor, pumice, a chasm,
sap, a thorn, a lyre, a trumpet,
3. Translate these words into Ukrainian and learn them by heart: an enchanter, to flee, hectic,
pestilence, a hue, steep, commotion, loose, tangled, surface, dim, to vault, a verge, to cleave, foliage,
to despoil, to pant, to bleed, tumult, incantation, a prophecy, sepulchre.
4. Find 5 synonyms and 2 antonyms: foerce, to quiver, swift, to extinguish, vast
5. Translate into Ukrainian:
1) Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes
2) The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low
3) Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth
4) mid the steep sky's commotion
5) Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean
6) from the dim verge Of the horizon to the zenith's height
7) Will be the dome of a vast sepulcher
8) Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams
9) The sea-blooms and the oozy woods
10) to outstrip thy skiey speed
11) The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
12) by the incantation of this verse
13) The trumpet of a prophecy
14) Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Comprehension questions
1. Why does the author capitalize the West Wind? What effects does the wind provoke?
2. What does the poet compare the ghosts to?
3. Prove that the author refers to the cycling of seasons in this poem using the text. Which season does
the poet describe?
4. Find elements and concepts characteristic of Romanticism in the second stanza.
5. Who is the “destroyer and the preserver” the poet is speaking about?
6. What or who is described with the phrase “wakened from his summer dreams”?
7. “while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean,
know Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear” – who grows grey with fear? Why are they
afraid?
8. What does Stanza IV indicate?
9. In what way was the poet’s life different when he was a boy?
10. If the poet were a leaf, a cloud, a wave or a boy again, what wouldn’t he have to do?
11. What does the poet ask the wind about in Stanza V?
12. What would the poet like to scatter?
13. What is your understanding of the last line of the ode: “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind”?

Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Vocabulary tasks
1. Translate the following words into Ukrainian: a trunk, wreck, despair, decay, frown, lone.
2. Translate the whole poem Ozymandias.

Comprehension questions:
1. Who is the narrator of the poem?
2. Who is Ozymandias?
3. What did the traveler see in the desert?
4. What does it mean: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert” ?
5. Describe the face of the statue. What interesting details has the poet mentioned?
6. “The hand that mocked them” – which hand? What does “them” mean?
7. What words appear on the pedestal? Why are these lines so memorable?
8. What does “the colossal wreck” mean?
9. What are the author’s ideas about art and history?
10. What is the general tone of the poem?